Forbes’ Youngest Billionaires
1: Perenna Kei and family
Age: 24
Net worth: $1.3 billion
The world’s youngest billionaire title goes to Perenna Kei, who owns an 85% stake in Logan Property Holdings through different companies and a family trust. Logan’s chairman and CEO, Ji Haipeng, is her father. Previously known by the name “Ji Peili,” Kei is a non-executive director at the company and holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance from the University of London.
Key Points
2: Dustin Moskovitz
Age: 29
Net worth: $6.8 billion
No longer the world’s youngest billionaire, Dustin Moskovitz will turn 30 this year. Dustin Moskovitz, Mark Zuckerberg’s former roommate, helped launch the social network from a Harvard dorm, dropping out after two years to work full-time on the venture as Facebook’s third employee.He left Facebook in 2008 to start Asana, a software company that aims to improve how people work with project collaboration tools. He married his longtime girlfriend Cari Tuna last year.
3: Mark Zuckerberg
Age: 29
Net worth: $28.5 billion
Facebook turned 10 this year, and no one was celebrating harder than CEO Mark Zuckerberg. After seeing his company past the growing pains of a disappointing May 2012 IPO, Zuckerberg has the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company flying high. As of mid-February, Facebook’s shares were up more than 130% over the past year. That’s caused Zuck’s net worth to more than double over the same period, even after he gave away 18 million shares in late December. He sold more than 41 million shares and exercised 60 million options around that time as well.
4: Anton Kathrein, Jr.
Age: 29
Net worth: $1.35 billion
Anton Kathrein, Jr., is the third generation to lead his family’s Kathrein-Werke AG, “the oldest and largest antenna manufacturer in the world,” according to the company’s website. A pioneer in automotive antennas, it also makes radio and TV broadcast antennas, satellite and terrestrial reception systems, equipment for high-speed multimedia transmission by cable TV operators, antenna systems, and electronic components that allow cell phone signals to bounce across the world. The company, with 18 production sites worldwide, over 6,800 employees, and $1.8 billion in revenue in 2012, was founded in 1919 by Kathrein’s grandfather. Anton Sr. ran the company from 1972 until his unexpected death in 2012.
5: Drew Houston
Age: 30
Net worth: $1.2 billion
Dropbox cofounder and CEO Drew Houston is Silicon Valley’s newest boy-wonder billionaire. Barely out of his 20s, he joins the 10-figure fortune club this year after his San Francisco-based tech company raised a new round of funding in January at a valuation just under $10 billion. Houston (pronounced like the New York City street, not the Texas city) co-founded Dropbox, a cloud-based file-sharing service, with Arash Ferdowsi in 2007. Houston started tinkering with computers at age 5 and has been involved in startups since high school.
6: Albert von Thurn and Taxis
Age: 30
Net worth: $3.8 billion
Although he first appeared on Forbes’ billionaire list as an 8-year-old, Albert von Thurn und Taxis, the 12th prince in his family line, officially inherited his fortune in 2001, on his 18th birthday. His assets include real estate, art, and 36,000 hectares of woodland in Germany, one of the largest forest holdings in Europe. An eligible bachelor, he lives in the family castle in Bavaria, Schloss Emmeram, and drives race cars.
7: Scott Duncan
Age: 31
Net worth: $6.3 billion
Scott Duncan is one of Texas’ most eligible bachelors and one of four heirs to a massive energy-pipeline fortune built by their late father, Dan Duncan. He is $1.2 billion richer than a year ago thanks to a rise in the stock price of Enterprise Products Partners and a generous dividend plan. His father, formerly the richest man in Houston, died in 2010 at age 77. At the time of his death, there was a one-year lapse on estate taxes, allowing the siblings to inherit the fortune tax-free. Had Duncan died at another time, their fortune would have been subject to a federal tax of at least 45%.
8: Eduardo Saverin
Age: 31
Net worth: $4.1 billion
Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin, who was born in Brazil, has been living in Singapore since renouncing his United States citizenship in 2012. He rarely makes media appearances and now spends his time as an angel investor. “My life is not about creating another Facebook,” he said at a Wall Street Journal conference in Singapore last year.
9: Yang Huiyan
Age: 32
Net worth: $6.9 billion
China’s richest woman, Yang Huiyan, is vice chairman of real estate developer Country Garden. She was given her father’s stake in Country Garden before the company’s initial public offering in 2007, the same year that she topped Forbes’ list of China’s richest with a net worth of $16 billion.
10: Fahd Hariri
Age: 33
Net worth: $1.2 billion
Fahd Hariri is the youngest son of slain Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. He graduated from the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture de Paris in 2004. While he reportedly hasn’t set foot in Beirut since his father’s assassination in 2005, he develops residential buildings there and credits his father for his love of real estate development.
11: Marie Besnier Beauvalot
Age: 33
Net worth: $2.7 billion
Marie, 33, along with siblings Emmanuel, 43, and Jean-Michel, 46, inherited French dairy giant Lactalis, producers of the popular Président brie among hundreds of other cheese, milk, and yoghurt brands. Between them, they own 100% of the company their grandfather founded in the 1930s.
12: Sean Parker
Age: 34
Net worth: $2.4 billion
In June, Napster founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker wed singer Alexandra Lenas in a lavish ceremony in the forest in Big Sur, California, with guests wearing outfits created by Hollywood costume designer Ngila Dickson. The $4.5 million wedding generated headlines for its Lord of the Rings-inspired outfits and Parker’s settlement with the California Coastal Commission for alleged environmental damage. Parker paid a $1 million fee on behalf of the Ventana Inn (owner of the venue) for lacking proper permits and threw in an additional $1.5 million donation to the Coastal Commission. Parker insists that not a single tree was harmed.
13: Julia Oetker
Age: 35
Net worth: $1.65 billion
The Oetker fortune, of which Julia Oetker is the youngest of eight billionaire beneficiaries, was built on baking and pudding powder. Now broadly diversified, Dr. August Oetker KG—a holding company whose subsidiaries employ some 26,000 people and generate around $15 billion in annual revenue—traces its roots back to 1891, when August Oetker, a pharmacist, started selling non-perishable baking powder. Today, each of his heirs and their families owns 12.5% of Bielefeld-based Dr. August Oetker KG.
14: Robert Pera
Age: 35
Net worth: $2.7 billion
Thanks to stellar performance from his Ubiquiti Networks, Robert Pera returns to the list after a one-year absence.He started out as a hardware engineer with Apple in 2003, but after just two years he left the company to start his own, later saying, “Apple is a great company, but I realised I wanted to have more success faster.”
15: Ayman Hariri
Age: 35
Net worth: $1.2 billion
Ayman Hariri is the son of slain Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. He’s involved in running Saudi Oger, one of Saudi Arabia’s biggest construction companies and the source of the Hariri family fortune. Oger was part of a venture that won a $653 million contract in January 2013 to build a local branch of the Jean Nouvel-designed Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi.
16: Naruatsu Baba
Age: 36
Net worth: $2.2 billion
Naruatsu Baba joins the ranks of Forbes billionaires as his smartphone game maker, Colopl, storms the market. Baba founded the company in 2008 as a developer; today he owns 59% of the growing company after selling a 10% stake last summer.
17: Yvonne Bauer and family
Age: 36
Net worth: $3.5 billion
Yvonne Bauer is the fifth generation of her family to run Bauer Media Group, which publishes some 600 magazines in 37 countries worldwide (U.S. titles include First for Women, Woman’s World, and In Touch). The group continues to expand through acquisitions and product launches focused on radio and print.
18: Lawrence Ho
Age: 37
Net worth: $3 billion
Lawrence Ho is the son of Macau gambling industry legend Stanley Ho. Melco Crown Entertainment, which they co-founded with Australian James Packer, has casino projects in Macau and Manila.
19: Yoshikazu Tanaka
Age: 37
Net worth: $1.6 billion
Yoshikazu Tanaka, founder and CEO of social networking gaming company Gree, is trying to get the firm back on track after declining sales for conventional mobile phones and stiff competition—he is up against Apple’s App Store and Google Play. The company’s share price has slumped 22% over the past year.
20: Alejandro Santo Domingo Davila & family
Age: 37
Net worth: $11.1 billion
Colombian beer king Julio Mario Santo Domingo Pumarejo died in October 2011, leaving his inheritance spread among Colombia’s richest family. Julio Mario had owned the Bavaria brewery but traded it in 2005 for 15% of SABMiller, the second-largest brewer on the planet. Julio Mario had three sons, including Alejandro, the new face of the family and a managing director at the New York investment firm Quadrant Capital Advisors.
21: Jack Dorsey
Age: 37
Net worth: $2.2 billion
Jack Dorsey has founded two billion-dollar Silicon Valley companies and shows no signs of slowing. His first, Twitter, went public in November 2013. Dorsey, who owns nearly 5% of the company’s outstanding shares, serves as chairman of the San Francisco-based microblogging service. He owns an even larger stake—nearly 29%—in payments company Square, which had estimated revenues of $220 million in 2012 and is valued at about $3.25 billion as of a funding round announced in September 2012.
22: Jan Koum
Age: 38
Net worth: $6.8 billion
Jan Koum caused quite the stir when Facebook announced that it was buying his mobile messaging startup WhatsApp for billion in February. Koum created WhatsApp in 2009 as the first smartphone application to let people send text messages between different phones and countries for free, using only their cell phone numbers. It is now the biggest mobile messaging service in the world with 430 million active users, bigger than Skype and Snapchat combined. Born and raised in a village on the outskirts of Kiev, Koum immigrated to Mountain View, Calif., when he was 16 and soon discovered a passion for computer hacking and networking.
23: Nicholas Woodman
Age: 38
Net worth: $1.3 billion
Another year, another milestone for GoPro creator and CEO Nicholas Woodman. After debuting on the Forbes billionaires list last year, he plans to take his company public this year after filing IPO papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission in February. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company is keeping it under wraps, however, after filing their documents confidentially, an exception for companies with less than $1 billion in revenue under the JOBS Act.
24: Chase Coleman, III
Age: 38
Net worth: $1.6 billion
Coleman is running one of the most dynamic new alternative money management businesses, Tiger Global Management, which oversees some $13 billion. His $6.3 billion Tiger Global Hedge Fund has cooled off a bit after trouncing the U.S. stock market in 2011 and 2012. But Tiger Global still returned some 14% net of fees in 2013.
25: Yusaku Maezawa
Age: 38
Net worth: $1.25 billion
Yusaku Maezawa founded online fashion mall Zozotown, a wildly popular website with some 1,600 brands, which are mostly Japanese, and 4 million members. The website is structured like an actual mall, where stores are set up; it sells on consignment.
26: Rahel Blocher
Age: 38
Net worth: $2.9 billion
Rahel Blocher, along with her sister Magdalena, is the largest shareholder of Ems-Chemie, the gigantic Swiss polymer and chemical manufacturer that her family has run for decades. When Christoph Blocher departed the company in 2004 after 35 years of service in the Swiss government, he sold his stock equally to his four children. Rahel, the youngest sibling, isn’t actively involved in company operations, unlike Magdalena, who is the CEO.
27: John Arnold
Age: 39
Net worth: $2.9 billion
John Arnold shocked the hedge fund world in May 2012 when he announced that he was calling it quits at age 38. He got his start at Enron in 1995 and is said to have made $750 million for the company in 2001 alone, the year that the company collapsed. After Enron, he started his own fund, Centaurus Advisors, and became a billionaire, posting triple-digit returns for several years.
28: Jon Oringer
Age: 39
Net worth: $1.35 billion
Jon Oringer became New York’s first tech billionaire in 2013 thanks to the soaring value of Shutterstock, the stock photo service he founded 10 years earlier and took public in 2012. As a serial entrepreneur, Oringer had come up with one of the world’s first pop-up blockers as a computer science graduate student at Columbia. The site now has over 30 million photos, 40,000 contributors, and 2012 revenues of $170 million.
29: Liu Qiangdong
Age: 39
Net worth: $2.7 billion
Liu Qiangdong is the founder and CEO of JD.com of Beijing, formerly called 360Jindong. The company boasts about 500,000 orders a day.
30: Ryan Kavanaugh
Age: 39
Net worth: $1 billion
Ryan Kavanaugh’s Relativity Media is backed by fellow billionaire Ron Burkle. Relativity now also has a TV division, sports management, and a music department.
31: Miriam Blocher
Age: 39
Net worth: $1.1 billion
Miriam Blocher is a major shareholder of Ems-Chemie, the gigantic Swiss polymer and chemical manufacturer that her family has run for decades. When Christoph Blocher departed the company in 2004 after 35 years of service in the Swiss government, he sold his stock equally to his four children. Miriam and brother Markus have sold shares to sisters Magdalena and Rahel over the years to run their own companies. Miriam purchased Läckerli-Huus, a Swiss confectionary and baked goods company, in 2007 and still manages the company.
