Austin Russell: the university drop-out who made a billion dollars

Halfway through his first year as a physics student, Austin Russell won a $100,000 prize designed to encourage young entrepreneurs. A decade later, he is the world’s youngest billionaire. Jane Lewis reports

Austin Russell
(Image credit: © David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In 2011, the libertarian Silicon Valley financier Peter Thiel created a $100,000 scholarship to encourage promising young entrepreneurs to drop out of university and start their own ventures. Dozens of tech prodigies have passed through the programme to pursue their dreams – none quite so spectacularly as Austin Russell. The 26-year-old founder and CEO of Luminar Technologies is one of the few people to have amassed a fortune in the world of self-driving cars.

Following Luminar’s float last December, which valued his stake at $2.4bn, Russell can lay claim to being the youngest self-made billionaire in the world. More to the point, perhaps, the lanky six-foot-four entrepreneur – who “could pass, quite easily, for a young American pastor” – is one of the few people who has “got Elon Musk worried”, says The Times.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.