20 Youngest Tech Billionaires Of 2015: Age Is Just A Number
Young And Wealthy
On Forbes' annual list of the world's richest people, there were tech billionaires of all ages -- and the youngest this year is just 24.
These billionaires have come up with an app, a social media platform, devices and more, at astoundingly young ages. While not all of these techies found their wealth in their early to mid-20s, all are now in their 30s or younger.
The apps and technologies these youngsters developed may sound familiar, as these products' rapid rise in popularity brought them their wealth.
20. Yusaku Maezawa
Age: 39
Net worth: $1.3 billion
Yusaku Maezawa is the 20th youngest billionaire in tech, according to Forbes, and the founder of the largest online fashion mall in Japan, Zozotown. More than 3.5 million customers have shopped at the site's 659 stores, Forbes says. The 39-year-old developed a popular app called WEAR that lets users scan bar codes of fashion items in stores. After trying to hit it big in music with his rock band in California, he moved back to Japan and started selling CDs. Maezawa founded his retail business in 2000. Forbes says Maezawa is the 19th-richest person in Japan.
19. Kenji Kasahara
Age: 39
Net worth: $1.4 billion
Kenji Kasahara founded Japan's most popular social networking site, Mixi, which has more than 18 million subscribers. Kasahara, 39, is ranked by Forbes as the 18th-richest person in Japan. He founded his social media platform in 2004 at the age of 28. Before that, he created employment website Find Job at age 21, after graduating from the University of Tokyo's School of Public Policy.
18. Nicholas Woodman
Age: 39
Net worth: $2.4 billion
Nicholas Woodman is the founder, CEO and chairman of GoPro, maker of the same-named durable, wearable video camera.
Woodman, 39, owns more than 40 percent of the company he founded in 2002, whose stock Forbes says has fluctuated in value over the course of its history. The California native -- the son of an investment banker -- was an avid surfer growing up. He was inspired by surfers' having trouble capturing footage of their rides, so he wanted to develop a camera they could strap to themselves and wear while surfing. He made his GoPro prototype with his mother's sewing kit and a drill, Forbes says. He sold the camera in multiple stores, including surf shops, and on the QVC home shopping network.
17. Jan Koum
Age: 39
Net worth: $6.6 billion
Jan Koum is the founder of WhatsApp, the world's biggest mobile messaging service, with more than 700 million users.
Koum emigrated from Ukraine to the United States when he was 16, and lived in an apartment with his mother that they gained through government assistance. He worked sweeping floors while his mother was a babysitter. His mother was later diagnosed with cancer and the two lived off of her disability money. Koum attended San Jose State University while working as a security tester for professional services firm Ernst & Young. His mother passed away in 2000 shortly after he landed a job with Yahoo as a security and infrastructure engineer. He left the company in 2007 and started WhatsApp in 2009. Facebook bought the service for $19 billion last year. A few months after the deal closed, Koum donated $555 million in Facebook shares to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which provides grants for local needs, Forbes says.
16. Yoshikazu Tanaka
Age: 38
Net worth: $1.1 billion
Yoshikazu Tanaka is the founder and CEO of Gree, a social-networking game platform. The 38-year-old Tokyo native started developing Gree in 2003 as a hobby before opening it up to users in 2004. By March of that year it garnered more than 10,000 users. He established Gree Inc. by the end of that year.
Since then, Tanaka has been investing in other areas as the popularity of the gaming service dipped.
Tanaka started out working for Sony before working for e-commerce website Rakuten. Forbes ranks Tanaka as the 21st-richest person in Japan.
15. Jack Dorsey
Age: 38
Net worth: $2.7 billion
Jack Dorsey made his fortune when he co-founded Twitter, one of the most popular social networking sites in the world. Dorsey dropped out of NYU in 1999, launched Twitter with three others in 2006 and took the position of company CEO. In 2008, Dorsey stepped down as CEO and is now the chairman of the company in which he owns a 4 percent stake, according to Forbes.
Dorsey is now the CEO and founder of Square, which he launched in 2010. Square is a mobile payments app that allows smartphones to process credit cards.
Dorsey is from St. Louis and lives in San Francisco.
14. Travis Kalanick
Age: 38
Net worth: $5.3 billion
Tracis Kalanick is the co-founder and CEO of Uber Technologies, the maker of the Uber app, which acts as a driving service on your phone. Despite battling regulatory and safety concerns and competing with taxi services across 54 countries including the United States, Forbes says investors have valued the controversial private company at $41.2 billion.
Kalanick co-founded Uber in 2009 and it exploded in popularity in major cities across the country. He dropped out of UCLA in 1998 to launch multimedia search engine Scour Exchange. That company filed for bankruptcy just two years later. Kalanick is from Los Angeles and lives in San Francisco. Forbes says he is the 96th-wealthiest person in the United States.
13. Naruatsu Baba
Age: 37
Net worth: $1.6 billion
Naruatsu Baba is a software developer who founded smartphone game maker Colopl, and today owns almost 60 percent of the company. Since its launch in 2008, Colopl has had five of the largest-grossing apps for Android. Some of the biggest games the company is behind: "Meow Meow Star Acres," "Dino Dominion," "Treasure Trove Detective" and "Professional Baseball PRIDE."
Baba is now expanding to virtual-reality gaming as his company is working on a VR version of its popular smartphone game "White Cat Project."
At 37, he is ranked by Forbes as the 16th-wealthiest person in Japan.
12. Robert Pera
Age: 37
Net worth: $1.8 billion
Robert Pera is the founder and CEO of Ubiquiti Networks, which he started in 2005 and took public in 2011.
His company makes wireless products such as Wi-Fi amplifiers that can provide Internet access to more than 10,000 customers within a 36-mile radius. Pera established his company's place in the industry by undercutting competitors like Motorola while still garnering a large profit.
Pera graduated from the University of California, San Diego, where he received his master's in electrical engineering. He grew up idolizing Steve Jobs, so it was fitting that his first job out of college was at Apple, where he tested the company's Wi-Fi devices. He left Apple to start his own company.
He is an owner of the Memphis Grizzlies NBA franchise, in which he owns a 25 percent stake.
11. Garrett Camp
Age: 36
Net worth: $5.3 billion
Garrett Camp is the co-founder and chairman of Uber, an app that turns a smartphone into an on-demand car service.
Originally from Calgary, Camp attended the University of Calgary, where he co-founded StumbleUpon in 2002. The Web-discovery website grew to more than 25 million registered users. He later sold StumbleUpon to eBay in 2007 for $75 million. Two years later, Camp co-founded Uber, which is estimated to be worth more than $41 billion. Forbes says he is the eighth-wealthiest person in Canada.
10. Scott Farquhar
Age: 35
Net worth: $1.1 billion
Scott Farquhar is the co-founder of Atlassian, an Australian business software company.
He started the company in 2002 after graduating from the University of New South Wales. His business specializes in developing online business software tools for development and IT teams. Forbes says Farquhar financed the company with a $10,000 line of credit. Since then, the company has taken off, as its platform is used by more than 35,000 companies across the globe.
Forbes estimates that Farquhar owns about one-third of Atlassian and values the company at $3.3 billion. Forbes says he is the 24th-richest person in Australia.
9. Mike Cannon-Brookes
Age: 35
Net worth: $1.1 billion
Mike Cannon-Brookes is the co-founder with Scott Farquhar of Atlassian. He befriended Farquhar when the two were at the University of New South Wales. During their tenure there, the two programmers started the online business software tools company. Forbes says Atlassian is used by more than 35,000 companies, including BMW, American Airlines, Cisco, Facebook and Citigroup.
8. Sean Parker
Age: 35
Net worth: $2.5 billion
Sean Parker has had a major role in a slew of tech organizations. He is best-known as the co-founder of file-sharing service Napster and as the founding president of Facebook. He is also the co-founder of Internet platforms Plaxo, Airtime and Causes.
Parker left Facebook in 2006 to become a managing partner of Founders Fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm.
Lately, Parker has been donating a large amount of his fortune to charity, giving $550 million to the Sean N. Parker Foundation. Parker has given more than $24 million to Stanford University to establish a research center to find a cure for allergies. Forbes says Parker has been hospitalized more than a dozen times in the past four years for allergic reactions.
7. Drew Houston
Age: 32
Net worth: $1.2 billion
Drew Houston is the co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, which he started when he was 24. Since the cloud-based file-sharing service launched in 2007, it has seen an exponential growth in popularity and is valued at around $10 billion, according to Forbes.
Houston has been involved with technology startups since high school, Forbes says, and Dropbox is his sixth startup. The Acton, Mass., native received his bachelor of science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
6. Eduardo Saverin
Age: 32
Net worth: $4.8 billion
Eduardo Saverin is one of the five co-founders of Facebook, the largest social media platform in the world. He famously started the company after he befriended Mark Zuckerberg and three others during their time together at Harvard.
Facebook now has more than 1.4 billion users, and this past year, its revenue grew 58 percent, to $12.5 billion. Facebook has acquired multiple other major tech companies and platforms along the way, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus VR.
Saverin maintains a 4 percent stake in Facebook and also invests in multiple international technology startups.
Born in Brazil, Saverin resides in Singapore after renouncing his U.S. citizenship in 2012. Forbes says he is the sixth-richest person in Singapore and eighth-richest person in Brazil.
5. Ryan Graves
Age: 31
Net worth: $1.4 billion
Ryan Graves was the first employee at Uber, the smartphone app that acts as an on-demand driver service, and is the head of global operations for the company after a brief stay as CEO. Graves joined Uber in 2010 when company co-founder Travis Kalanick tweeted that he was looking for a product manager. Graves, who had worked at GE and interned at Foursquare, replied to the tweet, telling Kalanick to email him. Uber is valued at $41.2 billion, according to Forbes.
4. Dustin Moskovitz
Age: 30
Net worth: $7.9 billion
Dustin Moskovitz is one of the five co-founders of Facebook. He dropped out of school in 2002 to help his Harvard roommate, Mark Zuckerberg, develop the website. It is now the most widely used social media platform in the world with more than 1.4 billion users and the most popular smartphone app in the world.
Moskovitz left Facebook in 2008 to starts software firm Asana, where he is now the CEO. He and his wife, former Wall Street Journal reporter Cari Tuna, started Good Ventures, a foundation that gives millions of dollars to causes such as marriage equality and malaria eradication. The Florida native resides in San Francisco. Forbes ranks Moskovitz as the 59th-richest person in the United States.
3. Mark Zuckerberg
Age: 30
Net worth: $33.4 billion
Mark Zuckerberg is the co-founder and CEO of Facebook. The social media platform is larger than it's ever been after seeing a 58 percent revenue growth in 2014, to $12.5 billion, thanks to support from mobile ads. The Facebook app is the most used app on mobile devices today. Facebook itself has more than 1.4 billion users. The company also owns Instagram, which has more than 300 million users. Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion, and the growing messaging platform has more than 700 million users. Zuckerberg also spearheaded Facebook's $2 billion acquisition of Oculus VR, which he intends to turn into another huge moneymaker, but it has yet to release a product. Zuckerberg famously created Facebook in his dorm at Harvard. Forbes ranks him as the 16th-richest person in the world and the 12th-richest person in the U.S., and he was ranked at 22 on its list of the world's most powerful people.
2. Bobby Murphy
Age: 26
Net worth: $1.5 billion
Bobby Murphy is the co-founder of the popular social media and messaging app Snapchat.
He and college friend Evan Spiegel developed the app while at Stanford and launched it in 2010 with the name Picaboo. They rebranded the app under the name Snapchat in 2011 after it failed to gain traction. Today it has more than 100 million monthly users. Forbes estimates that Murphy has at least a 15 percent stake in the company. In late 2013, the company turned down a $3 billion buyout offer from Facebook, according to Forbes. Last month, the free app received buyout offers that would value it at $19 billion, Forbes says. Murphy, 26, resides in Venice, Calif.
1. Evan Spiegel
Age: 24
Net worth: $1.5 billion
Evan Spiegel co-founded Snapchat with Bobby Murphy and is its CEO. The app allows users to send photos and videos to friends, and then the images vanish after a few seconds. With Stanford friend Murphy, Spiegel co-founded the company in 2011 under a different name and developed the app before finishing college. Forbes estimates that Spiegel and Murphy have at least a 15 percent share each in the company.
In September 2013, the company turned down a $3 billion buyout offer from Facebook, according to Forbes. Last month, the free app received buyout offers that would value it at $19 billion, Forbes says.
Spiegel, an L.A. native, lives in Los Angeles.