His brothers Leonardo Maria, 28, and Luca, 22, also inherited fortunes, as did three older siblings. Then there’s Sophie Luise Fielmann, 29, German heiress to Fielmann AG, an eyeglasses fortune left by her father, Günther Fielmann, who died in January at age 84. She and her sister Livia are the youngest granddaughters of Werner Ricardo Voigt, the billionaire cofounder of the Brazilian electrical equipment producer WEG, who died in 2016.
Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio
Along with her younger sister Alexandra, Katharina is a sixth-generation owner of Ferd, the more than $4 billion (equity) investment company their father, Johan, runs. Katharina is a sustainability officer at an Oslo-based construction firm. He owns nearly half of salmon farming company SalMar ASA, inherited from his father Gustav Witzoe, but does not have an operating role. Instead, he’s casting his line as a real estate and tech startup investor. Furtwaenger and her older brother Jacob were each given a 37.4% stake in the family’s German media company by their father, Hubert Burda, who is no longer a billionaire. Burda Media’s titles include the German editions of Elle and Playboy.
In fact, there are 15 people around the globe who boast a three-comma fortune despite being 30 years old or younger. His father was a small town scrapyard owner who started out renovating ex-Soviet equipment at the end of the Cold War. He transformed the business into the $3.2 billion (2023 revenue) defense producer Czechoslovak Group, which Strnad has since taken over as owner and CEO. In his spare time, Strnad collects art, sports cars and historic vehicles. A newcomer to the billionaire ranks, Pedro is the son of the late Edson de Godoy Bueno (d. 2017), once Brazil’s richest healthcare billionaire. Bueno is the CEO and largest shareholder of laboratory services firm Diagnósticos da América SA, which has seen its shares nearly triple over the past year.
He became a billionaire last April, when M&A Research Institute Holdings’ share price skyrocketed thanks to spiking revenues and a surge of M&A activity in Japan. Jonathan Kwok, 28, first became a billionaire in his own right after his father, Hong Kong property mogul Walter Kwok, passed away in 2018. Alexandra Andresen, now 23, has been a billionaire since she was 19 thanks to her stake in Ferd, the Norwegian investment company her father still runs. Irish citizens Firoz, 27, and Zahan, 25, are the richest entries on this list.
- They still have plenty of time to make a return—something that will be much more difficult for FTX cofounder Gary Wang, 29, who pleaded guilty to fraud charges in December.
- His great-grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, laid the foundations for the family fortune when he invented an airplane propeller the French used in the First World War.
- It remained under a trusteeship until his 18th birthday, when he became a billionaire.
- Jonathan now runs Empire Group Holdings with his brother and is the youngest billionaire in Hong Kong.
AGE: 24
According to Forbes, it's the first time in 15 years that there aren't any self-made billionaires under 30. Leonardo Maria is his father’s only child with Zampillo and heads strategy for Luxottica. When they transitioned into sewing and screen printing fitness clothing in Francis’ parents’ garage, their sportswear brand was born. Morgan offloaded his stake to private equity firm General Atlantic in a 2020 deal that valued the company at $1.5 billion. Moved by the experience of his grandfather, who was forced to close his real estate business because he didn’t have a successor, Sagami, who got his start in advertising, launched M&A Research Institute Holdings in 2018. The company uses AI to advise small- and medium-scale enterprises with aging owners who have no one lined up to take over.
SalMar’s share price has soared 800% over the past decade, inflating the younger Witzøe’s wealth along with it. He’s now Norway’s fifth-richest top 10 youngest billionaires in the world person and its biggest taxpayer, having given the government NOK 292.4 million—the equivalent of about $29.6 million—in 2022. Exporting to over 50 countries, SalMar is the world’s second largest salmon farmer. The company says it produces enough to feed every Norwegian a nightly fish dinner.
Like his brothers, he owns 12.5% of the holding company Delfin, which has stakes in a range of companies that include the Ray-Ban producer EssilorLuxottica. She and her sister Jung-youn each own approximately 9% of the South Korean-Japanese online gaming publisher Nexon, founded by their late father Kim Jung-ju in 1994. Nexon’s hit role-playing video game MapleStory, released in 2003, helped popularize the free-to-play model whereby users paid only for cosmetic, nonessential accessories for their characters.
For the first time in 15 years, there are no self-made billionaires under the age of 30.
He inherited his wealth when his father died in a 2021 helicopter accident at age 69. The bulk of his fortune comes from an estimated 2.5% stake in the French software company Dassault Systèmes and an estimated 4.1% stake in Dassault Aviation. His great-grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, laid the foundations for the family fortune when he invented an airplane propeller the French used in the First World War. He inherited 49% of Red Bull when his father Dietrich Mateschitz, who founded the business in 1984, died in 2022.
Like his brother Firoz, his wealth comes from a 4.6% stake in the Tata conglomerate as well as a 25% stake in construction giant Shapoorji Pallonji Group. He and Firoz have been taking on leadership roles in the debt-laden SP Group and helping to reorganize it in the wake of their father’s death. Though he and his brothers are Irish citizens, they live in Mumbai, where both the SP Group and Tata are based. He was only 19 when his father gifted him nearly half of the fish farming behemoth SalMar. Eleven years later, his dad continues to operate the company while Gustav focuses on real estate and tech startup investments.
Clemente, the youngest Del Vecchio heir, is not known to have a role at Luxottica, which owns Sunglass Hut, Ray-Ban and Oakley, among others. They still have plenty of time to make a return—something that will be much more difficult for FTX cofounder Gary Wang, 29, who pleaded guilty to fraud charges in December. The Snapchat cofounder is one of the youngest CEOs of a publicly-traded company in the world. After rallying in 2019, Snap stock is down 50% since the start of the year. Spiegel, who was born in the U.S., quietly became a dual American-French citizen in 2018, according to reports in the French press.
The World’s Youngest Billionaires 2024
That includes Ben Francis, who founded activewear maker Gymshark in 2012, when he was 19, and Palmer Luckey, who sold his first startup to Facebook and is back with a successful defense tech business. Forbes has ages for about 97% of the 2022 list members; this post is based on the ages that we've been able to confirm. Unlike his half-brother Leonardo, he has no role in EssilorLuxottica.
Her great-great-great grandfather purchased the tobacco producer Tiedemanns Tobaksfabrik in 1849 and built it into a family cigarette empire that lasted until Andresen’s father sold it in 2005. Now the family focuses on its investment firm Ferd, which deals primarily in real estate and private Nordic companies, including the oil service business Interwell and Norway’s largest private medical laboratory. After gaining experience as a board observer for several years, she became a member of the board in June.
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A few are self-made, having built notable companies like Snap (Evan Spiegel, 33), Gymshark (Ben Francis, 31) and Oculus VR (Palmer Luckey, 31). Collison, born and raised in Limerick, Ireland, but now living in San Francisco, is the richest billionaire age 30 or under, with a fortune of $3.2 billion. The value of his stake in privately held Stripe has nearly tripled in the past two years thanks to three nine-figure funding rounds. The most recent, a $250 million Series G in September, put Stripe’s valuation at $35 billion. When his father died in 2021, 23-year-old Remi Dassault inherited about 2.5% of the French software company Dassault Systèmes and 4.1% of Dassault Aviation, according to Forbes. The world got a new teenage billionaire when Leonardo Del Vecchio died in June 2022.
