Thirty-five billionaires under thirty, $92.4 billion between them, and a record twelve who built it themselves. The youngest of all is a 20-year-old holding two per cent of a Brazilian maker of electric motors.
The 35 youngest people on Forbes’ 2026 billionaires list are worth $92.4 billion between them, down from the $152.3 billion held by the 35 youngest members of last year’s list.
Every figure below comes from Forbes’ World’s Youngest Billionaires feature, published on 10 March 2026 and calculated on wealth as of 1 March 2026, unless another source is named in the sentence. Where Forbes has not published a current number and secondary aggregators have filled the gap, the aggregator is named and the older Forbes figure sits beside it. Ages are as reported. Nothing here has been estimated, rounded or inferred by us; where a number rests on a single source, we say so.
$92.4bn
That is the combined wealth of everyone who reached ten digits before thirty. Forbes counts 35 of them, which it notes is one per cent of the planet’s 3,428 billionaires, up 0.4 per cent on 2025. A record 12 are self-made.
Which leaves the majority who are not. The under-30 list is, structurally, an inheritance document with a technology annexe attached, and the annexe is the part that changes every year.
2%
Amelie Voigt Trejes, 20, owns roughly two per cent of WEG, the Brazilian industrial machinery company cofounded in 1961 by her grandfather, Werner Ricardo Voigt, who died in 2016. Forbes names her the world’s youngest billionaire; the aggregator Businesstats puts the stake at about $1.1 billion.
She is not the eldest child in her own household, or even close. Her twin brothers, Pedro and Felipe Voigt Trejes, are also on the list and both are older than she is. The data site Voronoi lists the three of them as cousins of Dora and Lívia Voigt de Assis, two more WEG-linked billionaires from the same family.
Two per cent of a company that makes electric motors, and she outranks everyone.
7 weeks
The margin by which Amelie Voigt Trejes displaced Johannes von Baumbach. Forbes reports she is seven weeks younger than the German pharmaceutical heir, who held the title in 2025 at 19 and is now second youngest.
His fortune comes from Boehringer Ingelheim, founded in 1885 and the largest privately owned pharmaceutical company in the world. Forbes’ 2025 estimate valued Johannes and his three siblings, Maximilian, Katharina and Franz, at $5.4 billion each; several secondary aggregators citing Forbes now put each of them nearer $6.6 billion, a figure Forbes itself has not published in that form. The family has been led since 2015 by their uncle, Hubertus von Baumbach, the first family member in the chief executive’s office in 25 years. Whether any of the four siblings has a role at the company is unknown.
TimesLIVE, reporting the 2025 crowning, put the privacy at its plainest:
> Johannes himself remains a somewhat elusive figure, with no photographs of the young billionaire available publicly.
Forbes Australia reported one detail about him: he skis competitively in Austria.
12.5%
Clemente Del Vecchio and his brother Luca, born in 2001, each hold a 12.5 per cent stake in Delfin, the Luxembourg holding company through which the family controls EssilorLuxottica. They are two of the six children Leonardo Del Vecchio left when he died on 27 June 2022, aged 87, with a fortune Forbes estimated at $25.5 billion and heirs ranging in age from 18 to 65. Business Today and other 2026 aggregator estimates put the brothers near $6.6 to $6.8 billion each.
The interesting thing about a ranking sorted by birthday is what it hides. Two of the wealthiest Del Vecchio siblings never appear on an under-30 list at all: Leonardo Maria, 31, EssilorLuxottica’s chief strategy officer and one of only two heirs working in the business, whom Forbes valued at around $7.5 billion in December 2025; and Claudio, the eldest, at around $7.1 billion in February 2026. The stakes are comparable. The candles are not.
$33.4bn
ValueAdd VC, which breaks down the Forbes list, calculates that the EssilorLuxottica and Boehringer Ingelheim heirs alone account for $33.4 billion of the cohort’s total, and that the five wealthiest people under thirty are all heirs, drawn from just two European family fortunes.
Roughly a third of the money on a list that celebrates youth comes from spectacle frames and pharmaceuticals, held by two families who between them have been compounding since 1885 and 1961. The remaining two-thirds is spread across thirty people, several of whom coded something last year.
$1.5bn
Kim Jung-youn is 22. Her father, Kim Jung-ju, founded Nexon in Korea in 1994 and died on 28 February 2022, aged 54, while travelling in Hawaii. Silicon Valley Weekly reports that Forbes recorded her net worth at $1.5 billion as of 12 April 2026, a figure we have found in that one source.
The same report sets out what happened in between. She and her older sister, Jung-min, each inherited stakes in NXC, Nexon’s holding company, worth about $2.5 billion. South Korea’s inheritance tax brought the estimated net worth down to about $1 billion at the time. Neither sister holds an active role in the firm’s daily management, and both stay out of view.
A fortune that halved on the way through the tax code, then grew back by half again in four years.
$2.2bn
Surya Midha, Brendan Foody and Adarsh Hiremath are each 22 and each worth $2.2 billion, according to Forbes, on the strength of Mercor, the AI recruiting startup that private investors valued at $10 billion last autumn. Midha is a couple of months younger than his two cofounders, which makes him the youngest self-made billionaire on the list. Forbes notes that the trio are the youngest self-made billionaires ever to appear on it, beating Mark Zuckerberg, who debuted at 23.
There is also a new youngest self-made woman: Launa Lopes Lara, 29, a former ballerina and MIT graduate from Brazil who cofounded the prediction market firm Kalshi. Forbes reports that her cofounder, Mansour, grew up in Lebanon and taught himself English while studying for the SATs, and that the two met at MIT.
The self-made dozen arrive with biographies. The heirs arrive with percentages.
1961
WEG was cofounded in Brazil that year by Werner Ricardo Voigt. In the same year, in Italy, a 25-year-old named Leonardo Del Vecchio founded Luxottica.
Sixty-five years later, both decisions are still producing billionaires who were not born when the founders were at their peak, and both companies now sit near the top of a list about people in their early twenties. The 2026 under-30 ranking is, in two of its most valuable entries, a report on what two young men did in 1961.
1 March 2026
The date all of this was frozen. Forbes calculates the wealth on 1 March and publishes ten days later, which means the entire ranking is a photograph of one morning’s share prices and one morning’s birthdays.
That is why the obvious question, who will be the world’s youngest billionaire next year, has such a dull answer: whoever is youngest and still above ten digits on 1 March 2027. Nobody has to do anything. Amelie Voigt Trejes will be 21, her two per cent of WEG will be worth whatever a Brazilian motor company is worth that morning, and the four von Baumbach siblings will be a year further into a fortune that began in 1885.
The list resets. The stakes do not.
