whos

The Forbes Millionaires List of 2026 added 45 new names of millionaires. What is relevant about these new incorporations is the origin of their fortune: it comes from companies related, directly or indirectly, to the rise of AI. The most surprising thing about this new list of new millionaires is that, just a year ago, practically no one knew who they were. Today, the combined fortune of this group of AI billionaires exceeds $2.9 trillion. If this small group of visionaries formed a country, it would be the fifth largest economy in the world. Jensen Huang: the man in the leather jackets. Jensen Huang began his career washing dishes at a Denny’s for less than three dollars an hour. In 1993 co-founded NVIDIA and for two decades it opted for GPUs for video games. Then AI came along and turned NVIDIA upside down. All models in the world needed their chips. Suddenly, NVIDIA had become the main engine of a great expanding industry and Huang in its main director. Huang’s fortune is around 166 billion dollarsand NVIDIA is worth more than five billion in the stock market, making it the most expensive company in the world. 97% of the CEO’s assets are in shares of the company itself, so his personal fortune is closely linked to NVIDIA obtaining good results. If the AI ​​craze cools, its fortunes will fade at the same rate. But for now, Huang is the only shovel seller in the biggest gold rush of technological history. Alexandr Wang: the child prodigy of Los Alamos. Alexandr Wang was barely unknown three years ago. This 29-year-old was born in the same town where Oppenheimer built the atomic bomb. His parents were physicists and he dropped out of MIT in his first year. At the age of 19, he founded Scale AI, a company that data label to train AI models. The most invisible job in the development of AI and, according to himself, the most necessary. At 24 years old he was already the youngest billionaire of the world. At 28, Meta bought 49% of Scale AI for 14.3 billionwhich gave him the label of “AI whiz kid“Wang went on to lead Mark Zuckerberg’s AI strategy with a clear goal: build Meta superintelligence from the ground up. The company he led already has his first modelcalled Muse Spark. His alliance with Mark Zuckerberg has skyrocketed his personal wealth, which is now around 3.2 billion dollars. Dario Amodei: the one who builds what he fears most. Dario Amodei was vice president of research at OpenAI. One day he decided that he did not agree with the AI ​​development guidelines, considering that the technology he was helping to create it was dangerous. His sister Daniela He also did not agree and both resigned from their positions at the company that created ChatGPT. Together they founded Anthropic, which in May 2026 closed a round of 65 billion and reached a valuation of 965,000 million. Amodei wrote a 15,000 word essay where he argues that AI can cure cancer and reverse climate change. He wrote it while designing security systems so that the same AI would not do just the opposite. Dario’s personal fortune is around $15.5 billion. according to Forbes. Amodei has become a millionaire by building something that he considers a real threat…and is not the only one. Sam Altman: the “rara avis” of Silicon Valley. Sam Altman has led OpenAI since its founding with Elon Musk. According to what he said Bloombergin June 2026, the company filed the documentation for its IPO with the SEC with a valuation of 852,000 million. However, according to his own statements, his annual salary It is $76,001. And he doesn’t have a single share in the company. Its co-founders accumulate between 30,000 and 35,000 million each. He Altman’s personal wealth is around 3.5 billion, thanks to investments on Reddit, Stripe or Airbnb that you did before OpenAI existed. He built the most influential company of the decade and was left without part of the cake. Whether it was a mistake or a calculated move ahead of the IPO is the most interesting question in the entire industry. The second wave of millionaires has already arrived. The 45 new billionaires that Forbes included in its latest fortune compilation are not all from OpenAI or NVIDIA. There is a second wave of founders who apply AI to specific sectors: law, medicine, code. AI for lawyers Harvey automates legal investigation with a valuation of 11,000 million. Mercor recruits with AI and went from 100 to 1,000 million in revenue in one year. Edwin Chen founded Surge AI and debuted on Forbes with 18 billion. almost no one knows who. He Bloomberg index documents 19 new AI millionaires in the last year alone, with a combined wealth of 59.3 billion. We are no longer talking about chips or large general models, but about founders of small startups who have developed AI tools with real clients and income statements that they don’t stop growing. In Xataka | We already know who has won the AI ​​race: the OpenAI employees who sold their shares Image | Scale AI, Brendan Foody, Wikimedia Commons