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Here are 5 of the most standout first-time tech billionaires, ranked from lowest to highest net worth:
Liang Wenfeng, 40
Net worth: $1 billion
Source of wealth: AI, hedge fund
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Founder of the A.I. Start-Up DeepSeek Liang Wenfeng. Photo from Facebook |
Liang founded DeepSeek in 2023 and gained global attention in January 2025 after launching an AI model said to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT at a much lower cost.
The Chinese man, who hasn’t taken on any outside investors, funded DeepSeek in part with his profits from High-Flyer Capital Management, the quantitative trading hedge fund he cofounded in 2015 with two college classmates.
Sundar Pichai, 52
Net worth: $1.1 billion
Source of wealth: Google
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Google and Alphabet CEO, Sundar Pichai. Photo courtesy of Pichai's Instagram |
Pichai, CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet since 2019, owns just 0.02% of the company.
A recent 30% increase in Alphabet's stock—fueled by the success of its Gemini 2.0 AI model—helped push the India-born executive over the billionaire threshold for the first time.
Yao Runhao, 37
Net worth: $1.3 billion
Source of wealth: Online games
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Founder of Paper Games studio, Yao Runhao. Photo from X |
Yao founded Paper Games, a Shanghai-based studio behind Love and Deepspace, an AI-powered dating simulation game that launched in January 2024.
The hit game now boasts around six million monthly users and accounts for over 80% of the studio’s $850 million in annual revenue.
An avid gamer since he was a kid, the Chinese man and his now-wife once launched a mobile fashion game together.
Phil Shawe, 55
Net worth: $1.8 billion
Source of wealth: Translation services
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Founder and CEO of TransPerfect Phil Shawe. Photo from Instagram |
Shawe co-founded TransPerfect back in 1992 in a college dorm. Following a prolonged legal dispute with his former co-CEO and ex-girlfriend, the U.S. man gained full control of the company in 2018.
Today, TransPerfect earns over $1.3 billion annually, offering AI-powered translation services to major clients like Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Justice.
Alexandr Wang, 28
Net worth: $2 billion
Source of wealth: Artificial intelligence
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Alexandr Wang, world youngest self-made billionaire and co-founder of Scale AI. Photo courtesy of Wang's Instagram |
Wang is the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at 28. His company, Scale AI—which provides data labeling services to tech giants like OpenAI, Meta, and Google—was valued at nearly $14 billion after a $1 billion funding round in May 2024.
A New Mexico native, Wang began working in Silicon Valley at 17, dropped out of MIT at 19, and founded Scale through Y Combinator.
