The Richest Kids On The Planet
Making millions of dollars is hard, and most of us aren't going to ever make that much money in our lives. But there are some people — youngsters, at that — who were lucky enough, talented enough, or born-into-wealth enough to amass more money before their eighteenth birthday than we'll ever have in our entire lives, combined. You can gleefully hate all of the following people –they'll be fine, they'll just cry into their piles of money.
Nick D'Aloisio
Age he got rich: 16
How he made his money: Computer programmer
He's the youngest VC-funded entrepreneur in the entire world, getting his start at fifteen. He designed an app, Trimit, an artificial intelligence designed to summarize large amounts of texts into Twitter-length content. After it appeared in the UK Apple store, he took it down, recreated it, and uploaded it again, this time with a new, better name — Summly. It was this app, created with the backing of dozens of people — including Ashton Kutcher — that made him the youngest funded entrepreneur ever.
This netted him a mere million bucks — it wasn't until the ripe old age of seventeen that he made his millions, as his creation — Summly — was bought up by Yahoo in 2013, for the princely sum of thirty million dollars! We're just as surprised as you are — who knew that Yahoo was still a company in 2013, let alone one that could spew out tens of millions for an app? Well, it apparently wasn't one for long, as its luck took a downturn and, in 2015, D'Aloisio left the company. What'll he be up to next? No one knows exactly. He already did a brief stint for AirBnB, and he might be working on something new. But, also, he's super rich and not even twenty-one? He could probably just chill.
Evan (of Evantube)
Age he got rich: 9
How he made his money: YouTube
There's not a ton of ways you can become famous on Youtube. Most of the truly famous YouTubers were already famous (like the Vlogbrothers), or they play video games while doing silly voices (like PewDiePIe), but then there's Evan, who started his EvanTube channel at age 7. He's not a sketch or weird-out Youtuber. He doesn't make cartoons or give step-by-step guides to makeup. Instead, he reviews his favorite toys. That's ... basically it! Remember when you used to bug your parents, ranting about all the games and toys you loved? If YouTube had existed back then, you could have made mad moolah.
Granted, Evan does have a little help from his dad, who edits the videos and sometimes adds some special effects to them, but this is still a super-young kid pulling in mad hits and mad money. He's garnered over 1.2 billion views, and earns over a million bucks per year, all through talking about toys!
Jaylen Bledsoe
Age he got rich: 14
How he made his money: Entrepreneur
Remember middle school? How many millionaire, genius, entrepreneur kids did you know then? Unless you were in class with Jaylen Bledsoe, you probably didn't know a single one. He's the head of Bledsoe Technologies (later renamed The Jaylen Bledsoe Global Group), a company he formed at age 12, that specializes in information consulting technology. We think that sounds like gibberish, but has led to him being the CEO of a multi-million-dollar company, with 150 employees. He has dozens of awesome clients too, including some celebrities.
Eventually, one awesome company wasn't enough, and he began an entirely different one devoted to helping other young geniuses like himself. Of course, it's doubtful any of them will be as awesome as him, because remember: he started all this at age twelve. He was making millions before he even hit puberty. Before we hit puberty, we couldn't even count to a million.
Juliette Brindak
Age she got rich: 17
How she made her money: Miss O and Friends
Depending on your age and proclivities, you might know about Juliette Brindak's site, Miss O and Friends, but you almost definitely didn't know just how young she was when the site took off.
Juliette Brindak had maybe one of the best sweet sixteens in the world. See, she had been working on a site called Miss O and Friends, a social media hub designed exclusively for preteen and teen girls to get together and socialize. Basically, it's Facebook, but not face-meltingly awful. It started as something of a self-described hobby, but she soon managed to get a bunch of investors to join her company, rocketing its value upwards. A year later, in 2008, the company had its valuation, placing it at $15 million. So while she's not as rich as Zuckerberg, she's also too rich to care.
Jackie Evancho
Age she got rich: 10
How she made her money: Singer
For those who haven't heard of Jackie Evancho, she's a classical-crossover singer, which means that she sings awesome classic music, and also cool pop music. There's a chance, though, that you've heard of her before or even heard her, if you're one of the millions who watch America's Got Talent. She appeared on the show when she was only ten years old, but that wasn't her actual start. Before popping up on one of America's most popular competition shows, she debuted in a talent show at just eight years old. After that, she went on to YouTube fame, and even showed up on a PBS show called Celebrate America, singing "Ave Maria" like all typical third-graders do. She's now a multi-millionaire with multiple bestselling albums, and she performs all around the country.
Ianthe Fullagar
Age she got rich: 18
How she made her money: Winning the lottery
UK resident Ianthe Fullagar had perhaps the only method of success on the list you might be capable of duplicating. That's because, in 2008, she won the lottery — at the age of eighteen! If that happened to us, we would have blown the money before you could say, "Hey, wait, don't buy a giant inflatable castle and then throw it into the ocean just to see what would happen!"
But Fullagar isn't like us (lucky her). Before winning the lottery, she was a University (fancy Brit talk for college) student, and that didn't change a bit. While she went on a rather nice vacation, most of the money sat in the bank, or went towards her family, ensuring her mother wouldn't have to work another day in her life. Again, if it was us, we'd have bought sharks and then hired someone to put lasers on their heads, but you know, helping your family out is good, too. We guess.
Suri Cruise
Age she got rich: birth
How she made her money: Parents
Suri Cruise is the child of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes and, unlike many others in this article, she didn't become rich by doing anything too amazing. However she was lucky enough to be born into an ultra-wealthy family, and we will never, ever stop being jealous of her for it.
Of course, despite how she's super rich, that doesn't mean her life is perfect. Her father pays child support but apparently hasn't seen her in years, not even coming to her tenth birthday party. At least he's set her up a large trust fund, which is more than we can say about our parents.
Elle Fanning
Age she got rich: 8 (when she became a leading actress)
How she made her money: Acting
Elle Fanning is a star of film and screen, whom you've probably seen in one of her many movies, like We Bought a Zoo or Maleficent. Due to superstar acting paying a huge amount, and how she's been acting basically her whole life, Elle Fanning is much richer than you could ever dream of being.
Fanning started acting back in 2001, at the age of three, in I Am Sam. She played the younger version of the character who her older sister, Dakota Fanning, was playing. After that, she went through a string of awesome movies. Her latest movie was Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon, a thriller about the high-stakes world of modeling. Trust us, the movie is much darker than it sounds, which means she's made the full transfer from kiddie sensation to adult star successfully. Congrats! Now, we just wait a few years before she does something awful, and we all start to hate her, and the hate-cycle starts again.
Blue Ivy Carter
Age she got rich: birth
How she made her money: By having Jay-Z and Beyonce as parents!
Blue Ivy Carter has the best life in the entire world. Her father is Jay-Z, which is awesome, but her mother is the super-awesome Beyonce. Blue Ivy Carter is basically a deity. Maybe the cutest part of her almost-perfect life? She doesn't even realize that her parents are famous! That'd be like Jesus Christ not realizing that his dad was the God of the entire Universe.
She was even featured in the VMA Awards, yet she doesn't know her parents are famous. Not yet, anyways. Eventually, she'll figure it out, and hopefully not by listening to Lemonade and realizing her mom's calling out her dad for some very un-dad activities. For now though, she's amazingly rich and doesn't have to deal with the stress of it. How could she have a better life?
Prince George
Age she got rich: 2
How he made all that money: Being a prince!
Prince George, first-born son of Prince William and Duchess Catherine Middleton, is only two years old, which means he maybe can walk, probably can't talk, and since he's a prince, has more money than many countries. This one child is worth billions. Can you even conceive of a number that large? That's enough money to make every movie you'd ever want to make, enough money to buy anything you want (five times over), enough money to pay off about half of your student debt — he has all of that, and he's still barely not-a-baby!
That's nothing, however, compared to Princess Charlotte, the just-born daughter of Kate and William. She's worth over five billion dollars, meaning their version of sibling rivalry will be who has more billions to their name. Look, we know it might sound driven entirely from jealousy and greed, but ... yeah, it totally is. DOWN WITH THE MONARCHY!
Isabella Barrett
Age she got rich: 9
How she made her money: Beauty pageants and beyond
Ever watch one of those shows like Toddlers & Tiaras or Dance Moms or I Had an Unhappy Life and Now Live Vicariously Through my Child, and imagined becoming a multi-millionaire simply by being young and walking around? Well, Isabella Barrett made that dream a reality. You might recognize her name if you watched the above shows, because she was on Toddlers & Tiaras. Of course, she was younger than — only six — as opposed to her now-worldly age of ... nine freaking years old! She is now worth roughly two million dollars, and she's still single-digits old.
Barrett has stake in companies, she's walked the runway in fashion shows in New York, and she continues to win pageants. Oh, and she's also recorded pop music, because of course she has! Look, we're not saying nine is too young to have more money than most of us can even conceive of, we're just saying that ... no, wait, that's exactly what we're saying.
David and Catherine Cook
Ages they founded company: 16, 15 (sold company for $100 million at aged 22,21 respectively)
How the two made their money: myYearbook.com (aka MeetMe)
Catherine and David Cook are siblings who, as teenagers, struck upon a great idea. You know how yearbooks are awesome, but paper books suck all sorts of butt? Well, what if you could digitize them, and then, what if you turned all those digital yearbooks into an entire social networking site? That's what the two of them decided to do, making a super-awesome company, before realizing that it was a bit too much for the two of them to do alone. After awhile, the two brought their older brother, Geoff, in as a businessman and CEO. The website was rebranded as MeetMe, exploded in popularity, and in 2011, sold for over $100 million.
Tyler Dikman
Age he got rich: 15
How he made his money: Computer supplies
Finally, a young millionaire who actually acts his age. The company young Tyler Dikman founded in 2000, at the ripe old age of fifteen, was (and still is) called Cooltronics. That's not where his journey began, but seriously — isn't Cooltronics just the best name a teenager could come up with? Before that, when he was thirteen, he became the youngest person to get an internship with Merrill Lynch, a job he got in part due to his babysitting gigs. Most babysitters are lucky to get an extra $5 and free reign of the fridge.
Also, babysitting wasn't even his first job! He had been working since the age of thirteen, taking whatever jobs he could come up with, even as a magician for kids' parties. But it was after working at Merrill Lynch when he started a computer-supply company and gave it that way-too-cool-for-school name, Cooltronics, that he made his fortune. While he's in thirties now, Dikman still lands a place in this article due to how young he was when he first achieved his millions. Plus, he never grew square and changed the company's name. Major props to him for that.
Maddie Bradshaw
Age she got rich: 10
How she made her money: Shark Tank, jewelry, and lawsuits
You might have seen Maddie Bradshaw before, if you're a fan of Shark Tank. She appeared on the show with her company, M3 Girl Designs, which sold jewelry made out of colorful, trendy bottle caps. Her company, at the time of the show, was already five years old and booming — Bradshaw started it at age 10 and, by the time she got on Tank, had already made $6 million. Nevertheless, she actually got a handful of investment offers from the Sharks before growing even larger, becoming a booming business that pulled in at least an extra $1.6 million.
Unfortunately, the company hasn't been doing as well lately. In fact, it barely exists. Bradshaw and her family started suing other companies, claiming trademark infringement. After several successful settlements, the truth finally came out that the company actually had no trademark, as Bradshaw certainly didn't invent "stuff made out of bottle caps." The ensuing loss of both lawsuit money, Shark money (all investments were pulled after the truth came out) and of reputation caused M3 to all but go dark by 2014.
But Bradshaw not only didn't lose all of her money, she's now at Stanford, because being a millionaire before she turned eighteen wasn't enough for her. Hey, at least she won't have too much college debt once she graduates. Unless she sues the wrong person for the wrong reason again.