π°π€ AI created an entire company of billionaires at once.
And not long ago, the billionaires' club was associated with oil magnates, owners of trading empires, and people who had spent decades building their businesses. Now sometimes it is enough to be at the origins of the right AI company.
In the latest Forbes 400 for 2026 year entered at once six co-founders of Anthropic, the creator of Claude. Forbes estimated each one's fortune at approximately $15,5 billion. That is, these six alone collectively possess a fortune of approximately $93 billion.
Moreover, four co-founders of Anthropic β Tom Brown, Daniela Amodei, Jack Clark and Sam McCandlish β also made it into the top ten youngest members of the Forbes 400. They are between 36 and 39 years old, and each of them is credited with the same $15,5 billion.
In general, the current list shows very well just how quickly AI turns engineers and startup founders into super-rich people. In the Forbes 400 there are now ten billionaires younger than 40 years, whereas a year ago there were only four. And seven new young members earned their fortunes precisely thanks to the AI boom.
Anthropic appeared in 2021, when a group of employees left OpenAI and founded their own company. Five years later, their startup is valued by investors at hundreds of billions of dollars, and its founders one after another find themselves among the richest people in America.
The result is a rather amusing formula for the new era: previously, a fortune in the tens of billions required mines, factories, railways or oil wells.
Now sometimes it is enough to leave one AI company, create another β and wait five years.
