The Most Notable New Billionaires Of 2020

Buoyed by surging stock markets in the U.S. and China and a proliferation of IPOs and reverse mergers called SPACs, more than 200 newcomers joined the ranks of Forbes’ list of billionaires in 2020. Nearly one fourth of them made their fortunes in healthcare. They range from China’s first vaping billionaires to the richly-paid founder of an e-commerce firm in the U.K. to the husband and wife behind an electric car company that has yet to produce a car—and aims to take on Tesla.

Despite the pandemic, the IPO market was hot in 2020. One driver was the sharp increase in listings of special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs — essentially blank check companies looking to acquire a business. Nearly 250 SPACs went public in 2020, according to SPACInsider. One of those, on December 3, led to Luminar Technologies’ founder and CEO Austin Russell becoming the world’s youngest self made billionaire at age 25. Russell, an optics whiz, came up with the idea for his automotive sensor company when he was just 17 and studying physics at Stanford.

Traditional IPOs with sky-high valuations drove other new fortunes. The three cofounders of restaurant delivery service DoorDash—Tony Xu, Stanley Tang and Andy Fang—all became billionaires on December 9 when their company listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange and shares surged from the $102 IPO price to $189. 

Generous rounds of venture capital funding also helped mint new billionaires in 2020. The most high profile of them are Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, the cofounders of no-fee stock trading app Robinhood , which has attracted millions of mostly millennial traders with the claim of democratizing finance. It’s been a rocky road, as Forbes reported in an investigation over the summer.  

Here are 10 of the most notable new billionaires in 2020: 

Chen Zhiping

Net worth: $15.3 billion

Citizenship: China

Source of wealth: vaping devices

Chen, age 45, has ridden a wave of demand for vaping devices. Shares of vaping device maker Smoore International Holdings, which he founded in 2009, have more than doubled since listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in July. China’s move to ban online sales of e-cigarettes in late 2019 hasn’t been a deterrent. Smoore International makes vaping devices and components for customers including RELX — one of China’s biggest brands — as well as Japan Tobacco, British American Tobacco and U.S. firm NJOY. Chen owns about 34% of Smoore International. The company’s vice general manager, Xiong Shaoming, owns about 5%, a stake worth about $2.3 billion.

Stephane Bancel

Net worth: $3.6 billion

Citizenship: France

Source of wealth: biotech

Bancel — one of 50 new healthcare billionaires in 2020 — is CEO of Boston-area biotech firm Moderna, which achieved the remarkable feat of rapidly producing a vaccine to treat Covid-19. On December 18 the company received emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, just days after the Pfizer-BioNTech team got approval for its coronavirus vaccine. Bancel, who’s been CEO of Moderna since 2011, owns about 6% of the company’s stock. He’s sold about $100 million worth of Moderna shares in 2020.

Austin Russell

Net worth: $3.3 billion

Citizenship: U.S.

Source of wealth: automotive sensors

He left Stanford to become a Thiel fellow—a program launched by billionaire Peter Thiel that pays young entrepreneurs $100,000 to drop out and pursue their startup ideas. Russell’s Luminar Technologies makes sensors to help autonomous cars “see” their surroundings by bouncing a laser beam off objects in their path. It went public via a SPAC merger in early December. Russell owns about 35% of the public company, which is expected to have 2020 revenues of $15 million. 

Dmitry Bukhman

Net worth: $3.1 billion

Citizenship: Russia

Source of wealth: online games

Bukhman, age 35, and his brother Igor, 38, own and run online gaming upstart Playrix, best known for the free mobile-app games Fishdom and Homescapes. Born and raised in northern Russia, the brothers started selling games online while Dmitry was still in high school. They founded Playrix in 2004 and have built it into a company with more than $1 billion in revenues —without the help of outside investors. Though its games are free, Playrix makes money from players’ in-app purchases. The company, headquartered in Ireland, has 2,500 employees across Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

Matt Moulding

Net worth: $3 billion

Citizenship: U.K.

Source of wealth: E-commerce 

Moulding founded Manchester based e-commerce company, The Hut Group, in 2004 and took it public as THG Holdings in September 2020. The company runs more than 150 mobile-friendly websites selling fashion, nutrition (My Protein) beauty supplies (Look Fantastic) and more, with next-day delivery to U.K. customers and sales to customers in 164 countries. In November Moulding was awarded about $1 billion in shares in the newly public company — a bonus that kicked in when the market valuation of THG reached an average of $8.6 billion over a 15 day period. The payment triggered reported criticism from a number of banks in London; Moulding and the board brought in a remuneration expert as a result.  

Tony Xu

Net worth: $2.7 billion

Citizenship: U.S.

Source of wealth: DoorDash

Xu, age 36, founded DoorDash with fellow Stanford University students Stanley Tang and Andy Fang in 2013 with the goal of providing a delivery service for restaurants. Xu was born in China but moved to the U.S. with his parents when he was five so his dad could pursue a PhD in aeronautical engineering at Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; his mother, a doctor in China, was unable to practice the U.S. so she worked three jobs for 12 years, including as a server at a local Chinese restaurant, where Xu writes that he got “a front row seat as a dishwasher.” Xu started DoorDash, he writes in the company’s prospectus, to help people like his mom. DoorDash revenue spiked during the pandemic, with more people stuck at home; its shares surged 80% the day it went public in early December. The stock has dropped about 20% since then but the company, which lost $149 million on $1.9 billion in revenue in the first nine months of 2020, still sports a whopping $45 billion market capitalization. 

Byju Raveendran and Divya Gokulnath

Net worth: $2.5 billion 

Citizenship: India

Source of wealth: education technology 

Former math teacher Raveendran, age 39, founded edtech company Byju’s in 2011. Early in 2020, Bjyu’s had 35 million students signed up for its math and science tutoring app. His wife Divya, a former student of Raveendran’s, helps run the company and sits on the board. Investors in Byju’s include Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Chinese Internet services giant Tencent Holding; in a June 2020 fundraising, investors valued Byju’s at $10 billion.

Jared Isaacman

Net worth: $2.1 billion

Citizenship: U.S.

Source of wealth: online payments

Isaacman, who’s just 38, dropped out of high school to work as a security consultant for a payments processor. He also built an online payments-processing company called Shift4Payments and managed to take it public during the pandemic. In 2011, Isaacman, who flies fighter jets for fun, founded Draken International, a defense firm that trains Air Force pilots and owns the world’s largest private fleet of military aircraft. Isaacman sold a majority stake in Draken to Wall Street firm Blackstone in 2019 for a nine-figure sum.

Geeta Gupta-Fisker and Henrik Fisker

Net worth: $1.2 billion each

Citizenship: U.K. and U.S.

Source of wealth: electric car startup

Famed car designer Henrik Fisker has mounted a comeback seven years after the collapse of his pioneering electric vehicle company. Now, with his wife Geeta Gupta-Fisker as cofounder and chief financial officer, he has engineered the public offering of their new carmaker, Fisker Inc., thanks to a SPAC in partnership with Spartan Energy, a group from private equity firm Apollo. As a result, both husband and wife are billionaires — at a company that doesn’t yet have anything to sell. Fisker Inc. is planning a battery-powered SUV called the Ocean, with production slated to start in the fourth quarter of 2022—and priced around $38,000. 

Vlad Tenev

Net worth: $1 billion

Citizenship: U.S.

Source of wealth: trading app Robinhood Financial

Tenev and his cofounder Baiju Bhatt became billionaires this year after their stock trading app, Robinhood Financial, raised $800 million from investors, valuing the company at more than $11 billion. (Each cofounder owns an estimated 10% stake in the company.) In June, Forbes reported that a 20-year-old Robinhood customer committed suicide after seeing a negative $730,000 balance on his account due to options trading. In August, Forbes spelled out in a deep dive that Robinhood was designed to profit by selling its customers’ trading data to the very sharks on Wall Street who have spent decades—and made billions—outmaneuvering investors. In mid December the Securities and Exchange Commission fined Robinhood $65 million for failing to disclose, until late 2018, its business deals with high-speed trading firms. Robinhood neither admitted nor denied the SEC charges. In a statement to Forbes, Robinhood said, “We are fully transparent in our communications with customers about our current revenue streams.”

Net worths are as of December 28, 2020.