Three young men, aged 22, have just made history by becoming the world's youngest self-made billionaires. Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha, all from San Francisco, are the CEO, CTO, and board chairman of Mercor, a startup that streamlines recruitment and has helped train models in Silicon Valley's biggest AI labs. Founded in 2023, Mercor is now valued at US$10 billion.
"It's definitely crazy," Mr. Foody told Forbes. "It feels very surreal. Obviously beyond our wildest imaginations, insofar as anything that we could have anticipated two years ago."
The trio is estimated to each have about 22 percent stake in the company, and they are younger than Mark Zuckerberg when he became a billionaire at 23. They are members of the Thiel Fellowship, a program created by investor Peter Thiel that gives out grants of up to $100,000 to young people, on the condition that they drop out of college within two years and work on a project instead. Mr. Hiremath, who spent two years at Harvard before leaving, said his life did a "180 in such a short period of time."
"The thing that’s crazy for me is, if I weren’t working on Mercor, I would have just graduated college a couple of months ago," he added. The brainchild was born with the idea of matching engineers in India with US companies that were on the lookout for freelance coders, and created a recruiting platform that would interview applicants with AI and match them with the best-fitting company. When asked if they had bought anything flashy with their newfound wealth, the founders said they simply didn’t have the time. "I leave the office around 10:30 pm, on an average day, six days a week," Mr. Foody said. "So there’s not a whole lot of time outside of that to be distracted by things outside of the business."
But here's where it gets controversial... While their success is undoubtedly impressive, some argue that their achievements are more a result of luck and privilege than hard work and innovation. And this is the part most people miss... The Thiel Fellowship, for instance, has been criticized for enabling young people to drop out of college and pursue risky ventures without the necessary education and experience. So, what do you think? Are these young billionaires a testament to the power of hard work and innovation, or are they just riding the wave of privilege and luck?
