Elon Musk 2.0? Meet Austin Russell, the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, Luminar founder and evangelist for the lidar self-driving car tech that Tesla’s CEO called ‘freaking stupid’
- Elon Musk calls lidar ‘expensive and unnecessary’ but 26-year-old Russell, on Forbes’ ‘40 Under 40’ list, believes otherwise – and has deals with Volvo, Toyota and Intel to prove it
- He left Stanford after getting a US$100,000 fellowship from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and now owns an US$83 million LA mansion next door to Tom Hanks and one in Florida
1. He’s a university dropout (!)
At the age of 17, Russell was studying physics at Stanford University when he developed the idea of an automotive sensor technology which later became Luminar Technologies’ key breakthrough. He didn’t stay long though, dropping out in 2012 after receiving a US$100,000 fellowship from billionaire tech investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.
Talking about why he dropped out, Russell told Forbes: “When you have this fundamental drive to be able to build, to be able to create, it’s very challenging to do that in an academic environment.” Russell himself was born into a well-to-do family in Newport Beach, with his father Michael Russell working in commercial estates and his mother, Shannon Cleye, a former model and actress on The Young and The Restless, real estate portal Dirt reports.
2. He invented a self-driving car technology
Russell’s Luminar is a start-up that develops automotive lidar (light detection and ranging) hardware and software technology that “uses lasers to detect and measure distance and ultimately create a 3D map of the real-world environment that can be used in self-driving”, as per CNBC.
Luminar’s lidar sensors are now being used by major automotive customers such as Volvo, Toyota and Intel’s Mobileye. Recently, Luminar was selected for use in Nvidia’s Drive Hyperion Autonomous Vehicle Reference Platform which aims to produce final software in 2024.