Luminar’s Austin Russell Named The World’s Newest and Youngest Self-Made Billionaire 

Luminar Technologies Inc. debuted as a public company on the stock market on Thursday, December 3, 2020. The market value of the company stands at a value of about 7.8 billion dollars. This success introduced the CEO, Austin Russell, as the “world’s newest and youngest self-made billionaire”.

The company, Luminar Technologies Inc., produces self-driving or autonomous cars. Austin Russell had received a fellowship amount of $100,000 in offering from Paypal Cofounder Peter Thiel. After that, the recently named billionaire started building up his company. And now the shares he owns is worth $2.4 billion as of Thursday. 

Luminar’s Austin Russell Becomes The world’s Youngest Self-Made Billionaire

Luminar Technologies Inc. is an automotive company that makes softwares and autonomous vehicles sensors for automobiles. The company was founded in 2012, it has a team of 350 people. The company has raised over 250 million dollars in venture capital funding.

The company works with the similar technology in automotives as Tesla (TSLA) and Nissan (NSANY) does. The difference is, LAZR (Luminar Technologies Inc.) uses lidar tech as distance measure where as the others use radar and GPS tech. Lidar technology uses laser sensors. This is what makes it interesting, giving the vehicles a 3D view and helps navigate. 

The company went public recently through SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) listed in NASDAQ. The CEO owns 104.7 Million shares of the company. As of Friday, Luminar Technologies Inc. is set to be valued more than 3 billion dollars worth.

Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal, has remarked, 

“You can build a biilion-dollar business but that does not mean you can become a billionaire… It’s remarkable from a financing perspective to retain a financial stake of that size.”

According to a recent interview with Forbes, Austin Russell said, 

“It’s been insanely intense, grueling. Everything through every day that we’ve had to go through, scaling this up. And of course it’s incredibly rewarding to have an opportunity to be able to get out there now and get into the public markets and scale through this IPO SPAC,” he also added, “I’m still relatively young… And I was fortunate enough to be able to retain a good enough stake.”

The company’s stock has doubled since the debut in stock market, rallying and astounding amount of 40% increase on the NASDAQ COMP. Austin Russell has mentioned in his interview with Forbes that he has set ambitious goals to work with Road Safety technology in the future.