Forbes list confirms Limerick’s John Collison as the youngest self-made billionaire in the world

What had you done with your life by the time you were 26?

If you’re John Collison, you’d have become the youngest self-made billionaire in the world by that age, but there aren’t many twenty-somethings like John and his brother Patrick, who, in fact, are two of only four self-made billionaires in the world in their 20s. The others? Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, co-founders of a little-known social media app known as Snapchat. John and Patrick are two of the 195 newcomers on Forbes World’s Billionaires list for 2017, which as you’re probably well aware of at this stage, is down to the phenomenal success of online payment processing firm Stripe. According to Forbes, both John (26) and Patrick (28) each have an estimated fortune of $1.1 billion (approximately €1.02 billion) thanks to their firm raising money at a $9.2 billion valuation last year. Not bad, considering one of them was not even two years of age during Italia ’90 and the other wasn’t even born. Let that sink in for a minute. You can check out the 2017 Forbes World’s Billionaires list in full here, which includes Bill Gates as number one for the fourth year in a row.