Meet The World’s Youngest Self-Made Billionaire: Austin Russell | Forbes

Published 2 years ago
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After dropping out of Stanford and getting a $100,000 fellowship from Peter Thiel, Austin Russell got to work on his passion project–and now, in the blink of an eye, he’s the world’s youngest self-made billionaire.

Luminar Technologies founder and CEO Austin Russell, now 26, spent his teens doing research at University of California at Irvine’s Beckman Laser Institute. The lanky, 6-foot-4 entrepreneur dropped out of Stanford in 2012 to found laser lidar (an acronym for light, detection and ranging) startup Luminar Technologies, after getting a $100,000 fellowship from billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. Its sensors now help self-driving cars of such customers as Volvo, Toyota and Intel’s Mobileye see in 3D by bouncing laser beams off nearby objects and vehicles’ surroundings.

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The company listed on the Nasdaq via a SPAC merger with Gores Metropoulos in December 2020. Russell, who owns about one-third, became a billionaire himself–in fact, the youngest self-made billionaire in the world at just 25.

Read the full profile on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/austin-russell-youngest-self-made-billionaire-2021/#2ffcdc841fea

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