The Times Magazine 21he problem with hyper-successful
young tech billionaires is that we
tend to start mythologising them
the moment they appear. Perhaps
it’s because we struggle to compute
the vast sums of money they are
making. Perhaps it’s because we
like to tell ourselves that the
wan-faced nerds who sculpt the
landscape of modern life deserve
their positions of power because they are – and
have always been – so special. Even though we
know, deep down, that things are rarely so
simple, we still tend to look at our Mark
Zuckerbergs and Elon Musks as though their
success was preordained, their genius clear
from the crib. That they were obvious prodigies,
just waiting to float on the stock market.
The problem with Austin Russell, who
is himself a hyper-successful young tech
billionaire, is that he does very little to dispel
these kinds of myths. When he was two years
old, he memorised the periodic table of
elements and could recite them all, on cue,
from hydrogen to ununoctium. Growing up
in Newport Beach, California, he seemed to
possess a preternatural aptitude for soaking up
information – physics, electronics, computer
programming – and then using that new
knowledge to build things. Aged ten, he found
work moonlighting as a software consultant.
Aged 11 and denied a mobile phone by his
parents, he hacked and reconfigured his
Nintendo DS handheld games console so
that it would function as one. He then called
his perplexed mother, simply to let her know
what he had done. “I remember doing it from
the bus to school,” he says, still tickled. “It was
fun stuff early on.”
It wasn’t long before Russell turned his
mind to less playful problems. At 13, he filed
his first patent for an underground system
that would recycle sprinkler water. He became
fascinated with laser technology and turned
the family garage into a makeshift lab while
his father (who “worked in commercial real
estate”) and his mother (“who did a bunch
of different things but nothing technology
related”) resigned themselves to parking on
the street and left him to whatever “black
magic” he was busying himself with behind
the garage doors. He invented a holographic
computer keyboard. He invented a laser that
could detect whether a mole was cancerous.
He developed a theoretical framework to
charge electrical devices by beaming down
energy from satellites. He got a job at the
Beckman Laser Institute research centre
at 16. You know. Obvious prodigy stuff.
At 17, he began a physics degree at Stanford
University only to drop out after a few months
to found his own start-up, which he called
Luminar. For the time being, all you really
need to understand about Luminar is thatRussell created it in order to develop laser
sensor technology for autonomous vehicles.
Which is to say, he made it his mission to
help the self-driving cars of the future navigate
the world around them. And then one day in
December 2020, Luminar finally debuted on
the stock exchange as a public company. The
following morning, Russell woke up to find
that his stake in the business meant he was
suddenly worth $2.4 billion, aged 25.
Which means he is today the world’s
youngest self-made billionaire. It does all feel
a little strange, he admits. Although, given
everything he’s done over the past 15 years or
so, nor is it a complete surprise. He chooseshis words. “There are some elements of it that
are surreal. But there are many elements that
just make total sense.”
Russell is tall, with a stubbly beard,
sonorous voice and a fondness for plain shirts
and cardigans. He could pass, quite easily, for
a young American pastor. Does he have a
girlfriend, I ask. A fiancée? Anything like that?
“It’s effectively none of the above right now,”
he says. “That may change down the line.
But when it comes down to it, building the
business is the No 1 priority right now.”
He’s not joking. Russell says he can
sometimes work “100 or 120 hours a week,
depending on the intensity of what’s going
on”. As a child, he says he had a “borderline
obsession” with building new things. “I used to
be an information sponge, you know? There
was a point where I was reading north of
1,000 articles or papers a day, just skimming
through them, trying to find out how things
work.” He would listen to university lectures
online – “but my trick was to play them back
at two or three times the speed” – and has
no social media presence whatsoever as he’d
sooner not have the distraction.
“I’m curious on the social media thing.
What would be your approach?” he asks. “Do
you think I should ever create, like, a Twitter
account in the future?” I say that, on balance,
he’s probably best sticking with how he’s been
doing things so far. It seems to be working out.
And yet despite all this Russell is, in the
flesh, neither a twitchy automaton nor some
aloof Silicon Valley visionary. Instead he is
on the affable side of businesslike and though
admittedly more enthusiastic about lasers than
the average person, in the grand scheme of
tech billionaires, he just seems quite... normal.
He is at peace with this. “I think there’s
a level of quirkiness that’s acceptable andT
Austin Russell in 2017.
Below: Tesla CEO Elon MuskHe laughs when I mention
Elon Musk’s view. ‘I work
with 50 carmakers and
pretty much all of them
disagree with Elon’
EPA