


While the other kids played jump rope, Austin would take a jump rope and swing it overhead, wondering why the rope didn’t come down, his mother revealed to the Orange County Register.
#AUSTIN RUSSELL LUMINAR WIKIPEDIA SOFTWARE#
Of course, it’d be negligible to forget that he worked as a software consultant by the seasoned age of ten. “Our class was asked by the teacher, ‘who do you admire most?’ When I answered ‘Bill Gates,’ most of the students looked confused and said, ‘who is that?'” “When I was in preschool, I was experimenting with water and prisms, and also spent many weekends at the Discovery Science Center,” he remembers. What some would call genius made an appearance at a time toddler Austin was but two years old, he memorized the entire periodic table of elements. Taking into account these career paths, this tech prodigy may have more professionally in common with his paternal and maternal grandfathers as the former invented our modern-day electric blanket and the latter once built a raceway. His father, Michael, brokered commercial real estate while his mother, Shannon, was a model who occasionally dabbled in public speaking. ChildhoodĪustin was born on Pi Day in March of 1996 and grew up along the sparkling, sun-drenched shores of Orange County’s famed Newport Beach.

Regardless of the fact that the foundation of his wealth is pretty much exclusively on paper at this juncture, it’s important to observe the brilliance of Luminar CEO Austin Russell and thoroughly analyze the steps he took in life to procure such a promising future after only a quarter-century’s existence on Earth. So you might be wondering, how does somebody who owns a company that actually posts annual net losses by the millions of dollars become a billionaire? Basking in the marvelous magic of a capitalistic society, we’re happy to humbly retort, it happens much more often than you’d think. Then they hauled in $15 million of revenue in 2 020, however, that’s paired with operating losses of $72 million. If we peel the curtain back, over the course of 2019, Luminar had $12.6 million in revenue while also reporting a net loss of $94.7 million. Luminar touts a market cap north of $10 billion and trades at over 350x projected 2021 revenue, making Russell’s rise into the billionaire ranks entirely based on the value of his holdings in the high-tech sensor manufacturer. Russell has impressively managed to hang onto a personal stake worth nearly a third of his company, all things considered in Silicon Valley’s shark-infested venture capitalist environment, and maintains 83% of the voting power whilst functioning as chairmen of the board, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Shares in Orlando-based Luminar closed with a value of $22.98 on its IPO day, up 28% from a closing price of $18 just twenty-four hours earlier, when the shares traded as Gores Metropoulos stock. “We set up the company to be a long-term sustainable business and power the future of autonomy for all of these automakers. “It is totally surreal and it totally makes sense and it is hard to explain the dichotomy of it, but this has always been the goal,” he told CNBC’s Squawk Box in an interview following the news of his recently struck fortune. The company he started as a teenager attending high school engineers cutting edge lidar technology paramount to the development of fully autonomous vehicles that can be realistically priced for mass-market appeal. Capping off an already unbelievable trip around the Sun, December 2020 saw wall street introduce the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, twenty-five-year-old CEO and founder of Luminar, Austin Russell.
