Forbes10 Youngest Billionaires Of 2014

  Drew Houston,
NET WORTH: $1 billionAGE: 30Dropbox cofounder and CEO Drew Houston is Silicon Valley's newest boy-wonder billionaire. Barely out of his 20s, he joins the 10-figure fortune club this year after his San Francisco-based tech company raised a new round of funding in January at a valuation just under $10 billion.  Houston (pronounced like the New York City street, not the Texas city) cofounded Dropbox, a cloud-based file-sharing service, with Arash Ferdowsi in 2007. Houston started tinkering with computers at the age of 5 and has been involved in startups since high school. Dropbox is his sixth startup. 
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Dustin Moskovitz NET WORTH: $6.8 billionAGE: 29 No longer the world's youngest billionaire, Dustin Moskovitz will turn 30 this year, a few months after Facebook celebrated its 10-year anniversary. Mark Zuckerberg's former roommate, Moskovitz helped kickstart the social network from a Harvard dorm, dropping out from school after two years to work on the venture full-time as Facebook's third employee. That decision is paying off in spades now as Facebook trades higher than ever, following a disappointing public debut in May 2012. He left Facebook in 2008 to start Asana, a software company that aims to improve how people work with project collaboration tools. His roughly 5% stake, or 95.4 million shares, in Facebook comprises the bulk of his fortune.

 Mark Zuckerberg

NET WORTH: $28.5 billionAGE: 29Facebook turned 10 this year and no one was celebrating harder than CEO Mark Zuckerberg. After seeing his company past the growing pains of a disastrous May 2012 IPO, Zuckerberg has the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company flying high. Facebook's shares are up more than 130% over the past year as of February. That's caused Zuck's net worth to more than double over the same period, even after he gifted away 18 million shares in late December. He sold more than 41 million shares and exercised 60 million options around that time as well. 


 Albert von Thurn und Taxis

NET WORTH: $1.6 billionAGE: 30Although he first appeared on Forbes's billionaire list as an 8-year-old, Albert von Thurn und Taxis, the 12th prince in his family line, officially inherited his fortune in 2001, on his 18th birthday. In June 2008, he received an M.A. in economics and theology from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. His assets include real estate, art and 36,000 hectares of woodland in Germany, one of the largest forest holdings in Europe. An eligible bachelor, he lives in the family castle in Bavaria, Schloss Emmeram, and drives race cars.

 

 Eduardo Saverin
NET WORTH: $4.1 billionAGE: 31Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin, who was born in Brazil, has been living in Singapore since renouncing his United States citizenship in 2012. He still owns 2.2%, or about 53 million shares, of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based social networking company. The climb in the value of Facebook shares has added nearly $2 billion to Saverin's net worth since last year. He rarely makes media appearances and now spends his time as an angel investor. "My life is not about creating another Facebook," he said at a Wall Street Journal conference in Singapore last year 

 

 

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Yang Huiyan NET WORTH: $6.9 billionAGE: 32China's richest woman Yang Huiyan is vice chairman of real estate developer Country Garden. She was given her father's stake in Country Garden before the company's initial public offering in 2007, the same year that she topped Forbes' list of China's richest with a net worth of $16 billion.

 

 Fahd Hariri

NET WORTH: $1.2 billionAGE: 33Fahd Hariri is the youngest son of slain Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. He graduated from the Ecole Spéciale d'Architecture de Paris in 2004. While still a student, he ran an interior design studio on the outskirts of the city and sold furniture to clients in Saudi Arabia. While he reportedly hasn't set foot in Beirut since his father's assassination in 2005, he develops residential buildings there and credits his father for his love of real estate development.

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Sean Parker NET WORTH: $2.6 billionAGE: 34In June, Napster founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker wed singer Alexandra Lenas in a lavish ceremony in the forest in Big Sur, California with guests wearing outfits created by Hollywood costume designer Ngila Dickson. The $4.5 million wedding generated headlines for its Lord of the Rings-inspired outfits and Parker's settlement with the California Coastal Commission for alleged environmental damage--Parker paid a $1 million fee on behalf of the Ventana Inn (owner of the venue) for lacking proper permits, and threw in an additional $1.5 million donation to the Coastal Commission. Parker insists not a single tree was harmed. At 19, he disrupted the music industry with file-sharing service Napster and made billions as Facebook's first president.

Robert Pera NET WORTH: $2.7 billionAGE: 35Robert Pera returns to the list after a one-year hiatus thanks to stellar performance from his Ubiquiti Networks, which surged nearly 192% in the past year and now has a market cap of $4.6 billion. He first became a billionaire after Ubiquiti, a software and systems communications technology company focused on emerging markets, went public in Oct. 2011. The stock tanked in 2012 amid Wall Street skepticism and a problem with Chinese criminals counterfeiting the company's products. A Shenzen court, with help from Ubiquiti, recently sentenced one of the operation's ring leaders to five years in prison. Pera started out as a hardware engineer with Apple in 2003, but after just two years he left the company to start his own, later saying, "Apple is a great company, but I realized I wanted to have more success faster."

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 Ayman Hariri
NET WORTH: $1.2 billionAGE: 35Ayman Hariri is the son of slain Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. He's involved in running Saudi Oger, one of Saudi Arabia's biggest construction companies and the source of the Hariri family fortune. Oger was part of a venture that won a $653 million contract in January 2013 to build a local branch of the Jean Nouvel-designed Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi. Oger's other interests include telecommunications; it has a major stake in Turk Telekom