Meet Austin Russell, the newest and youngest self-made billionaire on Forbes’ 2021 list. Russell is the CEO and founder of Luminar, a company that provides laser sensor technology for self-driving cars.
Don’t be fooled by his relaxed demeanour and shaggy strawberry blonde hair and beard, this 6 foot 4 man is a human mastermind. Born on Pi Day (March 14), he grew up on Orange County’s Newport Beach shores. Earmarked as a child genius from a young age, Russell memorized the periodic table at 2 years old and rewired his Nintendo DS consul into a mobile phone at age 11. At 13 he filed his first patent for an underground water recycling sprinkler. In high school, he focused his talent by working for the University of California at Irvine’s Beckman Laser Institute. It was here that he discovered his love for lidar technology (light detection and ranging.) At age seventeen, not long after he received his driver’s license, he launched Luminar to use the lidar sensors he was developing to improve and make possible self-driving cars – in the process, saving lives by decreasing the frequency of fatal automobile accidents.
He summed up his future ambition in “When this becomes a new, modern safety technology on vehicles that are integrated on every vehicle globally produced, that’s when I’d firmly say that we’ve accomplished the goals that we set.”
Unsurprisingly he was accepted into Stanford University with a desire to continue studying and learning about lidar. Only six months into freshman year, Russell dropped out of Stanford. Early Facebook investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel provides students with a $100,000 investment to ditch school and work on their start-ups. Russell was a successful applicant and recipient of this funding, promptly dropping out to follow his pursuits.
Major automotive companies such as Volvo cars, Daimler and Intel’s Mobileye have secured prototype sensors over the past few years from Russell, ensuring his revenue growth. Luminar will likely post sales of over $25 million this year but could generate at least $1.3 billion by 2026.
Announced in August, Luminar was listed on the Nasdaq via a SPAC merger acquisition with Gores Metropoulos. The procurement resulted in lidar’s net worth bumping up to 2.4 billion dollars before trading. Russell negotiated 104.7 million shares himself which is about a third of Luminar’s outstanding equity. At the close of business on December 3, these were worth 2.4 billion dollars.
Peter Thiel describes Russell’s ownership of Luminar as “You can build a billion-dollar business, but that does not mean you can become a billionaire. It’s remarkable from a financing perspective to retain a financial stake of that size.”
Russell’s phenomenal mind and invested interest in car safety make him an admirable and successful entrepreneur who rightly deserves the title of the youngest self-made billionaire for 2021.