Seven young billionaires richer than Kylie Jenner

Kylie Jenner may have only been on Forbes’ Billionaires List for two years — after an investigation found the now 25-year-old is merely worth $900 million — but there are plenty of other youngin’s who are billionaires.

In fact, even if had Jenner remained on the list, she would have been dethroned as the world’s youngest billionaire by a 19-year-old drugstore scion.

From Oslo, Norway, to Orlando, Fla., these are the world’s seven youngest billionaires. 

Gustav Magnar Witzøe, 29

Worth: $4.2 billion

Norwegian model Gustav Magnar Witzøe been blessed with good looks — and $4.2 billion.

His father, also named Gustav, founded one of the world’s largest salmon producers, Salmar ASA, in 1991 and gifted his stake to his only child 22 years later. The model, who became a billionaire at 18, now lives with his Staffordshire bull terrier, Aro, in an Oslo penthouse overlooking the Aker Brygge waterfront.

Witzøe told The Telegraph, ‘I wasn’t poorer or richer the day after [he inherited the stake]. It’s still my dad’s company, he makes that decision. It’s paperwork, basically. It’s not like the money instantly transfers to your bank account.”

Still, the 29-year-old lives a glamorous life, cruising around in a $160,000 Lamborghini Urus. 

Though Witzøe doesn’t necessarily need to work, he keeps himself busy with three jobs: modeling, investing in start-ups through a firm he co-runs, Wiski Capital, and operating his philanthropic The W Initiative, which donates to groups focused on children’s health and education. 

After high school, he even worked on the salmon farm for two years.

“It was a really great experience, it’s so nice to work outside all day, using your body. You get home and you’re exhausted. I learnt a lot about the industry and how things worked,” he told The Telegraph.

Ryan Breslow, 28

Worth: $2 billion

Like several other billionaires on this list, Ryan Breslow dropped out of college — leaving Stanford, in his case, to focus on Bolt, the payment startup he founded his sophomore year. The software brings one-click payments to online retailers, simplifying the landscape of e-commerce companies so much that Bolt is now valued at $11 billion. Breslow’s own net worth? A whopping $2 billion.

Though Breslow is one of the world’s youngest billionaires, he doesn’t exactly live like one in his relatively modest three-bedroom home on the border of Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood, not far from where he grew up in North Miami Beach.

During his childhood, both of Breslow’s grandfathers joined forces to run a denim shop, an accounting firm and a seafood market, and his parents owned a local golf range. An entrepreneurial spirit certainly runs in the family, but Breslow doesn’t make a big fuss about his success — especially on Instagram, where his posts are strictly business.

According to Forbes, “Breslow spends most days alone at home. He dances to ‘house disco’ music on the AstroTurf in his backyard. He meditates amid soaring palm trees, white Buddha statues and a humming air conditioner. And, from a treadmill desk in his sunroom, near the ceremonial drums, he runs Bolt.” In the same article, Breslow, who lives on a vegan diet, said, “I live a monk lifestyle.” He avoids gluten, alcohol and caffeine. 

“Most people who get rich want to be a part of an elite circle. I want nothing to do with it — I’m probably one of the only billionaires who has that feeling,” Breslow, who relies only on candlelight after sunset so as not to disrupt his sleep cycle, has said.

In early 2022, he instituted a four-day workweek for his 800 Bolt employees, saying, “There’s too much work theater, where people go through the motions to appear busy. I’d much rather have you focus on your health, well-being and family during your time off, so that when you’re here working, you’re all in.”

Pedro Franceschi and Henrique Dubugras, both 26

Worth: $1.5 billion each

With a net worth of $1.5 billion each, Brazilians Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi, who started coding when they were pre-teens, earned their spot on Forbes’ list in January 2022, five years after co-founding the fintech startup Brex. Their company revolutionized spending for small businesses, allowing early-stage organizations to use a corporate credit card, a privilege most young startups are denied. 

The pair met when they were still in high school — Dubugras in Sao Paulo and Franceschi in Rio de Janeiro. In a 2020 interview with The Takeoff, Dubugras said, “We met at the end of 2012 over Twitter, fighting [about] Vim vs. Emacs [two text editors for programming] … It got complicated to fight over 140 characters, so we went to Skype and became best friends there.”

Franceschi wasn’t the only person Dubugras fought with, though. In the same interview, Dubugras said, “I was having fights with my mom, moved out of my house, got emancipated, and was running out of money.” Rather than get a job to support himself, he and two coder friends — not including Franceschi — traveled to Miami for a hackathon competition with a $50,000 prize and won. 

According to Dubugras, Franceschi “started coding when he was nine, and then when he was 12, he got very hacker-famous because he was the first person in the world to jailbreak the iPhone 3G.”

In 2016, both Dubugras and Franceschi were accepted to Stanford University, but dropped out after only eight months to focus full-time on Brex, which is now headquartered in San Francisco. The dynamic duo, along with Franceschi’s wife, moved to Los Angeles at the start of the pandemic. 

In 2018, Dubugras told Nasdaq, “People warn against doing business with family and friends, but I wouldn’t be where I am today without Pedro by my side and I know he’d say the same.”

Alexandra Andresen, 26, and Katharina Andresen, 27

Worth: $1.2 billion each

These Norwegian sisters each were gifted 42% — now valued at $1.2 billion — of Ferd, the investment company that their father, Johan H. Andresen, founded in 2001. 

According to the Independent, even as a teen equestrian, Alexandra didn’t spend her billions willy-nilly, though. “I save when I get my weekly allowance, and I save the cash prizes I win in competitions or if I get money as a gift for my birthday. It means I can buy myself things I really want, like a bag or a pair of shoes, without having to ask mum or dad for money,” she said in 2016.

Until Forbes threw their names on the list for the first time that year — when Alexandra was 19 and Katharina was a 20-year-old Amsterdam University College student studying social sciences — the sisters had lived relatively obscure lives in Oslo. That said, Alexandra had made a name for herself as a three-time junior Norwegian dressage champion. 

Katharina — who paid a $32,000 fine for driving under the influence in 2017 at a Norwegian ski resort graduated in July from Regent’s University London, where she studied global management. She commemorated her graduation with an Instagram of her and her father.

Unlike several other billionaires on this list who keep their personal lives private, the Andresens share their passions with their thousands of Instagram followers. Alexandra’s feed consists of photos of her with her many horses, and every now and then, the red-headed heiress posts a sweet picture with her beau, 28-year-old Colin Thompson — a former racecar driver and founder of the Paramount Wood Co. furniture brand.

Katharina also has a boyfriend, 32-year-old Norwegian entrepreneur Frederic Kvasnes. The two have posted photos together from Paris, Santorini and Rome.

Austin Russell, 27

Worth: $1 billion

As the founder and CEO of Luminar Technologies — which creates software for self-driving cars — Austin Russell became the youngest self-made billionaire in 2020, when he was just 25 years old. That was the same year his company, which is based in Orlando, Fla., went public. Today, his net worth is $1 billion. 

“If you want to be able to see through a technology, a vision of a product, everything, college is not the right place to be able to do that,” Russell, who dropped out of his first year at Stanford, told Forbes. “The incentive and the reward is to get a paper published, rather than to be able to see something truly meaningful through into the world at large and to be able to have that breadth of vision. [Leaving school is] really what afforded me to be able to do all of those things.” 

Another helpful factor was winning $100,000 from the coveted Thiel Fellowship, a program founded by fellow billionaire and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, to help get young entrepreneurs’ businesses off the ground. 

After achieving billionaire status at the end of 2020, Russell dropped $83 million on a six-bedroom, 18-bath mansion in Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades neighborhood, about an hour north of where he grew up in Newport Beach. Two months later, he purchased a $10 million home in Winter Park, Fla., presumably to be closer to his company’s headquarters. 

He and his creation have some haters, though.

In a 2019 interview with CNBC, Elon Musk called Russell’s lidar technology “freaking stupid” as well as “expensive and unnecessary.”

Russell clapped back: “I think 50 commercial partners and a majority of the major automakers we are working with would disagree.”