(White Plains, New York, U.S., 41 years old)
CEO of Meta Platforms

He founded Facebook in 2004 in a Harvard dorm room and has since dominated the social lives of more than a quarter of the world’s population. Through algorithms, he influences their tastes and moods. His operation was sealed with the acquisitions of Instagram (2012) and WhatsApp (2014). He tried to buy Snapchat, but when its owner resisted, he shamelessly copied it, filling Instagram with filters that add dog ears and cat noses. When TikTok burst onto our screens with its voracious algorithm and addictive short videos, Zuckerberg “took inspiration” and created Instagram Reels.

His fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, stands at $236 billion. In October 2024, he became the third-richest person in the world. Today, he is betting big on augmented reality and artificial intelligence.

He continues to meddle in our social lives; recently, he said Americans were unhappy because, on average, they had only three friends, while science suggests the optimal number for near happiness is 15. Following this, he announced plans to address this shortfall with synthetic friends — capable of giving love and companionship — with a huge advantage over human friends: they never get tired and continuously adapt to fit in. What could possibly go wrong?

Since his Harvard days, his self-image has grown alongside his fortune. At Meta’s 2024 conference, he revealed himself as an obsessive fan of the Roman Empire and appeared wearing a black T-shirt that read “Aut Zuck Aut Nihl” (Zuck or nothing), his take on the Latin phrase “Caesar or nothing.”

He has three children with pediatrician Priscilla Chan, his lifelong partner and wife, and has built a luxury bunker in Hawaii.

(Yongding, China, 42 years old)
Founder of ByteDance (parent company of TikTok and Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok)

Even his name, Zhang Yiming, heralds arrival and light. According to the South China Morning Post, it is inspired by the old proverb: “Surprising everyone with a first attempt.” The creator of TikTok is the richest person in China, with a fortune that reached 350 billion yuan (approximately $49.15 billion) by the end of 2024. He has changed the rules of global entertainment, shortened our attention span, and tested our tolerance for novelty and constant dopamine hits.

His first product was Toutiao, a news aggregator, and in 2016 he launched Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. In 2021, he stepped down as CEO of ByteDance, but still holds 22% of its shares. His employees — even those who no longer work for him — speak of his skill in exercising soft power. He is an avid reader of biographies and savvy enough to avoid conflicts with the Chinese Communist Party. He is married to a classmate whom he used to help with computer problems.

(Mobile, U.S., 64 years old)
CEO of Apple

Tim Cook faces two main challenges in his legacy: not being part of Apple’s founding myth and stepping into the shoes of Steve Jobs, a Silicon Valley legend. His strategy has been to maintain a low profile and show great adaptability navigating successive waves of woke and conservative cultures. The one thing he has firmly embraced is being the first openly gay tech magnate.

Behind the scenes, Cook replaced Jobs’s micromanagement style with a more collaborative approach. Between 2011 and 2020, he doubled the company’s profits. In recent years, he has quietly implemented a strategy to shift iPhone manufacturing from China to India.

He was a generous donor to the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and also donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s 2025 campaign.

An enthusiast of fitness, hiking, and cycling, Cook’s net worth is estimated at $2.2 billion. He does not have a publicly confirmed partner.

(Chicago, United States, 40 years old)
CEO of OpenAI

Perhaps the best-known face in the artificial intelligence industry thanks to ChatGPT, which now boasts 800 million weekly active users — about 10% of the world’s population. In May 2023, he testified before the U.S. Congress calling for regulation of AI — a debate that two years later seems stalled with little actual regulation.

He quietly entered the ranks of the ultra-wealthy — his salary is around $65,000 plus bonuses and stock — but according to a Wall Street Journal investigation, his net worth of over $2.8 billion comes from investments in third-party companies like Airbnb, Soylent, and Pinterest.

Since January 2024, he has been married to Oliver Mulherin, an Australian AI engineer. “My kids will never be smarter than AI,” Altman said recently on his company’s official podcast. He added that for future generations, it won’t be a problem to be the least intelligent in the room: “They will use it incredibly naturally and look back at this like a very prehistoric time period.” Altman believes in artificial intelligence so deeply that he even relies on its guidance to care for his baby and manage his anxieties as a first-time father.

Unlike some other geniuses on this list, Altman is not lacking in social skills. Those who know him call Altman “a monster of empathy.” Karen Hao, the author of the book Empire of AI, explains: “What I realized over time talking with so many people, some of whom love him, some of whom hate him, is that if you believe or if you align with his view of the world and his vision […] he is the greatest asset ever to have in your corner. He will persuade whoever needs to be persuaded.”

(Albuquerque, United States, 61 years old)
Founder and CEO of Amazon. Owner of Blue Origin and The Washington Post

A seasoned Silicon Valley oligarch, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 after graduating from Princeton University and working on Wall Street. Amazon has since monopolized online retail, reshaping consumer habits and the business landscape. As a bright child, Bezos once dismantled his crib with a screwdriver to show his parents he wanted to sleep in a bed.

His dream has always been to orbit the Earth with a network of hotels and theme parks — a childhood fantasy he’s working to realize through Blue Origin, a space exploration company he launched in 2000 to develop commercial spacecraft. Bezos’s interplanetary ambitions also explain his recent reconciliation with Donald Trump, after years of bitter public disputes.

His fortune is estimated at over $200 billion, with experts calculating that he would have to spend a million dollars a day for 548 years to go broke. After an expensive divorce from his first wife, MacKenzie Scott, Bezos has found love again with Lauren Sánchez. He has four children from his first marriage.

(Madurai, India, 53 years old)
CEO of Google and Alphabet

Sundar Pichai is the highest-ranking tech professional of Indian origin in the elite technology world. He is the mastermind behind the success of Google Drive and Google Chrome. Since becoming CEO in 2015, Google’s stock value has increased by more than 400%, fueled by advances in cloud computing and artificial intelligence.

His childhood was challenging. Pichai grew up with his parents and brother in a small apartment without a TV and sometimes without running water. He studied Metallurgical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, where he earned scholarships to attend Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Pichai has kept a low public profile, making his attendance at Trump’s inauguration — and even more so his visit to Mar-a-Lago — quite surprising. So far, his company remains the only major tech firm that is resisting the reactionary trend of rolling back diversity hiring initiatives.

He is married to Anjali Pichai, and they have two children.

(Pretoria, South Africa, 53 years old)
CEO of Tesla, founder of SpaceX, co-founder of Neuralink, and owner of X

After a brief but intense political stint as head of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk returned to his companies with a few million dollars less, a new adversary — Donald Trump — and mounting pressure from shareholders, especially those of Tesla, who witnessed the world’s most coveted car become a fascist symbol in less than five months.

Nonetheless, he remains the richest man in the world, with Forbes estimating his net worth at $424 billion as of May 2025. Musk holds three citizenships: South African, Canadian, and American. He learned to program at age 10 and designed a video game at 12. His first fortune came from the sale of PayPal, which he co-founded and where he was the largest shareholder. Since then, he has pursued his obsessions — one of them being traveling to Mars — through SpaceX.

He invested some of his fortune to create Tesla and Neuralink, a company aiming, in Musk’s words, to “achieve a symbiosis” between the human brain and artificial intelligence to remain relevant in a future dominated by intelligent machines.

Months before Donald Trump’s candidacy, Musk bought Twitter for several million above its value and entered its San Francisco headquarters carrying a bathroom sink, announcing the “cleanup” that followed days later. He laid off 80% of employees, rebranded the platform as X, and changed the algorithm to favor extreme creators.

Musk has at least 14 children, three divorces, and several partners, including actress Amber Heard. Bullied as a child, he told journalist Neil Strauss: “Going to sleep alone kills me.”

(Wuchuan, China, 40 years old)
Founder of DeepSeek

A complete unknown until January 20, when he shook the stock markets with DeepSeek, a Chinese-origin chatbot that displaced ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app in the United States. This catapulted him to billionaire status and caused Nvidia’s stock to plunge by 17% — all within 24 hours.

The platform has been presented as a low-cost alternative to ChatGPT, built with reportedly one-third of the budget of its competitors. Since 2021, Liang had been quietly accumulating Nvidia chips (between 10,000 and 50,000, according to MIT Technology Review) for an anonymous project, just before the U.S. restricted sales to China.

Little is known about this electronics engineer from southern China, who graduated from Zhejiang University. Discreet and somewhat scruffy, those who have worked with him describe him more as a “geek than a boss.” He has experience in finance and is the CEO of High-Flyer, a company that uses AI to make investment decisions. It’s said he pays the highest salaries in the AI industry — and that’s saying a lot.

(Boston, U.S., 64 years old)
Co-founder and CEO of Netflix

Legend has it that after paying a $40 late fee for returning a video rental, Reed Hastings co-founded Netflix with Marc Randolph. His partner, however, offers a different story, saying the platform was born from the idea of creating “an Amazon of something.” It was 1998.

Before Netflix, Hastings spent a year teaching in Swaziland with the U.S. Peace Corps and another year selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door.

Hastings is a magnate with a strong philanthropic profile. Recently, he donated $50 million to his alma mater, Bowdoin College (Maine), where he graduated in Mathematics in 1983. The donation funds the Hastings Initiative, which studies the risks and benefits of AI from a humanistic perspective.
He is the architect behind Netflix’s successful aging, integrating AI into the platform to optimize streaming and recommendations—a strategy crucial to the company’s growth. His net worth exceeds $2 billion. He is married to Patricia Quillin, and they have two children together.

He is the architect behind Netflix’s continued success, integrating AI into the platform to optimize streaming and recommendations — a strategy crucial to the company’s growth. His net worth exceeds $2 billion. He is married to Patricia Quillin, and they have two children together.

(Frankfurt, Germany, 57 years old)
Co-founder of PayPal and Palantir

He is the prophet of technocapitalism. Thiel graduated in Law from Stanford University. He co-founded PayPal with Elon Musk, took it public, and sold it to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. In 2004, he became one of Facebook’s early investors. He also co-founded Palantir, a company that provides software to the Pentagon — a commercial relationship that has reinforced one of his core libertarian ideas: the state ceases to be an obstacle when it becomes a client. According to Forbes, his net worth is around $20.9 billion.

Currently, his investments focus on longevity. He supports experiments led by English gerontologist Aubrey de Grey (who wears a bracelet with instructions on how to cryopreserve his body upon death) and is one of the backers of the trials at Próspera, on the Honduran island of Roatán, where he himself receives follistatin injections to increase red blood cells and muscle mass.

René Girard, author of the theory of mimetic desire, is his philosophical guide: “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.” This is the theoretical foundation of “likes” on social media.

Son of German immigrants, Thiel has been a key supporter of U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, and has helped unify the oligarchy around the new administration. Journalist Max Chafkin, author of The Contrarian, an unauthorized biography of Thiel, describes him as “a dangerous guy,” a defender of “strange and new ideas” because, he insists, that is what the future demands.

Since 2017, he has been married to Matt Danzeisen, a portfolio manager at Thiel Capital.

(Stockholm, Sweden, 42)
Founder of Spotify

The Swedish tech millionaire has forever changed the music industry, creating some winners but many losers along the way. At the very least, he got a lot of people to start paying for music again. He started his first business at 14, designing websites from his bedroom. At 16, he applied for a job at Google but was rejected because he was underage. Frustrated and angry, he decided to compete by creating his own search engine, which he launched online unfinished and as open source so more experienced developers could help finish it.

The idea for Spotify came to him in 2022 after Napster shut down, as illegal music download sites began to spread. Ek realized there was only one way to fight piracy: create something better than piracy itself, one that fairly compensates creators. That’s how Spotify was born in 2008, one of the few platforms that reached the U.S. long after becoming popular in Europe. In 2016, he married Sofia Levander, his lifelong partner, and they have two children. In 2017, Billboard named him the most powerful person in the music industry.

(Singapore, 42 years old)
CEO of TikTok

The discreet and low-profile successor to Zhang Yiming has found himself at the center of controversy over concerns about TikTok’s impact on the mental health of young people. Hardly anyone had seen his face until he was called to testify before the U.S. House of Representatives about the app’s data privacy and security practices and allegations of alleged ties to the Beijing government.

On at least one occasion, he had to insist that he is not Chinese but Singaporean. Despite his efforts, Trump signed an executive order to ban TikTok, although he has continued to extend the deadline for its sale. Perhaps for this reason, the tech leader was also seen at Trump’s presidential inauguration.

He has studied internationally, attending universities in London and the United States. Little is known about his actual power within the platform. According to a profile published by The New York Times, former TikTok executives said his decision-making power was “limited” and that ByteDance’s founder still held the reins of the company.

(Tainan, Taiwan, 62 years old)
Founder of Nvidia

“Huang is the man of the hour. The year. Maybe even the decade,” says Wired magazine. Investment analyst Jim Cramer from CNBC even claims Huang is more visionary than Elon Musk. The truth is, Huang bet on an industry and market that didn’t exist in 1993 — and helped bring both to life.

He embodies the American Dream: a Taiwanese immigrant who started washing dishes at a Denny’s in Portland at age 15 and ended up creating a multimillion-dollar company with two friends over breakfast at another Denny’s in San Jose.

Huang studied Electrical Engineering at Oregon State University, where he met his two future partners and his wife — one of only three women enrolled in the program. He graduated in 1984, went on to earn a master’s degree from Stanford University, and worked for several tech companies before quitting everything to found Nvidia in 1993.

Before starting the company, the three founders asked themselves three questions: Would we love doing this work? Is it worthwhile? Is it really hard? Huang says he still asks himself those same questions today.

His work philosophy is built on betting on important things even before a market exists. “The importance of the work is an early indicator of the future market,” he said in a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

In June 2024, Nvidia’s market value surpassed $2.5 trillion, making it the third most valuable company in the world — ahead of Alphabet (Google), Amazon, and Meta, and trailing only Microsoft and Apple.

The company’s rapid surge in value is explained by the AI frenzy. Nvidia supplies over 70% of the chips powering this technology. A New Yorker article summed it up perfectly: “There’s an AI war, and Nvidia is the only arms dealer.”

(Los Alamos, United States, 28 years old)
Founder of Scale AI

At his peak, he was considered the youngest self-made billionaire in the world. However, when the markets contracted in 2022, he dropped off the list. His company, Scale AI, which specializes in data labeling, works with giants like OpenAI and Google and is valued at $14 billion. He is the new prodigy of the industry, with everyone watching his moves closely.

This year, he announced a deal with the U.S. Department of Defense to use his company’s AI models in military applications. Wang has stated in an interview that he will only have children once brain-computer interfaces allow kids to connect with technology from birth. He considers the first seven years of life crucial for brain development and prefers that children spend this time connected to a machine. Rumor has it that Meta recently hired him. His net worth is estimated at $2 billion.

(Leningrad, Russia, 40 years old)
Founder of Telegram

Known as the Russian Mark Zuckerberg for his tech profile, fortune, and age, Pavel has created not one but two major social networks: VKontakte, Russia’s largest, which he founded at 22, and Telegram, one of the world’s most widely used communication platforms.

He lives in Dubai, where Telegram’s offices are located. Pavel studied Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at Saint Petersburg State University. He avoids the spotlight and interviews, earning a reputation for austerity and discipline.

According to the book The Russian Jesus: A Beacon of Digital Freedom in an Age of Surveillance, he abstains from alcohol, caffeine, and processed foods, following a strict regimen to promote mental clarity and physical health. He has five children from two previous relationships and recently revealed that he is a sperm donor. Forbes estimates his personal fortune at $15.5 billion.