Bill Gates first made the Forbes magazine list of the 400 wealthiest Americans in 1986, when he was just 30 years old, and the Microsoft (MSFT) chairman has topped the list in each of the past 18 years.
Gates joined the club relatively late in life, though, at least by the standards of today's high-tech billionaires. (Microsoft owns and publishes MSN Money.)
At age 27, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been a billionaire since he was 24. Dustin Moskovitz, just eight days older than Zuckerberg, is also a billionaire.
In fact, four of the five youngest Forbes 400 members got rich from Facebook, though only Zuckerberg, who broke into the top 20 for the first time this year, remains at the social-networking website.
The other two are Eduardo Saverin, 29, and Sean Parker, 31, whom the movie "The Social Network" portrayed as enemies.
Together these four control just over $25 billion of wealth.There are seven other digital pioneers among the nation's 20 youngest billionaires, including Yahoo (YHOO) co-founders Jerry Yang, 42, and David Filo, 45, who launched the Internet portal 17 years ago and barely made the financial cut this year.
Among other tech titans on the list are Reid Hoffman, 44, who took LinkedIn (LNKD) public earlier this year, and Mark Pincus, 45, the Zynga co-founder who rode the success of online games like Farmville to his first appearance in the Forbes 400.
Among other notables less than half the age of Warren Buffett are the investor John Arnold, 37, a former energy trader at Enron who now heads the hedge fund Centaurus Advisors; Daniel Ziff, at 39 the youngest heir to the Ziff-Davis publishing empire; and 28-year-old Scott Duncan, who inherited a $3.4 billion stake in the oil pipeline empire co-founded by his father, Dan Duncan, who passed away last year.
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