Meet Austin Russell, The World’s Youngest Self-Made Billionaire.

Austin Russell is the 26-year-old founder and CEO of Luminar, a Tech startup in Silicon Valley that makes LIDAR sensors for self-driving cars.

LIDAR sensors produced by Luminar Technologies enable the self-driving cars of auto manufacturers such as Volvo, Toyota, and even Intel’s Mobileye to “see” in 3D.

According to Forbes, Russell developed the idea for Luminar when he was just 17.

Luminar Technologies went public in December of Last year, Russell net worth rose to $ 2.4 billion due to his 104.7 million Luminar shares, making him the youngest self-made billionaire.

It has been incredibly intense, exhausting… Everything that we have had to go through every day, climbing this. And of course, it is incredibly rewarding to have the opportunity to go out now and enter the public markets and scale through this IPO SPAC. ”

“I am still relatively young, but… there has been a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in this. And I was lucky to be able to keep a good enough turnout,”  Russell told Forbes in a video interview from his office in Palo Alto, California.

Instead of going to high school, Russell spent his teen years researching at the University of California at Irvine’s Beckman Laser Institute, before deciding to study physics at Stanford University. It was there the “optics prodigy” developed the idea for his future startup, Lumina Technologies, which would eventually produce LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensors for self-driving cars.

In 2012, after securing a hefty $100,000 fellowship from none other than Peter Thiel – co-founder of PayPal and Facebook’s first outside investor – Russell opted to skip higher education in favor of going all-in on Luminar Technologies. When the company listed via the SPAC merger (NASDAQ: LAZR) in December of last year, Austin Russell went to sleep a genius and woke up a billionaire.

Before  Russell achieved the ‘billionaire’ status, He already had several notable accomplishments. According to the profile made by Forbes, he memorized the periodic table of elements at 2 years. When he was in sixth grade, he reconnected his Nintendo DS game console to a mobile phone after his parents forbade him to have one. At age 13, he filed his first patent: a groundwater recycling system that collects water from sprinklers and saves it to reduce wastewater.