Business leaders no longer have to spend decades building the next big thing to join the ranks of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. They just need to build an AI company.
According to CB Insights, there are currently around 498 AI unicorns or private AI companies worth more than about $1 billion.
A complete 100 of them were established after 2023. Over 1,300 AI startups are valued at over $100 million.
Take Mira Murati, Openai's previous CTO. Her startup, Thinking Machines Lab, has closed its $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation.
I have not seen such a high-tech boom since the late 90s and early 2000s. This has driven many of today's tech giants, from eBay to Google, into the mainstream. The “unicorn” label was not present at the time and its billion-dollar private valuations were not tracked, so it's impossible to directly compare the dot-com boom, but AI was creating billionaires at a record-breaking pace and even managed to ring in the age of signs.
AI billionaires boom
There is a boom in corporate valuation, and large salaries are also charged for founders, investors and C-suites.
March, Bloomberg Four largest private AI companies, including Openai, Humanity, Safety Tensions and Anysphere, reported that they have created at least 1.5 billion with a net worth of at least $38 billion. Since then, more than a dozen unicorns have been crowned.
AI startups are receiving large investments, bringing high valuations and wealth to founders and early investors. According to data from CrunchBase, Global Venture Funding in 2024 exceeded the 2023 total, with AI showing the biggest leap in volume each year.
For human founders, including CEO Dario Amodei, it shows that Claude Chatbot Maker is in discussions to raise $5 billion at a $170 billion valuation. Amodei's net worth is currently over $1 billion.
Also, Liang Wenfeng will be joining the Billionaire Club. The founder and CEO of Chinese AI company Deepseek could be worth more than $1 billion based on estimates from a low-cost AI company.
Also active is the net worth of billionaires as investments in AI continue to surge. Nvidia's CFO Colette Kress and EVP Jay Puri have become billionaires and joined CEO Jensen Huang after market capitalization exceeded $4 trillion. Similarly, Palantir's first $1 billion quarter dramatically increased the wealth of its company co-founders and C-Sweets. Peter Thiel and Alex Carp each look at the jump with a net worth of $17 billion.
