Artificial intelligence billionaires are emerging as a new jet-setting elite, golfing with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, cruising on yachts and flying private jets while building sprawling mansions in Palm Beach, Miami and Hawaii. UN Trade and Development projects the global AI market will reach $4.8 trillion by 2033, a 25-fold increase in a decade, and the wealth generated is fuelling a lifestyle boom to rival the dot-com era. San Francisco's housing market has been supercharged in the process, with the median sale price in the city hitting a record $1.76 million as of May 2026.
The OpenAI investor dating a tennis star
Ian Hathaway began his career as an economist before joining the OpenAI Startup Fund in 2021, taking over as its head from CEO Sam Altman in 2024. The $175 million fund backs early-stage AI startups in fields including healthcare, law, education and energy. Before OpenAI, Hathaway worked at San Francisco seed-stage firm Haystack, an early investor in Instacart, Doordash, HashiCorp, Wag and Carta. In June he was named to Global Corporate Venturing's 2026 Powerlist of 100 figures shaping corporate venturing.
Weeks later, Hathaway was photographed with former tennis star Eugenie Bouchard on a trip to Lake Como. The pair were seen hand in hand on a stroll after spending time together in the pool at the luxury resort Villa D'Este, with the 32-year-old Canadian dressed in a cream minidress.
The outing came after Bouchard, who retired from professional tennis in 2025 following the Canadian Open, completed a well-received debut as a broadcaster at Wimbledon. She shared photos and videos from the Italian trip on Instagram, though Hathaway did not appear in her posts.
The world's youngest self-made female billionaire
Lucy Guo, a college dropout, has an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion after cofounding data-labelling company Scale AI with Alexander Wang in 2016. She left the business in 2018 while keeping most of her stake and made Forbes' 30 Under 30 list the same year. In 2022 she founded Passes, a platform connecting influencers and celebrities with fans, raising $50 million from investors. In 2025 she unseated Taylor Swift as the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire, at age 31.
Guo owns three properties: a newly built mansion in LA's Hollywood Hills overlooking the Sunset Strip for nearly $30 million, complete with a cantilevered glass living room, infinity pool, sunken fire pit and 5,000-square-foot garden; a $6.7 million condo in Florida; and a $4.2 million farmhouse-style home in LA. She shares glamorous images with her 208,000 Instagram followers of parties, DJ sets and private jets.
"Honestly, I still feel the same as that little girl, like my life pre-money and post-money, it hasn't really changed that much," Guo told CNBC Make It. "I still find deals like I pretty much only order buy-one-get-one-free on Uber Eats." She told Fortune, "I've never really had a real vacation. Even when I'm on vacation I'm working at least eight hours per day." Guo trains at Barry's Bootcamp twice a day and in April 2025 marked her 3,000th class, crediting discipline over sleep.
The AI mogul's record divorce
Chey Tae-won is chairman of SK Group, one of South Korea's largest conglomerates, with a net worth of $5.3 billion making him the country's ninth richest person. He and ex-wife Roh Soh-yeong, daughter of a former president, were seen as South Korea's "marriage of the century" for 27 years.
Last week a court ordered Chey to pay Roh 944 billion won, about £489 million, in a case local media called the "divorce of the century," a record for South Korea though lower than the 1.38 trillion won ordered by an appeals court in 2024. The split followed a scandal in which Chey wrote a three-page letter to a newspaper confessing he loved another woman and had fathered her child, quoting the opening of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina in court papers. He married that woman, Kim Hee-young, in 2015, and Roh later sued Kim, with a court ordering Chey and Kim to jointly pay roughly $1.5 million in damages. Park Ju-gun, head of corporate analysis firm Leaders Index, said the ruling "likely won't affect management control of SK Group," though fund managers said Chey may need to sell or pledge shares to fund the payment. Chey golfed at Mar-a-Lago before meeting Trump last autumn, and Joe Biden called him a "pal" during a 2022 visit. SK's chip unit, SK Hynix, is a key supplier of memory chips for Nvidia's AI processors.
Elon Musk's fleet of jets and 14 children
Musk, who runs xAI and has a net worth of $719 billion, has 14 children with four partners: Justine Wilson, Grimes, Shivon Zilis and Ashley St. Clair.
His firstborn son died at ten months old in 2002. With Wilson he later had twins Vivian and Griffin, then triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian, before the couple divorced in 2008. He went on to have three children with Grimes, four with Zilis, and most recently a son, Romulus, with St. Clair. His daughter Vivian told Teen Vogue, "I will say I do not actually know how many siblings I have, if you include half-siblings," adding she is on good terms with those she knows despite a difficult relationship with her father. Musk operates a fleet of four private jets. In 2020 he announced he was selling nearly all his possessions and would own no house, later selling seven California homes for $128 million and moving to a Texas rental worth an estimated $50,000. He has since bought several stucco houses near each other outside Austin, intending them as a compound for the mothers of his children, though many have declined to stay there.
Nvidia's Jensen Huang and his Hawaii retreat
Nvidia became the first company to reach a $5 trillion valuation in 2025. Its chips, once built for video game graphics, now train AI models for tasks including image, facial and speech recognition. Huang, 63, is the world's seventh richest person with a net worth of $172.6 billion, according to Forbes, a striking turn for a man who worked at Denny's and was bullied at his Kentucky school after arriving from Thailand at age nine.
Huang lives with his wife, Lori, on San Francisco's Billionaires' Row, neighbouring Larry Ellison and David Sachs, in an 11,400-square-foot, seven-bedroom home worth an estimated $38 million. His property portfolio totals about $53 million, including a $6.9 million estate in Los Altos Hills and an $8 million compound in Maui. He is known for his trademark black leather jacket and a tattoo of the Nvidia logo on his left arm.
Sam Altman's real estate and a molotov cocktail attack
Altman, 41, the OpenAI CEO and venture investor, has a net worth of $3.3 billion. He bought a six-bedroom, seven-bathroom mansion in San Francisco's Russian Hill for $27 million in 2020, later suing its developers and contractors over issues including "substandard work" and "financial embezzlement," according to Realtor.com. The LLC used to buy the home said it had been marketed as the most expensive home listing in San Francisco history. Altman also bought three adjoining lots and a 950-acre ranch in Napa County for $15.7 million, bringing his real estate portfolio to $124 million.
In January 2024 Altman married his partner, Oliver Mulherin, in a seaside ceremony in Hawaii. In April this year a 20-year-old man threw a molotov cocktail at his San Francisco home before fleeing. The suspect, Daniel Moreno-Gama, was arrested less than two hours later while allegedly trying to break into OpenAI's headquarters carrying a jug of kerosene, a lighter and an anti-AI manifesto. He was charged with attempted arson and attempted murder, pleaded not guilty in May, and his preliminary hearing is set for August 19 after he requested an extension.
Mark Zuckerberg's hydrofoil hobby
Zuckerberg started Facebook in 2004 as a 19-year-old at Harvard and has since rebranded the company Meta Platforms, investing billions in data centres and research talent to pursue AI superintelligence, including creating an AI version of himself to offer "conversation and feedback" to staff.
With a net worth of $232 billion, Zuckerberg owns homes in Lake Tahoe, Palo Alto and Kauai and is reported to be developing a $170 million mega mansion in Florida. He has been photographed hydrofoiling on a $12,000 Efoil board capable of speeds up to 25mph, and trains in Brazilian jiu-jitsu as a blue belt, having won gold and silver medals in his competitive debut.
