#California techies dominate our first ever list of the nation’s most successful young entrepreneurs, reaffirming the American Dream and proving yet again that there is no better way right now to get rich fast than to go west and convince venture investors to back your most ambitious ideas. Some will fail but those who succeed can do so fantastically, regardless of age. In fact, of the 40 most successful under age 40, all of whom have net worths of $400 million or more, 39 are men, 34 made their money in the tech sector, and 33 live in California. Twenty-one are billionaires. And many either created or work for some of today’s hottest tech companies, including Uber, AirBnB, Fitbit, GitHub, Instacart and Pinterest.Samsung BusinessVoice
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Eight of the nation’s wealthiest entrepreneurs under 40 can trace their wealth back to Facebook, including the three richest and the group’s youngest. Mark Zuckerberg leads the pack with a net worth of $47.1 billion, more than four times as much as the second person in the ranks, his cofounder and college pal, Dustin Moskovitz. At number 3 is Jan Koum, who came to America at age 16 and got an apartment through government housing. He started WhatsApp, now the world’s biggest mobile messaging service with 800 million users in 2009 and sold it to Facebook for about $22 billion in cash and stock in 2014.  The list’s youngest member is Palmer Luckey. He was just 21 years old when he sold his virtual reality equipment company, Oculus, to Facebook for $2.3 billion in July 2014. Luckey, who still works at Oculus but has no job title, still lives with six roommates with whom he likes to play videogames, despite a recent net worth of $700 million. Luckey is one of half a dozen in the ranks who are still in their 20s.
Only 2 of those, though, are billionaires, Snapchat’s founders Evan Spiegel (who is dating former Victoria Secret’s model Miranda Kerr) and Bobby Murphy, who famously turned down a $3 billion offer from Facebook back in late 2013. Less than two years later, the company raised $538 million in new funding in May, reportedly valuing the company at about $16 billion. Now just months later, there are reports that one of its investors, Fidelity, wrote down the value of its investment by 25% in November. Agencies
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