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In January 2025, as it was gearing up to release its Claude 4 chatbot to compete with the likes of ChatGPT and Gemini, AI startup Anthropic revealed it was raising investor funding at a valuation north of $60 billion. The deal instantly made the four-year-old company one of the most valuable artificial intelligence firms on the planet -- and made all seven of its cofounders billionaires, catapulting Anthropic into another league of American companies: the billionaire factories.
Most major businesses are lucky to make one billionaire out of their founder. Some are successful enough to put a cofounder or an early investor in the three-comma club as well. A handful have even made an early employee or two super-rich. Then there are the fortunate few mega-firms that have spawned many billionaires. Among America's 680 self-made billionaires, 54 of them mainly owe their riches to one of just eight companies.
They're mostly consumer technology businesses. Some -- like Anthropic and digital advertising company AppLovin, which boasts eight billionaires -- are young upstarts whose stock has been driven through the roof by investors' AI mania over the past year. Anthropic began 2025 with a reported valuation of $18 billion; in September, the company announced a $13 billion round at a valuation of $183 billion. Shares of AppLovin, meanwhile, are up more than 1,000% since going public on the Nasdaq in 2021, including a 100% jump in 2025, putting the firm's market capitalization at nearly $250 billion.
Other kingmaker companies are household names, like Meta, Google and Microsoft. These tech giants have already been enriching their founders and major investors over decades of share price growth. Now, with the U.S. stock market at record highs -- and with these companies betting big on AI -- they largely have more, and richer, billionaires than ever before. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has long been a billionaire, but so too are an early software developer, a former CEO and, as of this year, current CEO Satya Nadella. Meta has made billionaires of Mark Zuckerberg and his cofounders, plus two former execs and three early investors.
No company has produced more U.S. billionaires than Alphabet, the parent company of Google. The search giant has created ten current billionaires since its founding in 1998, worth more than $600 billion combined: two cofounders, an ex-CEO, a current CEO and a half-dozen investors, including a Stanford professor who wrote a very early $100,000 check. Other major billionaire-producers include a cloud data storage company and two private equity titans making big investments in AI startups and data centers.
These billionaires have been building their wealth for a long time, but newfound friendships in Washington seem to have helped many of them supercharge their fortunes over the past year. More than a few of these moguls have been repeat guests at the White House, currying favor with President Donald Trump, who spent much of his first term criticizing Silicon Valley but has since buried the hatchet. At a Sept. 4 White House "tech titan" dinner, the president was flanked by billionaires behind Google, Oracle, Apple, Microsoft and Meta -- all companies that have minted multiple ten-figure fortunes.
Of course, a company becoming a billionaire factory is no guarantee of staying one. Nvidia, a poster child of the AI boom, would have qualified for this ranking of top billionaire-producing companies in October, when it briefly scraped the sky by hitting a record-breaking $5 trillion market capitalization, creating two new billionaires in the process. Yet shares have since cooled by 10%, enough to demote three people back to mere "centi-millionaire" status.
Here are the eight U.S. companies that have produced the most self-made billionaires. Data is as of December 22, 2025.
Google/Alphabet
10 billionaires · collective net worth: $618.2 billion
Larry Page (net worth: $255 billion) and Sergey Brin ($235 billion) cofounded Google in 1998, working out of late friend Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park, California. After hearing a pitch from Page and Brin on Stanford University professor David Cheriton's ($21.5 billion) front porch, Cheriton and Sun Microsystems cofounder Andreas von Bechtolsheim ($27.6 billion) famously wrote the company $100,000 checks, becoming Google's earliest angel investors. Soon, investor Kavitark Ram Shriram ($3.7 billion) put in $250,000. Then, in 1999, venture capital firms Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins bought into Google, helping eventually make VCs John Doerr ($20 billion), Mark Stevens ($10.8 billion) and Michael Moritz ($7.7 billion) billionaires. Then there are the CEOs: Eric Schmidt ($35.4 billion), who was recruited from Novell to serve as Google's second chief executive from 2001 to 2011; and Sundar Pichai ($1.5 billion), who took over as CEO in 2015.
Facebook/Meta
8 billionaires · $314 billion
In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg ($227 billion) cofounded Facebook with a handful of roommates, including Eduardo Saverin ($36.4 billion) and Dustin Moskovitz ($11.3 billion). When the company was still only a few months old, Napster founder and tech wunderkind Sean Parker ($3 billion) met with Zuckerberg and Saverin, who made him the company’s president at the age of 24. Parker owned 4% of the company when it IPO’d in 2012. Fresh off of selling his company to eBay, Paypal founder Peter Thiel ($27.5 billion) became Facebook’s first angel investor in 2004, giving the company $500,000. Jim Breyer ($3.2 billion) followed in 2005 when he led Accel Partners’ $12.7 million Series A funding round at a $98 million valuation. Around the same time, Jeff Rothschild ($3.2 billion), another venture partner at Accel, was recruited as a consultant to assist Facebook with scaling. He later became the company’s vice president of infrastructure, earning a haul of Facebook stock. Sheryl Sandberg ($2.4 billion) joined the social network in 2008 after being recruited from Google to serve as chief operating officer.
AppLovin
8 billionaires · $76.6 billion
Digital advertising firm AppLovin was founded in 2012 by Adam Foroughi ($26.5 billion), Andrew Karam ($10.5 billion) and John Krystynak ($5 billion). The same year, software engineer Vasily Shikin ($3.5 billion) joined the company as the vice president of engineering. In 2018, private equity investor Herald Chen ($2.6 billion) led KKR to invest $400 million in AppLovin. Chen joined AppLovin a year later and was awarded stock options amounting to nearly 1% of the company. Little is known about Hao Tang ($9.8 billion) and Ling Tang ($13 billion), who became major pre-IPO investors in AppLovin through shell companies. They own 4% and 5%, respectively. Eduardo Vivas ($5.7 billion) also invested before AppLovin went public in 2021 and currently owns around 2%.
Anthropic
7 billionaires · $25.9 billion
The youngest of the billionaire-producing companies, a handful of OpenAI alumni cofounded Anthropic in 2021: siblings Daniela Amodei ($3.7 billion) and Dario Amodei ($3.7 billion), plus Tom Brown ($3.7 billion), Jack Clark ($3.7 billion), Jared Kaplan ($3.7 billion), Sam Mccandlish ($3.7 billion) and Christopher Olah ($3.7 billion). It quickly joined the AI arms race, developing Claude, a chatbot to rival OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. The company hit a $60 billion-plus valuation in early 2025, putting all seven of cofounders into the three-comma club.
Blackstone
6 billionaires · $68.5 billion
Stephen Schwarzman ($48.3 billion) and Peter Peterson (d. 2018) started Blackstone Group in 1985. It began as a boutique firm advising companies on mergers and acquisitions. Jonathan Gray ($9.7 billion) joined as an asset manager fresh out of college in 1992 and is now chief operating officer. J. Tomilson Hill ($3.4 billion) joined in 1993 after being ousted as co-CEO of Lehman Brothers. Michael Chae ($1.2 billion) joined in 1997 and ran its international private equity business before being tapped to oversee the firm's finances. After trying out a few other investment firms, Joseph Baratta ($1.2 billion) joined Blackstone in 1998 and is now the asset management giant's global head of private equity. Hamilton "Tony" James ($4.8 billion), meanwhile, was recruited from Credit Suisse in 2002 to help Blackstone run its rapidly expanding private equity and asset management business.
Microsoft
5 billionaires · $290.5 billion
Hoping to capitalize on the spread of personal computers, Bill Gates ($104 billion) dropped out of Harvard to cofound Microsoft with Paul Allen (d. 2018) in 1975. Steve Ballmer ($148 billion) joined in 1980 as employee No. 30 after dropping out of Stanford’s MBA program. Ballmer served as CEO of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014. Software developer Charles Simonyi ($8.2 billion) joined Microsoft as employee No. 40 in 1981 and helped spearhead some of the most iconic software, including Word and Excel. Melinda French Gates ($29.3 billion) started at Microsoft as a product developer in 1987; she married Bill Gates in 1994; the couple divorced in 2021. Satya Nadella ($1 billion), who took over as CEO when Ballmer retired, joined the company in 1992.
Snowflake
5 billionaires · $9.2 billion
Oracle architects Benoît Dageville ($1.6 billion) and Thierry Cruanes ($1.4 billion) teamed up to found cloud services company Snowflake in 2012 and took it public in 2020. Along the way, the company has made three CEOs in a row into billionaires: Mike Speiser ($1.5 billion) was an early investor and served as founding CEO from 2012 to 2014; Bob Muglia ($1.3 billion), who had joined in 2014, took over; he handed the reins to Frank Slootman ($3.4 billion) in 2019.
Thoma Bravo
5 billionaires · $33.2 billion
Carl Thoma ($5.7 billion) started investment firm Thoma Cressey in 1998 and quickly hired a young dealmaker, Orlando Bravo ($12.8 billion), who would go on to build the firm’s software strategy.The duo split from Cressey in 2008 to form their own; software-focused investment firm Thoma Bravo.They were joined by Summit Partners and Hewlett-Packard alum Scott Crabill ($4.9 billion) in 2002.Three years later,Holden Spaht ($4.9 billion)and Seth Boro($4 .9billion )joined.Today ,all five are managing partners ofthe$181billion(AUM )firm .