The 2022 edition of the Forbes Billionaires List has been released and it's very clear that family connections are no longer the only way to achieve billionaire status at a young age. Instead, everyone from forward-thinking tech phenomenons to popstars-turned-entrepreneurs have made it on to the prestigious who's-who this year. Read on as we rank the youngest billionaires from the age of 34 downwards and see how they landed super-rich status so quickly. All dollar amounts in US dollars.

While Rihanna, real name Robyn Fenty, is famous for her chart-topping music career, it's her cosmetics line Fenty Beauty that has secured her billionaire status. She's currently the wealthiest female musician in the world, as well as the second wealthiest female entertainer after Oprah Winfrey.

Originally from Barbados, Rihanna now lives in LA. Fenty Beauty, which she co-owns with French luxury retailer LVMH, made more than $550 million (£433m) in revenue in 2020. The brand's success isn't just down to the Rihanna effect though; products come in a wide range of shades, including harder-to-find tones for women of colour. The brand also makes a conscious point of showcasing its products on a diverse range of models.

Rihanna also has a 30% stake in lingerie brand Savage X Fenty, which has recently been valued at $3 billion (£2.4bn).

Kazakhstan-based Timor Turlov is CEO of retail brokerage Freedom Holding, which gives post-Soviet citizens access to the US, Russian, and European stock exchanges. He started the company back in 2008 while still at college.

Moscow-born Turlov admits to having life-size cutouts of luminaries like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Joe Biden at the company's Kazakhstan headquarters, and says that his proudest accomplishment was in 2019 when Freedom Holding started trading on the Nasdaq.

Married with five children, Turlov told Forbes that he was inspired to work in finance by watching classic movies like Wall Street.

Russian-British businessman Said Gutseriev is the son of Russian oligarch Mikhail Gutseriev, who made his fortune at the helm of oil company Russneft. In 2017 Mikhail gave his son stakes in various businesses and Said has since launched his own company, a venture capital firm Larnabel Ventures. 

Like Turlov, Gusteriev was born in Moscow. He now lives in London with his wife, who he married in 2016 in a lavish ceremony thought to have cost $1 billion (£815.2m). Gusteriev hit headlines again in October last year when the Pandora Papers revealed he'd bought a London office block through an offshore company. 

San Francisco native Nikil Viswanathan co-founded Alchemy in 2020 with fellow Stanford grad Joe Lau, and the software they created together is now used by thousands of blockchain-based Web3 companies.

This wasn't the pair's first venture together. They launched app Down to Lunch in 2016, which was created to make it easy for people to let their friends know they were free to get lunch or hang out. The app was so successful that it hit number one on the Apple social apps list and was featured by The New York Times.

In December 2021, they announced the launch of Alchemy's investment arm, Alchemy Ventures.

Bobby Murphy co-founded Snapchat, the photo-sharing app loved by 293 million daily users.

California-raised Murphy has spent more than $50 million (£40.3m) on property since making his fortune, buying up several beach homes across Los Angeles. Murphy, who is married to Kelsey Bateman, is known in tech circles as the "quiet technical genius" behind Snap Inc., and prefers to let his co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel take the limelight. 

Along with Spiegel, chief technology officer (CTO) Murphy owns around a quarter of the company. The altruistic pair created an education and arts foundation in 2017, and plan to give the non-profit organisation up to 13,000,000 Class A shares by 2027.

Along with his brother John, Patrick Collison is the co-founder of online payments software platform Stripe. The Irish brothers were already self-made millionaires by their teens, having sold software company Auctomatic to Live Current Media for $5 million (£4m) in 2008.

They're now comfortably within the top 250 of Forbes' World's Billionaire's List; as of June 2022, they're in 195th place, having ranked 956th in 2021.

Patrick oversees the engineering side of Stripe and is also the public face of the business. Despite this, he's fiercely private; for example, he's engaged but hasn't publicly announced his fiancée's name

German-born Ludwig Theodor Braun is a sixth-generation member of the Braun family, and owns 10% of its medical technology company. B. Braun was founded back in 1839 by Julius Wilhelm Braun and began trading as the Rose Pharmacy in the German town of Melsungen, selling herbal remedies.

Fast-forward almost 200 years and the business is now a global company that employs over 63,000 people and manufactures a huge range of medical products, ranging from injection solutions to surgical instruments. When Ludwig's father, also named Ludwig, took over in 1977, the company was making a healthy $24 million (£19.3m) in annual sales. This had rocketed to $8 billion (£6.4bn) by 2022.

William Hockey co-founded payments company Plaid back in 2012 with Zach Perrett, who he met when they were both working at Bain and Company.

Plaid plugs a gap in payment software that allows companies to interact with their customers' bank accounts. By 2022, the San Francisco-based company employed 300 people, with offices opening in Salt Lake City and New York. Finance giant VISA's planned $5.3 billion (£4.27bn) acquisition of Plaid failed when the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit in 2021.

Although Hockey stepped down from his role as the company's CTO and president back in 2019, he is still a board member. In 2021, Hockey and his wife Annie bought Northern California National Bank for around $50 million (£40.28m), and in April 2022 announced that they were launching Column, a tech-focused bank.

Stanford graduate Joe Lau (left) started his career in app development with a simple idea: he wanted to develop an app that would make meeting friends for lunch easier. Down To Lunch, which he created with Nikil Viswanathan (who has already featured on our list), was the result, launching in 2015 and soon becoming one of the most popular social apps in the world.

Viswanathan and Lau continued their entrepreneurial endeavours and launched Alchemy, a blockchain and Web3 development platform, in August 2020. This was followed by Alchemy Ventures in December 2021.

In February 2022, Alchemy was valued by private investors at $10.2 billion (£8.22bn). Lau currently holds a 26% stake in the business. 

LA-based Evan Spiegel, who became a dual American-French citizen in 2018, developed Snapchat with his college buddy Bobby Murphy. The pair came up with the idea at a party in 2011 and now over 293 million people use it on a daily basis.

One of the few young billionaires to be married, he wed Australian supermodel Miranda Kerr in 2017 and the pair live together in Brentwood, Los Angeles.

Spiegel became a billionaire at 25 and is known to be generous with his wealth. He's given away more than $280 million (£225.58m) in Snap stock and, along with Murphy, has promised to donate 13 million shares to the charitable Snap Foundation. He and his wife also recently paid off the student debt of all new graduates of Otis College of Art and Design in LA.

New Yorker Devin Finzer began his working life as a software engineer at Pinterest but developed a taste for entrepreneurship. In 2015, he sold his first start-up business, Claimdog, to Credit Karma.

He went on to co-found OpenSea, an NFT marketplace, with Alex Atallah in 2018 and owns around 18% of the company. The pair became the world's first-ever NFT billionaires. 

Today, OpenSea is the largest marketplace for NFTs and user-owned digital items, with 600,000 users, two million collections, and more than 80 million NFTs. The platform attracts some of the world’s most prominent investors and was valued at $13.3 billion (£10.72bn) at the start of 2022.

Along with his brother Patrick (who has already featured on this list), Ireland native John Collison came up with the idea for online payment platform Stripe while they were both studying at MIT. Despite being competitive as kids, the fraternal duo decided that working together could be hugely beneficial. The pair dropped out of college and launched Stripe in 2010.

John is president of the company, which raised an $850 million (£684.4m) funding round with a valuation of $36 billion (£29.4bn) in 2020.

In September 2021, Collison, a keen pilot, was part of a consortium that bought into Weston Airport near Dublin, Ireland. Just a couple of months earlier, he snapped up a $21 million (£16.9m) 1,100-acre estate an hour away from that very same airport.

That should certainly help with commuting, with the high-flying younger Collison brother known to have chartered a private jet from Stripe's San Francisco HQ to Ireland in the past...

Jonathan Kwok became one of Asia's youngest ever billionaires when he inherited a stake in Hong Kong's largest developer, Sun Hung Kai Properties (SHKP).

When his father Walter died in 2018, Jonathan and his older brother Geoffrey also took over Empire Group Holdings, a property developer that Walter had launched after he left SHKP in 2008. In a 2017 Forbes list, the Kwok family’s collective wealth was estimated to sit at over $40 billion (£32.5bn), making them Asia’s third-richest family.  

Stanford graduate Alex Atallah is the co-founder of NFT marketplace OpenSea, which he launched in 2018 with Devin Finzer (who has already featured on this list). 

A Colorado native, Atallah is both CEO and CTO at the organisation, which was given a valuation of $13.3 billion (£10.7bn) at the start of 2022 and has around 600,000 users.

Prior to OpenSea, he was a programmer at software company Palantir and had worked at a couple of other tech-related start-ups. Atallah is believed to own around 18.5% of the company.

Sam Bankman-Fried is the son of two Stanford law professors. He studied physics at MIT with Gary Wang, with whom he founded cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2019.

Bankman-Fried says he wants to give most of his fortune away to charity. Earlier this year Forbes reported that he'd parted with just 0.1% of his then-$21.3 billion (£17.2bn) fortune. That's still a sizeable $21 million (£16.8m) though, which has reportedly gone to causes including voter registration, global poverty mitigation, and artificial intelligence safety.

When investors valued FTX at $18 billion (£14.5bn) in 2021, it made Bankman-Fried one of the richest under-30s in history. Not bad for someone who told the Financial Times in May 2022 that he'd got involved with crypto before he even knew what a blockchain was...

The Norway-based Witzoe family may have made their money from fish but 29-year-old Gustav is partial to casting his net in other areas too.

Given close to 50% in Salmar ASA, which is one of the world's largest salmon producers, by his father in 2013, Gustav is also a keen investor in start-ups and real estate. 

In the past, Witzoe has worked for MGM Property and he's also known to have injected money into Keybutler, which helps Airbnb landlords handle key delivery to guests.

MIT grad Gary Wang made his debut on Forbes' list of billionaires in 2022 due to FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that he co-founded with Sam Bankman-Fried in 2019. Wang is also CTO of the company.

Prior to partnering with Bankman-Fried, Wang worked for Google, where he built systems that were designed to aggregate global flight prices.

FTX claims to be built "by traders for traders" and it's certainly proving popular with them: in July 2021, the number of exchange users hit one million. Wang owns about 16% of the exchange and 18% of its US operations.

Palmer Luckey (pictured left) was just 19 when he founded the virtual reality company Oculus VR in 2012. Two years later he sold the business to Facebook, now Meta, for $2 billion (£1.6bn) in cash and stock. 

A native of Long Beach, California, Luckey went on to found the defence technology company Anduril Industries in 2017. The company was reportedly valued at $4.6 billion (£3.7bn) in 2019 and now plans to raise an additional $1 billion (£816.3m) in funding at a valuation of $8 billion (£6.5bn) later this year. 

Luckey's career hasn't been without incident, however. After Meta acquired Oculus VR, Luckey was sued by video game holding company ZeniMax Media, which claimed that he'd used the business' trade secrets. He was initially ordered to pay ZeniMax $50 million (£40.7m) in damages but this judgement was later dismissed. 

Miami-based Ryan Breslow made himself extremely popular with employees of his payment start-up Bolt when he introduced a four-day working week in 2022.

Breslow, who dropped out of Stanford in 2014, launched the one-click Amazon-style checkout the same year and stepped down as CEO in January 2022 after raising $355 million (£285.8m) for the company that very same month. 

He remains executive chairman of the business and says he's "excited" by his new role. Known for his love of yoga, Forbes notes that Breslow is also vegan, doesn't drink alcohol, and rarely socialises.

In 2007, Katharina Andresen and her younger sister Alexandra each inherited 42% of Ferd, the family's Oslo-based investment company. Ferd runs hedge funds and is an active investor on the Nordic stock exchange, and originally made its money from Tiedemanns Tobacco. The tobacco business was sold for around $500 million (£400m) in 2005.

Katharina has just completed a bachelor's degree in Global Management at Regent's University in London, so it looks like she may be following in her family's footsteps. 

Brought up to be mindful of her wealth, she not only supports non-profit organisations like CARE Norge but has also opted to rent a modest apartment in London while studying.

Along with his high school friend Pedro Franceschi, Henrique Dubugras is the co-CEO of financial tech start-up Brex.

The Brazilian natives co-founded the corporate credit card provider in 2017 after talking to other entrepreneurs about how hard it was for new businesses to get funding. An aspiring tech entrepreneur from a young age, Dubugras started coding when his parents wouldn't give him the money for a game he wanted to play.

Undeterred, he learnt how to program in an attempt to get the game for free and had created his own video games company by the age of 14. Dubugras and Franceschi both dropped out of Standford to launch Brex in 2017. The company now has a valuation of $12.3 billion (£9.8bn), and Dubugras made his debut on Forbes' list of billionaires in 2022.

Officially the world's youngest self-made billionaire, Alexandr Wang (pictured centre) made his $1 billion (£814.7m) fortune by founding Scale AI in 2016. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company provides a range of AI products for businesses and is currently valued at $7 billion (£5.7bn), according to Craft. 

Wang is the son of two physicists from New Mexico. He briefly attended MIT but dropped out to found Scale, which he now owns an estimated 15% of. Among Scale's clients are General Motors and supply chain company Flexport. 

Norwegian heiress Alexandra Andresen was born in Oslo in 1997 and became the world's youngest billionaire aged 19 when she inherited 42% of Ferd, her family's investment company. She retained the title for three years before losing it to Kylie Jenner.

Alexandra grew up around horses and competes professionally in dressage competitions; she's three-times Norwegian junior dressage champion. She occasionally models for her sponsor, equestrian clothing brand Kingsland.

She claims to be "down to earth" about her wealth, revealing to Ferd's corporate magazine that her parents taught her and her sister to save their pocket money and made them drive second-hand cars rather than flashy new models.

Wang Zelong, who comes from the city of Jiaozuo in Henan, China, inherited his place on Forbes' list when he was left a stake worth $1.3 billion (£1bn) in chemical company CNNC Hua Yuan Titanium Dioxide Co.

He also has stakes in Lomon Billions Group. Both are makers of titanium dioxide, a useful white pigment that's found in plastics, inks, and coatings.

Zelong has the distinction of being the only Asian-based billionaire on the Forbes' under-30 list and doesn't seem to have any social media accounts, meaning not much is known about him beyond his net worth.

Pedro Franceschi grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and studied at Stanford before dropping out after a year. Along with childhood friend Henrique Dubugras, he founded Brex, a corporate credit card company for entrepreneurs, in 2017.

Franceschi was obsessed with technology as a child and started teaching himself coding from the age of eight. Speaking at the Grind Global Conference, he joked that he became known as "the kid who was jailbreaking iPhones in Rio".

He had to give this first experimental venture up when he found out that translating Siri from English to Portuguese violated Apple's patents. The idea for Brex was the result of a conversation over dinner about the problems start-ups were having with funding. By this point, Dubugras and Franceschi had already sold their first start-up, Pagar.me, and the idea for a corporate credit card for start-ups was born.

In 2019, Franceschi made Forbes' 30 under 30 global list, and he officially achieved billionaire status in 2022.

Kevin David Lehmann was just 14 when he became a billionaire in 2017, after his father Guenther kindly transferred 50% of his ownership of the German drugstore chain dm (drogerie markt) to him. Guenther Lehmann, who also owns the Pfannkuch grocery chain, originally invested in dm in 1974. The company reportedly makes more than $12 billion (£9.6bn) in revenue each year.

As he was too young to take part in company business, Kevin's stake in dm was initially overseen by trustees. Although he's now of legal age, he still has no operational involvement with the organisation. Along with the rest of the Lehmann clan, he keeps a low profile, so don't expect to see him sharing holiday snaps on Instagram anytime soon.

Now meet the world's richest families