Jonathan Small
June 11, 2026
The first wave of AI billionaires — Jensen Huang , Sam Altman and their ilk — built chips, data centers and LLMs . The second wave is different. According to Bloomberg , 19 new AI billionaires emerged in the past year, worth a combined $59.3 billion, and most of them got rich by applying AI to industries that already existed.
One is a published poet who built an AI assistant for doctors now used in more than 100 million patient meetings. Another bootstrapped a data-labeling company to $1 billion in annual revenue without taking a single dollar of outside funding. Three have no college degrees. One pleaded guilty to a federal felony.
The newcomers are targeting law, healthcare, customer service and software development — sectors where AI can automate expensive professional work at scale. The first wave built the engine. The second wave is driving it somewhere.
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