New billionaires of the AI boom

The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has turned high-profile billionaires like Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chip maker Nvidia, and Sam Altman, the chief executive of the ChatGPT maker Open AI, into even richer billionaires.

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It has also produced a crop of new billionaires — at least on paper — from smaller startups. These individuals may become future Silicon Valley power brokers like the wealthy executives created by past tech booms, including the late-1990s dotcom frenzy, who then invested in or helped steer later waves of technology.

The new AI billionaires include Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo, who founded Scale AI, a data-labeling startup that received a $14.3 billion investment from Meta in June. The founders of the AI coding startup Cursor — Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger and Arvid Lunnemark — entered the billionaire ranks when their company was valued at $27 billion in a funding round last month. The entrepreneurs behind Perplexity (an AI search engine), Mercor (an AI data startup), Figure AI (a maker of humanoid robots), Safe Superintelligence (an AI lab), Harvey (an AI legal software startup) and Thinking Machines Lab (an AI lab) are in the nine-figure club as well, according to the companies or people close to the startups, as well as data from the startup tracker PitchBook and news reports.