Snapchat cofounder Evan Spiegel is the world’s youngest self-made billionaire and subsequently the world’s youngest male self-made billionaire if gender is being taken into account. He will turn 26 in June of this year and is said to have a personal net worth of more than $2 billion dollars. This is estimated due to his 13 percent shareholding in the company he founded. Elizabeth Holmes is the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire and just turned 32 years old this past February. She is the sole founder of Theranos, a bio-tech company that aims to make clinical blood testing less expensive for the average person. Her estimated net worth is approximately $3.6 billion dollars, as she holds a 50 percent shareholder stake in her company.
Both of these young self-made billionaires are coincidentally Stanford University dropouts, but that is where the similarities end. Spiegel is a former frat house member who studied product design in college. He networked his way into meeting influential people in the technology industry before starting up Snapchat with cofounder Bobby Murphy. Holmes, on the other hand, studied chemical engineering before she founded her company, was a President’s Scholar her freshman year and even spent a summer working on SARS research in Singapore.
For more on the differences between the two billionaires, their rise to the top and the traits that got them there, have a look at this infographic produced by the Brighton School of Business and Management.
