[imagesource: David Paul/Bloomberg]

At 25, I was still trying to figure things out, still studying, and definitely nowhere near getting my finances in order.

I’m still nowhere near getting my finances in order, but that’s a story for another day.

Then there’s Luminar founder and CEO, Austin Russell, who at 25, is Forbes’ newest youngest self-made billionaire.

He founded his company at the age of 17, which aims to bring self-driving cars to the market.

Take a moment to process that – 17 years of age:

“It’s been insanely intense, grueling . . . everything through every day that we’ve had to go through, scaling this up. And of course it’s incredibly rewarding to have an opportunity to be able to get out there now and get into the public markets and scale through this IPO SPAC,” 25-year-old Russell tells Forbes in a video interview from his office in Palo Alto, California.

“I’m still relatively young, but … a lot of blood, sweat and tears have gone into it. And I was fortunate enough to be able to retain a good enough stake.”

‘Good enough’ doesn’t begin to describe it.

His 104,7 million shares, which accounts for roughly a third of Luminar’s equity, is worth, as of Thursday this week, $2,4 billion.

The listing, announced in August, resulted from a merger with special purpose acquisition company Gores Metropoulos, a unit of Beverly Hills-based finance firm The Gores Group, and raised Luminar’s estimated market value to $3.4 billion prior to the start of trading.

Investors in his company include fellow billionaire Peter Thiel, who helped get Russell get started, Volvo Cars Tech Fund, Alec Gores of The Gores Group, and another billionaire who is also a Luminar board member, Dean Metropoulos.

Image: Luminar

Thiel, who is also the co-founder of Paypal, created a fellowship that offers young people with potential the money ($100 000) and the opportunity to drop out of university to go after their dreams.

Russell dropped out of Stanford University to found his company and says it’s the best thing that he ever did. That’s him, above, at 22, already making waves.

Russell, who’s also a Forbes 30 Under 30 alumfrom the class of 2018, isn’t looking to take on self-driving tech giants like Alphabet’s Waymo or GM-backed Cruise, but instead is perfecting sensors that help autonomous cars “see” their surroundings by bouncing a laser beam off objects in their path.

It’s known as ‘Lidar’ which stands for ‘light detection and ranging’.

The tech is a massive step in the right direction if autonomous vehicles are going to work effectively enough to be safe on the roads.

Some background on Russell to make you feel better about your own choices at 17. He was a bit of a prodigy, making him tough to compete with.

As the story goes, he memorized the periodic table of elements at 2 years old and rewired his Nintendo DS game console into a crude mobile phone when he was in the sixth grade after his parents forbade him from having one.

At 13, he filed his first patent: an underground water recycling system that catches sprinkler water and saves it for future gardening to reduce wastewater.

Rather than go to high school, he spent his teen years at the University of California at Irvine’s Beckman Laser Institute.

So, yeah, he was not your average kid.

You can read more about his climb to greatness here.

With the company’s value on the rise, he could be even richer in the coming years.

[source:forbes]