Austin Russell is a Stanford University dropout who became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire in 2020 at the age of 25 when his startup Luminar went public. Luminar creates sensing technology to help cars navigate their surroundings; Volvo, Toyota, and Mercedes-Benz use the sensors.
Russell, now 29, spoke on the Masters of Scale podcast with Will.i.am on Wednesday about how he got rich at an early age. Russell, who had a father in real estate and a mother who did some modeling and public speaking, says he was 100% self-taught and created a lab in his parent’s garage at the age of 10 or 11.
“[My parents] would always joke, oh you just let Austin do his black magic in the garage and slip food under the door,” Russell said.
He said he always wanted to know how and why things worked, and explored that curiosity from a young age.
Russell began focusing on optics and lasers in his home lab at 13; then, at 17 years old, he worked at UC Irvine’s Beckman Laser Institute. He decided to focus on entrepreneurship, instead of the tenured professor route, because he wanted to create innovations with immediate real-world impact.
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Russell founded Luminar, where he’s also the chief executive, at age 17 to build sensors that would make driving safer. He graduated high school, went to Stanford for a few months, then dropped out after receiving a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship to build his idea over two years.
His goal with Luminar became more ambitious: to save as many as 100 million lives and 100 trillion hours over the next 100 years. An April report from reinsurance company Swiss Re shows that progress towards that goal is being made — Luminar’s software reduced car accident severity by as much as 40%.
“I think the way that you ultimately apply and scale yourself has to be through some kind of business and some kind of endeavor at the end of the day,” he said.
Luminar founder Austin Russell. Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty Images
Russell said he benefitted from the wealth of information online, including lectures that previously would’ve been available only to graduate students. He claims to have once watched four years’ worth of lectures on the technical subjects he needed to know “in less than a month.”
“You can do it,” he said. “There’s nothing stopping you.”
Russell has an estimated net worth of $1.6 billion, though Luminar’s stock price has dropped by about 40% year-to-date. Possible causes could be a highly competitive market and a small number of customers that drive a large chunk of the company’s revenue.
He’s also no longer the world’s youngest self-made billionaire; 27-year-old MIT dropout and Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang now holds the title.