AI’s New Money

This year’s 19 new billionaires struck it rich by applying new technology to old businesses.

May 19, 2026 at 6:30 AM EDT

The most recent crop of artificial intelligence billionaires could hardly be more unlikely. One is a published poet. Another is helping catalog associates of the late pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein. At least three have no college degrees. One even pleaded guilty to a felony.

Their businesses are also quite different from those of the first wave, which primarily made their fortunes on data centers, chips and the large language models using them. The newcomers are applying AI to other industries, such as law, healthcare, customer service and software development.

The goal for many is to build an AI assistant, or “co-pilot,” in the language of the industry, for professionals: doctors looking for the latest in medical research or lawyers wanting to expedite case reviews. Others are focusing on AI’s picks and shovels, the equipment needed to analyze vast reservoirs of information: data labeling, or adding tags to images, text, audio and video so AI can make sense of it; or autonomous coding agents, which can work on their own to write programs and troubleshoot and fix older ones.

The New AI Rich are proliferating at a mind-boggling pace, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. They include two executives who gained their fortunes from Cerebras Systems, the AI chipmaker that went public last week in this year’s largest initial public offering. Over the past year these US startups have minted 19 billionaires worth a combined $59.3 billion. They join 41 members of the three-comma-club that the index identified last year.

Of course, the members of the “old” guard aren’t standing still. They continue to innovate and could well figure out ways to undercut the businesses of the newcomers. OpenAI and Anthropic are working on software that could eliminate the need for specialized applications from other companies, directly competing with many of the individuals featured here. They’re also siphoning off tons of funding, with OpenAI raising $122 billion in March at an $852 billion valuation. Anthropic could soon surpass them if it closes a $900 billion funding round, further lifting the fortunes of its seven billionaire co-founders. Both companies are reported to be targeting public listings later this year.

How this competition progresses could determine whether AI concentrates power in a handful of winners or creates an eco-system that could share this bonanza more broadly. Felix Wang, an analyst at research firm Hedgeye, expects to see a shakeout in AI infrastructure, which requires enormous investment. But the companies seeking to apply the technology to various industries have more room to run. “The innovations are just so new,” he says. Read on to find out how lavishly some are paying off.

Methodology:

To calculate the growing fortunes of private company founders, Bloomberg relied on PitchBook Data Inc., which tracks private companies, and Bloomberg reporting and data to calculate the percentage of a given company’s equity held by company insiders. Those figures are adjusted to account for equity granted to nonfounding employees, based on data from Carta. Bloomberg’s net worth calculations account for additional assets beyond company stakes when such holdings are known. Unless otherwise noted, representatives for the billionaires declined or did not respond to comment. All valuations are as of Friday, May 15, 2026, at market close.