James Dacombe dropped out of high school to launch his first startup. Now he’s Europe’s youngest self-made billionaire after his new AI chip company Olix raised funds at a $3.3 billion valuation.
Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciapark/2026/08/15/british-ai-chip-founder-becomes-europes-youngest-self-made-billionaire/
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Bullshit. Forbes just doesn’t understand money. Dacombe doesn’t have a billion dollars or anything he could sell for a billion dollars. Forbes just doesn’t get the difference between “wealth” and “implied valuation”.
You’re actually the one confusing wealth with cash. Nobody is claiming Dacombe has $1bn sitting in his bank account. Olix just raised $312m from external investors at a $3.3bn valuation. He owns roughly 30%, making that stake worth around $990m at the price investors have just paid, and he also owns 12% of CoMind. Equity is an asset and therefore forms part of net worth. That’s literally how the wealth of almost every founder billionaire is calculated. You can argue that private-company shares are illiquid and the valuation could change, but saying Forbes “doesn’t understand money” because they count equity as wealth is a pretty spectacular misunderstanding of how net worth works.
One day you will tell a story about me 😤