The New Billionaires of the A.I. Boom

Just like past tech booms, the latest frenzy has produced a group of billionaires — at least on paper — from smaller start-ups.

Dec. 29, 2025Updated 11:33 a.m. ET

The artificial intelligence boom has turned high-profile billionaires like Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chip maker Nvidia, and Sam Altman, the chief executive of the ChatGPT maker OpenAI, into even richer billionaires.

It has also produced a crop of new billionaires — at least on paper — from smaller start-ups. These individuals may become future Silicon Valley power brokers like the wealthy executives created by past tech booms, including the late-1990s dot-com frenzy, who then invested in or helped steer later waves of technology.

The new A.I. billionaires include Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo, who founded Scale AI, a data-labeling start-up that received a $14.3 billion investment from Meta in June. The founders of the A.I. coding start-up Cursor — Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger and Arvid Lunnemark — entered the billionaire ranks when their company was valued at $27 billion in a funding round last month.

The entrepreneurs behind Perplexity (an A.I. search engine), Mercor (an A.I. data start-up), Figure AI (a maker of humanoid robots), Safe Superintelligence (an A.I. lab), Harvey (an A.I. legal software start-up) and Thinking Machines Lab (an A.I. lab) are in the nine-figure club as well, according to the companies or people close to the start-ups, as well as data from the start-up tracker PitchBook and news reports. Most reached that point after the valuations of their privately held companies soared this year, turning their company stock into gold mines.

Jai Das, a partner at Sapphire Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, likened the new billionaires to the railroad barons of the 1890s Gilded Age who leaned into that era’s technology boom. But he cautioned that their wealth could be fleeting if the start-ups did not live up to their promise.

“The question is which of these companies is going to survive,” Mr. Das said. “And which of these founders can actually end up really being true billionaires and not just paper billionaires.”

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