The World's Youngest Billionaires 2025: 21 Under 30

Forbes

01-04-2025

Building a fortune usually takes years—even a lifetime. The numbers speak for themselves: Nearly three-quarters of the world's billionaires are between the ages of 50 and 79. Just 12% are under 50. The rarest of all are those who manage to achieve billionaire status by the age of 30; this year there are just 21 of those flush youngsters on the Forbes list.
Unsurprisingly, all but two of them inherited their wealth. That goes for the world's youngest billionaire, Johannes von Baumbach (age 19), heir to Germany's Boehringer Ingelheim, the world's largest privately-owned pharmaceutical company. He and three siblings—ages 23, 25 and 27—are each worth an estimated $5.4 billion thanks to a stake in the drugmaker.
The vast majority of the billionaire youths—15 of them—are from Europe. Germany has the most on the continent, with the four von Baumbachs as well as the heirs Sophie Luise Fielmann (age 30; eyeglasses), Kevin David Lehmann (22; drugstores) and Maxim Tebar (23; chainsaws). After that comes Italy, where three Del Vecchio brothers inherited part of the eyeglasses empire EssilorLuxottica. Their fortunes are all up 40%, to $6.6 billion, this year thanks to the company's soaring stock price after strong earnings growth in 2024.
Outside Europe, there are two sibling pairs in South Korea and Brazil who respectively inherited fortunes in online gaming and industrial machinery.
Then there are the only two self-made billionaires on the list. One is Australia's Ed Craven (29), who cofounded Stake.com, thought to be the world's biggest crypto-backed online casino, with $4.7 billion in revenue last year. The other is the United States' Alexandr Wang (28), who cofounded the AI data annotation unicorn Scale AI and who recently became a billionaire for the second time. Back in 2021, a $7.3 billion valuation of the company gave Wang his first go at a three-comma fortune, but he dropped off the Forbes list in 2023 amid a swath of plummeting private tech valuations. Now, thanks to a May funding round that valued Scale AI at $13.8 billion, the company—and Wang—are back.
Sophie and her older brother Marc inherited much of their late father Günther Fielmann's fortune when he died last year. Fielmann founded Fielmann AG in 1972 with the goal of bringing affordable eyeglasses to Germany. Marc co-led the company with his dad starting in 2018 and fully took over the following year. Sophie owns a third of its stock but has no role at the firm.
Andresen's fortune originally stems from the 150-year-old cigarette empire her father sold in 2005. After the sale, the family refocused on its investment firm Ferd, which has portfolios in real estate, finance and a variety of private Nordic companies. Like her sister (below), she owns a 42% stake in Ferd and sits on the board. She's also a strong supporter of LGBTQ+ rights and is an advisor for Oslo Pride.
Craven and Bijan Tehrani cofounded the online casino Stake.com, which managed to generate $4.7 billion last year even though crypto gambling is generally unavailable in the UK, U.S. and parts of Europe. Stake's popularity has blown up since the pandemic thanks in part to livestreamers filming themselves gambling on it. Now the company says it's involved in some 2% to 4% of all Bitcoin transactions.
After his father's death in 2022, Del Vecchio—and each of his six half-siblings and his mother—inherited a 12.5% stake in the family holding company that owns nearly a third of EssilorLuxottica, the world's largest eyeglasses business. Del Vecchio is EssilorLuxottica's chief strategy officer as well as the president of the iconic brand Ray-Ban.
Andresen sits with her sister (above) on the board of the investment company Ferd, which is based in the Oslo suburb of Bærum, and also owns a 42% stake. She is a three-time junior Norwegian champion in dressage horse riding but no longer competes due to spinal health problems. She's still heavily involved with horses and both owns and runs the Oslo horse-breeding stable Andresen Dressage.
He and his brother (below) inherited 4.6% stakes in the $165 billion (revenue) Mumbai-based multinational conglomerate Tata Sons after their father died in a car accident in 2022. The group, which owns 30 companies spanning everything from cars to jewelry, was founded in 1868 and currently has a presence across six continents and over 100 countries.
Wang is the world's youngest self-made billionaire thanks to his artificial intelligence unicorn Scale AI, which raised $1 billion at a $13.8 billion valuation in May. Forbes estimates that he has a 14% stake in the company, which labels the data used to train the AI for large language models (including ChatGPT) and self-driving cars. He cofounded Scale, which now counts Microsoft, General Motors and Meta among its customers, with Lucy Guo in 2016, after dropping out of MIT following his freshman year.
She and her sister (below) own 3.1% of the Brazilian electrical motor producer WEG, which their late grandfather Werner Ricardo Voigt cofounded in 1961. The siblings have no roles at the company, which produces more than 21 million electric motors every year and exports them to more than 135 countries.
While its heirs rank among the world's youngest billionaires, the German drugmaker Boehringer Ingelheim is rather ancient—it was founded in 1885, and its entrepreneurial roots stretch back even further, to 1817. The company is behind four of the 30-and-under fortunes on this list; Maximilian is the oldest among them. His siblings are below.
Mistry's father's death left him and his brother (Firoz, above) with 4.6% stakes in Tata Sons. Now he and Firoz are helping to refinance the debts of the construction company Shapoorji Pallonji Group, in which they inherited 25% ownership. In March, they secured $3.3 billion in credit for the SP Group from a slate of five private funds, including Ares Management Corp and Davidson Kempner Capital Management.
Katharina is the third-youngest inheritor of the German drugmaker Boehringer Ingelheim fortune. With three brothers, she's the only woman among its young heirs.
Tebar owes his fortune to a stake in Stihl, one of the world's leading manufacturers of chainsaws and other handheld power equipment. The company was founded in 1926 by Andreas Stihl, who built the first two-person electric chainsaw. Now it's grown to have a presence in over 160 countries, though it remains entirely family-owned.
Dassault's great-grandfather was a Holocaust survivor who invented a propeller used by the French Air Service in World War I, and founded the company that would go on to become the aerospace giant Dassault Aviation. Remi owns an estimated 4.1% stake in that business, which he inherited upon his father's death in 2021, as well as an estimated 2.5% stake in the software firm Dassault Systèmes.
He and his brother and half-brother (below and above) are the richest of the 30-and-unders, thanks to their minority stakes in the eyeglasses behemoth EssilorLuxottica. Their family holding entity Delfin also owns stakes in a variety of other companies based in Italy and France, including the bank UniCredit and the insurer Generali. He is not operationally involved with EssilorLuxottica or Delfin.
She and her sister (below) inherited approximately 9% stakes in Nexon, a South Korean-Japanese online gaming company, after the 2022 death of their father, company founder Kim Jung-ju. Nexon was a pioneer of the free-to-play gaming model and is also an industry leader of massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs.
Franz is the second-youngest heir to the Ingelheim-based German drugmaker Boehringer Ingelheim. Little is known about him or his siblings (above and below).
Lehmann inherited his fortune after his father quietly passed him a 50% stake in dm-drogerie markt, Germany's leading drugstore chain, in 2017, when Lehmann was only 14. His dad first invested in the brand in 1974, shortly after it was founded in 1973; it's since grown to own some 4,120 stores across Europe. Neither father nor son is involved with the company operations.
Though she doesn't have a role in the company, she and her sister (above) hold approximately 9% stakes in the game developer Nexon inherited through their late father. Gamers across 190-plus countries operate Nexon's slate of over 80 live games, including hits like MapleStory, KartRider and Dungeon & Fighter.
Like his siblings (above), he owes his wealth to his 12.5% ownership of the holding company Delfin, which has a stake in EssilorLuxottica, the eyeglass company behind shade offerers like Arnette, Ray-Ban and Persol. He has no role at EssilorLuxottica. He and his brother Luca (above) are the two children his late father had with the company's former head of investor relations, Sabina Grossi.
Voigt is the youngest billionaire heir of WEG cofounder Werner Ricardo Voigt and owns a 3.1% stake in the company, like her sister (above). She is currently studying psychology at university. After Forbes named her the world's youngest billionaire last year, she shared on social media that she wished to avoid attention and would keep a low profile online.
Johannes is the youngest heir to the German pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim. The family is notoriously publicity-shy, and it's unknown whether he or his three siblings (above) have any role at the company. The drugmaker has been led by a family member—Johannes' uncle, Hubertus von Baumbach—since 2015. Johannes skis competitively in Austria.