DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng named world's richest billionaire AI creator

Liang's net worth, derived primarily from his nearly 78% stake in DeepSeek, more than doubled after a June fundraising round valued the company at $50 billion, adding about $19 billion to his wealth.

The 41-year-old entrepreneur now ranks ahead of ChatGPT's OpenAI President Greg Brockman, whose estimated net worth is $25.5 billion, and Claude's Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei, whose fortune stands at $7.98 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

OpenAI co-founder and CEO Samuel Altman did not make Bloomberg's list of the world's 500 richest people.

LiangWenfeng, founder of startup DeepSeek, delivers keynote speech during the 10th China Private Equity Golden Bull Awards on August 30, 2019 in Shanghai, China. Photo by Reuters

The ranking focuses on founders whose companies generate most of their revenue directly from AI models, excluding entrepreneurs whose wealth comes primarily from other parts of the AI ecosystem, such as semiconductors or data centers.

That excludes technology billionaires including Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, Google's Larry Page, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Born in Zhanjiang, Guangdong province, Liang founded DeepSeek in 2023 as a spinoff from the AI division of Zhejiang High-Flyer Asset Management, the quantitative hedge fund he established with two former university classmates.

High-Flyer used profits from quantitative trading to accumulate advanced graphics processing units, providing the computing power needed for DeepSeek to develop its AI models without relying on traditional venture capital funding.

DeepSeek drew global attention in January 2025 after releasing its R1 reasoning model, which the company said delivered performance comparable to OpenAI's ChatGPT at a significantly lower cost. The Hangzhou-based startup has since become one of the world's most closely watched AI companies, with researchers and developers adopting its open-source models.

Liang has become one of China's most influential AI entrepreneurs, a rise many in the country have described as the "DeepSeek moment." In 2025, Time magazine named him among its "100 Most Influential People," writing that his emergence marked a moment when "U.S. tech dominance was being openly questioned."

He is now China's eighth-richest person, ranking just behind Chen Tianshi, co-founder of Cambricon Technologies a chipmaker now hailed as the "Nvidia of China."