AI Boom Creates Billionaires at Record Speed

In 2025, artificial intelligence startups made dozens of new people rich. The AI boom was the fastest and largest increase in wealth in recent years. Big investments in Anthropic, Safe Superintelligence, OpenAI, Anysphere, and others drove their valuations to record levels and created huge fortunes — mostly on paper, for now. CNBC tells in more detail about the record speed of creation of new billionaires.

According to CB Insights, there are currently 498 AI unicorns — private companies valued at $1 billion or more — worth a total of $2,7 trillion. Of these, 100 were founded after 2023. More than 1300 AI startups are valued at more than $100 million.

The stock price of Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft and other public companies continues to accelerate. At the same time, the companies that build data centers and computing power are rapidly expanding. And engineers are getting high salaries. Together, these are creating personal fortunes on a scale that dwarfs previous tech waves.

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“If you look at the data over the last 100 years, we’ve never seen this amount and this speed of wealth creation. It’s unprecedented,” said Andrew McAfee, a principal investigator at MIT.

New generation of billionaires

In March, Bloomberg estimated that the four largest private AI companies had created at least 15 billionaires with the total condition $38 billion. Since then, the number of unicorns has grown by dozens more.

Mira Murati, who left OpenAI last September, founded Thinking Machines Lab in February. By July, it had raised $2 billion in the largest seed round in history.

This gave the company a valuation of $12 billion.

Anthropic AI is in talks to raise $5 billion at a valuation of $170 billion, nearly triple what it was valued at in March. CEO Dario Amodei and six other founders are now likely multibillionaires, according to people familiar with the matter.

Anysphere was valued at $9,9 billion in June. Within weeks, it reportedly received an offer of $18 billion to $20 billion, likely making its 25-year-old founder and CEO Michael Truell a billionaire.

Wealth on paper and the secondary market

Most AI fortunes are tied to private companies, making it harder for founders and shareholders to raise money. Unlike the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, today’s startups can stay private longer. They regularly attract investment from venture capitalists, sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and other investors.

The development of the secondary market makes it possible to sell shares to other investors and receive cash. Special deals or tenders are increasingly being held, and founders can take out loans using their shares as collateral.

OpenAI plans to sell some of its shares to employees to cash them in. The company is now valued at $500 billion, up from $300 billion in March.

Since 2023, there have been 73 major deals. They brought real money to the owners of the companies - these were mergers, acquisitions, IPOs, reverse mergers, and sales of controlling stakes. After Meta invested $14,3 billion in Scale AI, its founder Alexander Wang moved to work for Meta's AI team. And Scale AI co-founder Lucy Guo bought a mansion in the Hollywood Hills for $30 million after this deal.

Geographic concentration of wealth

The AI boom is centered in the San Francisco Bay Area, reminiscent of the dot-com era. Last year, Silicon Valley companies raised more than $35 billion in venture capital.

San Francisco now has more billionaires than New York, with 82 to 66. The Bay Area's millionaire population has doubled in a decade, while New York's has grown 45 percent.

Last year, San Francisco saw a record number of homes sold for over $20 million. The city's surge in rents, home prices, and demand has been largely attributed to AI.

“It’s amazing how geographically concentrated this AI wave is. The people who are good at building and growing tech companies are here. I’ve been hearing for 25 years that this is the end of Silicon Valley, or that some other place is the new Silicon Valley. But Silicon Valley is still Silicon Valley,” McAfee said.

Prospects and interest for the financial sector

When companies like OpenAI go public, their shares will be freely available to buy and sell on the stock exchange. Right now, the wealth of founders and employees is mostly in the form of stakes in private companies. These stakes can’t be easily converted into real money.

The public offering of shares will make these shares liquid. Owners will be able to sell them and receive large sums. This will lead to the emergence of a new wave of super-rich people, as once happened after the IPO of Google and Facebook. Thus, the IPO turns "paper" wealth into real money.

“I would say a much larger percentage of wealth being created is illiquid right now. There are ways to get liquidity, but it’s nothing compared to working at Meta or Google,” said Simon Krinsky, chief executive of Pathstone and a former managing director at Hall Capital Partners in San Francisco.

When AI entrepreneurs have spare cash, they will likely invest in the same way that dot-com billionaires did: first in familiar companies and projects from their own circles, and then in more diverse assets.

Many dot-com founders began rethinking the wealth management industry itself after the market crash. Netscape founder Jim Clark, for example, helped launch MyCFO out of frustration with banks.

Krinsky believes that AI founders could follow the same path as dot-com billionaires. Artificial intelligence, he says, could change or even replace many of the traditional wealth management functions. But even the most sophisticated wealthy will eventually need personal services—help with taxes, inheritance, and investment advice.