For two and a half decades, the Forbes Midas List has acted as the scoreboard for the world's most successful venture capitalists. While the faces on the list change with the seasons, a small cluster of startups has consistently generated the kind of wealth that makes legends. These companies are the engines of the industry. They dictate which investors land at the top of the pile.
SpaceX, the aerospace giant launched by Elon Musk in 2002, stands as a massive outlier in this history. For years, the conventional wisdom in venture capital was to stay far away from industries packed with government contractors or hardware that costs a fortune to build. Musk ignored that. By perfecting reusable rockets and building a massive satellite network through Starlink, SpaceX proved that private capital could dominate the skies.
"SpaceX normalized the idea that startups could remain private at extraordinary scale."
Early backers like Peter Thiel and Luke Nosek of Founders Fund, alongside Steve Jurvetson of DFJ and Antonio Gracias of Valor Equity Partners, are currently seeing the fruits of their patience. They held their stakes through years of private market growth. They’re preparing for a massive payday when the company finally heads for a public stock exchange listing this coming June. The bet was a wild one, and it redefined what venture firms are willing to fund.
OpenAI, which started as a humble research lab in 2015, represents a different kind of speed. When ChatGPT dropped in late 2022, it didn't just become a product—it became the foundation for a new computing era. By positioning its large language models as the layer upon which all future software would be built, OpenAI triggered a feeding frenzy. Investors who got in early, such as Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures and Trae Stephens of Founders Fund, saw their portfolios balloon to values that used to be reserved for legacy tech titans.
There is a change in the plumbing of how these fortunes are made. In the old days, companies like Google or Meta hit the public markets relatively early in their life cycle. Today, businesses prefer to stay private. They soak up billions in funding without having to answer to the public every quarter. This means the enormous paper wealth is locked behind closed doors, rewarding only those with the right connections and the capital to play in the private arena.
ByteDance serves as the prime example of how this global game is played. By mastering the art of the algorithm with TikTok, the company changed how social media works globally. It forced giants like Meta to scrap their old playbooks and pivot to short-form video feeds. Even with the political drama surrounding its U.S. operations, which forced a major divestiture in January, the returns for backers like Neil Shen of HSG proved that massive, world-altering tech companies aren't strictly a Silicon Valley export.
Anthropic is proof that the AI gold rush isn't a winner-take-all scenario. Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, the company focused on AI safety and enterprise tools like Claude. By securing deep partnerships with Amazon and Google, they showed that there’s plenty of room at the top for multiple platforms. This helped catapult investors like Yasmin Razavi of Spark Capital and Matt Murphy of Menlo Ventures further up the rankings.
Some of the biggest winners aren't just selling gadgets or bots—they’re building the roads the entire internet drives on. Stripe, founded by Patrick and John Collison in 2010, turned online payments into a simple coding task. It grew into a financial operating system that keeps the internet running, earning the trust of investors like Michael Moritz of Sequoia. Their success story is one of boring, consistent execution in an industry that usually chases the next big shiny object.
Similarly, Databricks has become the backbone for modern data management. As generative AI demands more organization, their platform allows companies to store and train models internally. This has been a massive boon for investors like Ben Horowitz and David George of Andreessen Horowitz. While the tech headlines focus on the chatbots, these infrastructure players are quietly building the floorboards of the new digital economy.
Finally, we have the newcomer xAI, also founded by Elon Musk in 2023. With its integration into X and access to massive computing power, it isn't just another AI developer; it’s a platform. Investors like Shaun Maguire of Sequoia and David George of Andreessen Horowitz piled in early. They’re betting that Musk’s access to user data and hardware will give them a head start. It’s a perfect microcosm of today’s venture landscape: speed, massive stakes, and the blurring of lines between industrial tech, media, and artificial intelligence.