When Facebook went public in 2012, pricing its IPO at $38 per share, it minted several young billionaires. As the stock climbed following a lull, the increasingly valuable currency let one youthful Midas cement oligarch status on another geek, Jan Koum, the founder of WhatsApp.
That kind of phenomenal wealth creation isn't an everyday, or every-decade, occurrence, and it shows. According to a report by the wealth intelligence firm Wealth-X, half of the world's 10 richest people aged under 40 were either early employees at Facebook or had the company they founded acquired by Facebook.
The No. 1 under-40 billionaire is, of course, Zuckerberg, worth some $35.1 billion according to Wealth X. The other four are Koum ($7.7 billion), Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz ($7.7 billion), Facebook co-founder and estranged Zuckerberg roommate Eduardo Saverin ($4.4 billion), and Facebook's first president, Sean Parker ($5.2 billion).
Because Zuckerberg controls a majority of the voting power of Facebook (the company's Class B shares have 10 times the voting power of its commonly traded Class A shares), he is able to quickly make large acquisitions using the company's richly valued stock.
So, one billionaire is able to create new billionaires almost at will. When Facebook announced that it was buying WhatsApp for $19 billion early last year — turning Koum into one of the world's wealthiest people — its stock was trading near its all-time high at $68.06. It's now at $80.91.
The only comparable company in spreading the wealth around to very few young people is Microsoft, which minted three multibillionaires who between them own three major league sports teams, a bunch of cool planes, and a massive photo archive stored 220 feet underground at below-freezing temperatures.
But Bill Gates ($85 billion) was a relatively ancient 30 when the company went public, and 31 when his net worth first passed $1 billion. Paul Allen ($17.1 billion), his co-founder, left the company before its IPO, while Steve Ballmer ($20 billion) took over the company in 2000 and only left early last year.
There's really only one other path to obtaining Croesus-level wealth at an age when your back isn't always hurting for no reason, and it's the oldest method known to mankind: inheriting it.
Wealth-X said that Scott Duncan is worth $5.5 billion and Yang Huiyan is worth $5.1 billion. Duncan, 32, is one of four billionaire heirs to his father Dan Duncan's pipeline fortune, according to Forbes, while Huiyan took control from her father of the Chinese real estate developer Country Garden Holdings. The one self-made woman to make the list is Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the blood-testing company Theranos. Her net worth, according to Wealth-X, is $4.5 billion.