AI created over 50 new billionaires by 2025
Record activity in the AI sector has elevated dozens of founders and business leaders to the ranks of billionaires this year.
In 2025, everyone was talking about AI. But while talk is cheap, the valuation of AI companies has been intertwined with a boom. This year, AI has become a huge wealth generator for entrepreneurs building the models, infrastructure, and applications that are rapidly becoming part of everyday life, and has helped create more than 50 new billionaires.
According to Forbes, the year began with a moment when the AI race turned up the heat to 11. In January, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s open-source model, which it trained using a fraction of the computing power required by major American AI companies, rocked financial markets and catapulted founder Liang Wenfeng to billionaire status. His net worth is now estimated at $11.5 billion.
Anthropic, the creator of the AI model Claude, raised $3.5 billion in funding in the first months of the year, valuing all seven of its founders at $61.5 billion, making all seven of its founders billionaires. The company has raised $16.5 billion from investors this year alone, and in September, its valuation reached $183 billion.
Massive rounds of funding for AI companies are not uncommon: investors have poured more than $200 billion into the AI sector this year, and AI startups have accounted for 50% of all global funding, a 16% increase from 2024, according to Crunchbase.
Startups weren’t just raising money. They were also spending it, making huge commitments to building AI infrastructure. The race to build AI isn’t limited to models or data centers. In June, the talent war between tech companies offering attractive packages to lure top AI talent reached a climax when Meta bought a 49% stake in data-labeling startup Scale AI for more than $14 billion.
As part of the deal, CEO and co-founder Alexander Wang, 28 years old, who became a billionaire for the first time in 2022 thanks to his stake in Scale, joined Meta as its chief AI officer. The deal, which valued “Scale AI” at about $29 billion, briefly made Wang’s cofounder, Lucy Guo, 31 years old, the world’s youngest self-made entrepreneur, with a net worth of about $1.4 billion (she left the company in 2018 but kept her shares).
Meta’s new stake in Scale AI has opened up space for other data-labeling startups. Surge AI founder Edwin Chen, who owns a 75 percent stake in Scale AI’s competitor, is worth about $18 billion – the company’s $1.2 billion in revenue last year gave it a valuation of $24 billion, according to Forbes.
Data-labeling company “Mercor” raised $250 million in funding in October, valuing it at $10 billion, making its three 22-year-old founders the youngest billionaires ever, with each worth about $2.2 billion.
OpenAI’s “Sora 2”, unveiled in September, has taken social media by storm with AI-generated images and videos. Billions in funding have gone to startups working with multimodal AI formats, including images, videos, and sounds. Notably, “ElevenLabs” two founders, Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski, became billionaires this year when their AI audio production startup raised $100 million in October, valuing it at $6.6 billion.
According to a Gallup Workplace survey, weekly use of AI in the workplace has risen from 11% in 2023 to 23% this year. AI use is even higher among developers. Earlier this year, “Microsoft” CEO Satya Nadella (who also became a new billionaire thanks to AI) said that up to 30% of the company’s code is written by AI.
Anysphere, a company that sells an AI coding tool called “Cursor” (which has customers in more than half of the “Fortune 500”), was valued at $29 billion in November, making its four founders billionaires. Companies that have actively used AI, such as video game company “Paper Games”, translation software company “TransPerfect”, and Chinese AI robot maker “Orbbec”, have also made their founders billionaires.
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