The internet has created some of the world's youngest billionaires, possibly in the shortest possible time scale, ever.
The richest are Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the pair who set up Google in the late 1990s. They went from PhD students to (paper) billionaires in about five years.
The youngest is 25-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, founder of social networking site Facebook, who has returned to the billionaire list in 2010 after dropping out in 2009 amid the economic downturn.
As part of
SuperPower
- a season of programmes exploring the power of the internet - BBC News
lists the top 26 richest internet entrepreneurs according to the latest
Forbes ranking, released this week.
| Name | Age | Comment | Worth (bn) | Nationality | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Larry Page | 37 | Co-founded Google | 17.5 | US | |
| Sergey Brin | 36 | Co-founded Google | 17.5 | US | |
| Jeff Bezos | 46 | Founded Amazon in a Seattle garage | 12.3 | US | |
| Eric Schmidt | 54 | Google's grown-up chief executive | 6.3 | US | |
| Masayoshi Son | 52 | Controls Japanese internet and telecom firm SoftBank | 5.9 | Japan | |
| Pierre Omidyar | 42 | French-born immigrant launched online auction site in 1995 | 5.2 | US | |
| Hiroshi Mikitani | 45 | Runs Japan's leading online shopping mall | 4.8 | Japan | |
| Charles Schwab | 72 | Brought online investing to the masses | 4.7 | US | |
| Mark Zuckerberg | 25 | Founded Facebook in early 2004 while at Harvard university | 4.0 | US | |
| Ma Huateng | 38 | Runs China's most popular online chat service | 3.6 | China | |
| Robin Li | 41 | Co-founded China's most popular search site Baidu | 3.5 | China | |
| Mark Cuban | 51 | Former bar tender who sold internet video website to Yahoo for 5.7bn | 2.4 | US | |
| Jeffrey Skoll | 45 | Ebay's first president and full-time employee. Now a film producer | 2.4 | Canada | |
| William Ding | 38 | Founded China's no.2 online game company. Once China's richest man | 2.2 | China | |
| Andreas von Bechtolsheim | 54 | His initial $100,000 stake in Google made him a billionaire | 2.0 | Germany | |
| David Cheriton | 58 | Stanford professor who introduced Google's co founders to each other | 1.6 | Canada | |
| Shi Yuzhu | 47 | Founder of Giant Interactive, one of China's most successful online game companies | 1.6 | China | |
| Yoshikazu Tanaka | 33 | Founded the second most popular social networking site in Japan - Gree | 1.4 | Japan | |
| David Filo | 43 | Met Yahoo co-founder Yang at Stanford University | 1.4 | US | |
| Margaret Whitman | 53 | Former eBay chief, now running for California govenor | 1.3 | US | |
| Jerry Yang | 41 | Turned internet directory project into Yahoo portal | 1.3 | US | |
| Marc Benioff | 45 | Held posts at Oracle and Apple before launching Salesforce.com | 1.3 | US | |
| Todd Wagner | 49 | Co-founded broadcast.com with friend Mark Cuban | 1.2 | US | |
| Peter Thiel | 42 | The first outside investor in Facebook 2004. He also co-founded paypal | 1.2 | US | |
| Jack Ma | 45 | Founder, chairman and chief executive of internet business Alibaba | 1.2 | China | |
| Stephen Case | 51 | Former Pizza Hut store manager who co-founded AOL | 1.1 | US |