In 2023 and 2024 we drowned in blather about how tech companies were going to create an AI model so big it would annihilate and/or save humanity. In 2025, the volume got turned down on “AGI,” and the apocalyptic hype transformed into unbelievable amounts of money. Some of that money concentrated in the personal ledgers of AI startup founders, who discovered they were the proud owners of stakes worth ten-figure amounts.
According to Forbes, this happened more than 50 times in 2025. Humanity now has over 50 brand new AI billionaires.
As you might have noticed, the blessed title of billionaire has not been bestowed on the creators of a digital messiah. For the most part, the unicorns of the AI billionaire era are dreary enterprise SaaS firms, data labeling startups, or companies that promise to replace workers with their cost-saving AI “agents.” For instance, please congratulate Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, the new billionaires who got that way by founding a startup called Sierra that replaces human customer service representatives with AI agents.
There are exceptions to this rule of boringness. For instance, Polish founders Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski became billionaires via the success of ElevenLabs, whose entertainment-adjacent voice-generation tools have won backers like Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine.
Lucy Guo is the co-founder of a dreary AI SaaS company called Scale AI that annotates data, but her story is more fun than most because she briefly became the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire after Meta bought a large stake in her company. The detail that may have grabbed your attention was the fact that she “unseated” Taylor Swift as holder of that title. Then in December, the crown was snatched by Luana Lopes Lara, co-founder of the equally dreary non-AI startup Kalshi.
Also, Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha, the three Thiel fellows who founded Mercor, a company that mass-recruits experts and converts their expertise into AI training, are notable because they were all 22 when they became billionaires. That means they broke the age record held by Mark Zuckerberg.
According to the traditional metrics, the economy is, of course, booming, in case you didn’t know. Despite that, 75% of U.S. homes are rated unaffordable based on average U.S. income. And only 24% of house and condo sales for 2024, the last year with relevant data, were purchased by first-time homebuyers—a steep decline from 50% in the year 2010. Also, the top 10 percent of earners account for about 50 percent of all consumer spending now.
But I’m sure none of this is relevant. Congratulations to the 2025 class of AI billionaires! This party is definitely never going to end.
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