{"slug": "gilded-lives-of-ai-barons-how-tech-tycoons-have-become-new-jet-setting-elite-and", "title": "Gilded lives of AI barons: How tech tycoons have become new jet-setting elite from Palm Beach mansions and golf with Trump and private jets", "summary": "AI billionaires are emerging as a new jet-setting elite, with the global AI market projected to reach $4.8 trillion by 2033, according to UN Trade and Development. Notable figures include Elon Musk, who owns a fleet of private Gulfstream jets, and Ian Hathaway, who leads OpenAI's $175 million Startup Fund and was recently seen with former tennis star Eugenie Bouchard. Lucy Guo, 31, became the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire in 2025, and San Francisco's median home sale price hit a record $1.76 million in May 2026.", "body_md": "# Gilded lives of AI barons: How tech tycoons have become new jet-setting elite from Palm Beach mansions and golf with Trump and private jets\n\n**See more Daily Mail on Google -**[save us as a Preferred Source](https://google.com/preferences/source?q=dailymail.com)\n\nFrom golfing with [Donald Trump](/news/donald_trump/index.html) at the Mar-a-Lago Club estate, to lounging on yachts and boarding private jets, [AI](/sciencetech/ai/index.html) billionaires are increasingly emerging as the new jet-setting elite.\n\nTech trailblazers live in sprawling mansions in Palm Beach, Miami and [Hawaii](/news/hawaii/index.html), enjoying the luxurious lifestyle afforded by their contributions to innovation.\n\nFuelled by the AI boom, a new generation of power brokers has emerged, mirroring the meteoric rise of entrepreneurs in the late-1990s dot-com frenzy.\n\nThe sector is fast becoming the defining technology of our time with UN Trade and Development reports projecting the global AI market will soar to $4.8trillion by 2033 – a 25-fold increase in just a decade.\n\nAnd for those leading the tech revolution comes a life of ultimate luxury, from mega-yachts and lavish holidays to multi-million-pound estates.\n\nxAI founder Elon Musk owns a fleet of private Gulfstream jets and vintage cars while Ian Hathaway, who controls [OpenAI](/sciencetech/openai/index.html)'s Startup Fund, was recently spotted hand in hand with former tennis star Eugenie Bouchard on a sunny getaway in Lake Como.\n\nAnd it's not just men on top: 31-year-old Lucy Guo unseated [Taylor Swift](/tvshowbiz/taylor_swift/index.html) as the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire in 2025.\n\nNow, her Instagram is full of glamorous snaps of the American sunning herself on the beach, walking catwalks and jet-setting across the world on extravagant holidays.\n\nSan Francisco, meanwhile, has seen an astonishing housing boom supercharged by AI with the median sale price in the city as of May 2026 at a record high of $1.76million.\n\n## The OpenAI genius dating a glamorous tennis star\n\nIan Hathaway began his career as an economist but he now leads the investment fund of US AI research organisation OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.\n\nHaving worked for the fund since 2021, Hathaway took over the reins from CEO Sam Altman in 2024 after he stepped down.\n\nThe $175million OpenAI Startup Fund invests in early-stage AI startups where it believes AI can have a transformative effect – including in healthcare, law, education and energy and infrastructure.\n\nBefore joining OpenAI, Hathaway was an investor at Haystack, a San Francisco-based seed-stage VC firm, which made early investments in companies such as Instacart and Doordash, as well as cloud infrastructure company HashiCorp, petcare service provider Wag and equity management platform Carta.\n\nIn June, he was listed in Global Corporate Venturing's 2026 Powerlist – representing 100 individuals spearheading the future of the corporate venturing industry.\n\nWeeks later, the investor was photographed with tennis glamour girl Eugenie Bouchard in northern Italy.\n\nFormer tennis star Eugenie Bouchard was seen cosying up to OpenAI company partner Ian Hathaway as they enjoyed a sunny getaway to Lake Como\n\nBouchard, who retired from professional tennis in 2025, was seen hand-in-hand with Hathaway as they headed out for a stroll after canoodling together in a swimming pool\n\nThe Canadian sports star, 32, was dressed in a cream minidress as she relaxed in the sunshine with the venture capital investor on the shores of Lake Como.\n\nBouchard was seen hand-in-hand with Hathaway as they headed out for a stroll after canoodling together in the swimming pool at Villa D’Este, a luxurious resort.\n\nIt came after she wrapped a much-praised debut in broadcasting at the Wimbledon Championships.\n\nBouchard, who retired from professional tennis in 2025 following the Canadian Open, shared several photos and videos on Instagram from her Italian trip – though Hathaway doesn’t make any appearances in the posts.\n\n## The Instagram-loving 'world's youngest self-made female billionaire'\n\nLucy Guo, a computer science college dropout, has an estimated net worth of $1.5billion after cofounding data labelling giant Scale AI with Alexander Wang in 2016.\n\nGuo left the business two years later in 2018 holding on to much of her stake, and that same year she made the Forbes' 30 Under 30 list.\n\nIn 2022, she founded Passes – a platform for influencers and celebrities to connect with fans that's similar to Patreon and OnlyFans – raising $50million from investors.\n\nLucy Guo, a computer science college dropout, has an estimated net worth of $1.5billion after cofounding data labeling giant Scale AI\n\nNow, her Instagram is full of glamorous snaps of the American sunning herself on the beach, walking catwalks and jet-setting across the world on extravagant holidays\n\nShe owns three main residential properties: a newly constructed mansion in LA’s Hollywood Hills, overlooking the Sunset Strip, for nearly $30million, a $6.7million condo in Florida, and a farmhouse-style home in LA, which she secured at $4.2million.\n\nHer mansion in the Hollywood Hills has a cantilevered glass living room, an infinity pool with a spa, a sunken fire pit, and a 5,000 square foot garden, according to the property listing.\n\nShe posts dazzling photos to her 208,000 Instagram followers of her attending exclusive parties, DJing at festivals and boarding private jets.\n\n'Honestly, I still feel the same as that little girl, like my life pre-money and post-money, it hasn’t really changed that much,' Ms Guo told CNBC Make It. 'I still find deals like I pretty much only order buy-one-get-one-free on Uber Eats.'\n\nWhile Guo does enjoy some downtime, extended time off from her company is not ever on the cards.\n\n'I've never really had a real vacation,' she told Fortune. 'Even when I'm on vacation I'm working at least eight hours per day.'\n\nOutside of work, Guo is a fitness fanatic and can often be found keeping fit at Barry's Bootcamp, a boutique, high-intensity workout class which she attends twice a day.\n\nIn April 2025, she celebrated reaching a mind-blowing 3000 classes and credited her 'discipline' over prioritising sleep as the secret to her achievement.\n\n## The AI mogul who dumped his wife for a younger woman\n\nChey Tae-won is a South Korean billionaire businessman and the chairman of SK Group, one of Korea's largest conglomerates with interests in telecom, semiconductors, chemicals and energy, among others.\n\nWith a net worth of $5.3billion, he is South Korea's ninth richest person.\n\nBut the dramatic downfall of his marriage meant he immediately entered the history books of his country for a reason other than his business success.\n\nHe was the billionaire atop blockbuster memory chip maker SK Hynix.\n\nShe was the daughter of a past president.\n\nTogether, Chey and Roh Soh-yeong were South Korea’s romanticised ‘marriage of the century' for 27 years.\n\nLast week, Chey was ordered to pay his ex-wife 944bn won (£489million) in a case that local media dubbed the 'divorce of the century'.\n\nIt was the fallout from a marital betrayal from more than a decade ago, when the AI mogul penned a scandalous three-page letter to a South Korean newspaper.\n\nIn the confession that shook the nation, he described how he loved another woman and had fathered a child with her.\n\nChloe Kim and Chey Tae-Won attend the 'One Planet, Building Bridges To A Better Future' Gala at Fondation Louis Vuitton on October 14, 2023 in Paris, France\n\nThis picture taken on June 26 shows Roh Soh-yeong, director of Art Center Nabi, arriving at a court to attend her retrial regarding the division of assets with her former husband SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won at the Seoul High Court in Seoul\n\nIn court papers cited by local media, he said he didn’t believe his marriage could be redeemed and quoted the opening of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina: the Russian tragedy centred around an infidelity: 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.'\n\nHe married Kim Hee-young – the woman 15 years his junior with whom he had already fathered a child – in 2015.\n\nRoh later sued Kim over the affair, and a court ordered Chey and Kim to jointly pay her roughly $1.5million in damages.\n\nThe tech mogul posts Instagram photos of himself to his almost 90,000 followers, posing with Silicon Valley chief executives such as Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.\n\nChey, who goes by 'Tony' in the West, enjoyed a golfing session at Palm Beach's Mar-a-Lago before a meeting with President Donald Trump last autumn, while Joe Biden had called him a 'pal' during a 2022 visit.\n\nThe cash award to Roh is a record for South Korea, even though substantially lower than a settlement of 1.38 trillion won ordered by the appeals court in 2024.\n\nFund managers and analysts said it meant Chey may still need to sell shares in units of SK Group or use them as collateral to raise funds for payment, but probably would not affect management control of the conglomerate.\n\n'This likely won't affect management control of SK Group,' said Park Ju-gun, head of corporate analysis firm Leaders Index.\n\nSK Group's international profile has soared on the back of the artificial intelligence boom.\n\nIts chip affiliate, SK Hynix, has become a key supplier of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips used with Nvidia's AI processors, making the company one of the biggest beneficiaries of surging demand for advanced semiconductors.\n\n## Elon Musk's pronatalist fantasy and his love of private jets\n\nIf in business Elon Musk seeks endless innovation and danger, his private life is defined by the same turbulence and chaos.\n\n[Musk](/sciencetech/elon-musk/index.html) has welcomed 14 children with four different partners: Justine Wilson, Grimes, Shivon Zilis and St. Clair.\n\nBeginning with the arrival of his firstborn son in 2002, who tragically passed away at ten months old, the tech billionaire's children are: Nevada, Vivian, Griffin, Kai, Saxon, Damian, X Æ A-Xii, Exa, Strider, Azure, Techno, Arcadia, Seldon Lycurgus, and Romulus.\n\nElon Musk, who runs xAI, is the world's richest man, with a total net worth of $719billion\n\nElon Musk's 2015 Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. GVI, 22 seat, twin engine jet is seen parked at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (AUS) in Austin, Texas on Tuesday, July, 2022\n\nFollowing the death of Nevada, Musk and his then-wife Wilson subsequently welcomed twins Vivian and Griffin, followed by triplets Kai, Saxon, and Damian.\n\nAfter their divorce in 2008, Musk later welcomed three children with Grimes, four children with former Tesla employee Zilis, and, most recently, a son named Romulus with Ashley St. Clair.\n\nHis eldest daughter, Vivian, has admitted she has a hard time keeping track of just how many siblings she has.\n\n'I will say I do not actually know how many siblings I have, if you include half-siblings,' the model told Teen Vogue, adding that she is on 'good terms' with those she does know, despite having a difficult relationship with her father.\n\nThe tech mogul, who has a net worth of $719billion, operates a fleet of four private jets and once owned seven homes.\n\nIn 2020, however, Musk took to X to announce that he was 'selling almost all physical possessions' and 'will own no house'.\n\nHe sold all seven of his homes in California for $128million, and said he would reside in a small rental home in Texas, believed to be worth $50,000.\n\nNow, the SpaceX founder has made his base in multiple traditional, stucco houses near each other in a nondescript, upscale suburban area about a 15-minute drive from downtown Austin.\n\nThe pronatalist CEO bought the properties intending to create a compound where the mothers of his children could live with their offspring – but many of them have refused to stay there.\n\n## Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's Hawaii hideaway\n\nIn 2025, Jensen Huang's Nvidia became the first company in the world to reach a valuation of $5trillion.\n\nNvidia is the computer chip designer spearheading the artificial intelligence revolution.\n\nIts technology – once used to create graphics for video games – is capable of training AI models to perform tasks like image, facial and speech recognition as well as generating text for chatbots like ChatGPT.\n\nHe is the seventh richest person in the world with a net worth of $172.6billion, according to Forbes.\n\nIt marks an astonishing reversal of fortune for a shy former Denny's worker who was bullied at his Kentucky school after arriving from Thailand when he was nine.\n\nBut then everything about Huang's story is astonishing and showcases the powerful potential of when hard work, perseverance and good luck combine.\n\nEverything about Huang's story is astonishing and showcases the powerful potential of when hard work, perseverance and good luck combine. Pictured: His home on San Francisco's Billionaires' Row\n\nIn 2025, Jensen Huang's Nvidia became the first company in the world to reach a valuation of $5 trillion\n\nToday, the 63-year-old father of two lives with his wife Lori on San Francisco's Billionaires' Row where homes cost tens of millions of dollars and you can count tech giants Larry Ellison and David Sachs as neighbours.\n\nThe 11,400-square-foot, seven-bedroom property boasts panoramic views of the city's Gold Coast and has an estimated worth of $38million.\n\nHis property portfolio totals approximately $53million across three dwellings, including a $6.9million estate in Los Altos Hills, and an $8million compound in Maui.\n\nAs his wealth has ballooned, Huang too has transformed. Once a geeky, unassuming computer scientist, he is now a Silicon Valley rockstar – armed always in his trademark black leather jacket and with a tattoo of the Nvidia logo on his left arm.\n\n## The OpenAI CEO worth $3.3billion\n\nSam Altman, the 41-year-old CEO of OpenAI and a prolific venture investor, has a net worth of $3.3billion.\n\nHe bought a luxury mansion in San Francisco's Russian Hill neighbourhood for $27million in 2020, though he would later sue its developers and contractors for issues such as 'substandard work' and 'financial embezzlement', [Realtor.com](https://www.realtor.com/news/celebrity-real-estate/sam-altman-openai-home/) reported.\n\nHe also purchased three more lots around the six-bedroom, seven-bathroom San Francisco property.\n\nThe LLC he bought the mansion through said it was 'reported to be the most expensive home listing in San Francisco history', when it was first put on the market.\n\nThe billionaire also owns a 950-acre ranch in Napa County.\n\nHe bought the property for $15.7million in 2020.\n\nA view of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's house in Russian Hill after a suspected Molotov cocktail attack in San Francisco, California, United States on April 13\n\nOpenAI boss Sam Altman, 41, married his younger lover Oliver Mulherin at an intimate ceremony in Hawaii last year\n\nThe total value of his real estate portfolio is $124million.\n\nIn January 2024, Altman married his partner, Oliver Mulherin, in a seaside ceremony.\n\nIn April this year, a 20-year-old man approached the gate of his San Francisco home and hurled a molotov cocktail at the building before fleeing.\n\nThe suspect, Daniel Moreno-Gama, was arrested less than two hours later while allegedly trying to break into the headquarters of OpenAI with a jug of kerosene, a lighter and an anti-AI manifesto.\n\nFederal and California state authorities subsequently charged Moreno-Gama with a range of crimes, including attempted arson and attempted murder.\n\nHe pleaded not guilty in May and his preliminary hearing is scheduled for August 19 after he requested a voluntary extension.\n\n## The Facebook founder worth $232billion\n\nA 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg first started Facebook in 2004 for students to match names with photos of classmates.\n\nFrom his Harvard dorm room, the businessman managed to steer the platform from a university-based social site to the largest social network in the world.\n\nSince then, Zuckerberg has rebranded Facebook Inc. into Meta Platforms Inc., with a focus on building the metaverse and developing major AI initiatives.\n\nMark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan during their wedding at Zuckerberg's home in Palo Alto, California, USA, May 19, 2012\n\nAn animated Mark Zuckerberg was filmed flapping his arms frantically as he honed his hydrofoil skills in Hawaii over the weekend\n\nThe Facebook boss has been investing billions of dollars in data centres and the best research talent in a bid to dominate the superintelligence space, and he even created an AI version of himself with the intention to offer 'conversation and feedback' to his staff.\n\nAs he continues his battle to conquer the world of AI, the billionaire has also been developing his vast property portfolio.\n\nWith an estimated net worth of $232billion, Zuckerberg already owns homes in Lake Tahoe, Palo Alto and Kauai and is reported to be developing a sprawling $170million mega mansion in Florida.\n\nAnd when he is not working, the tech-entrepreneur has been known to take up extravagant hobbies.\n\nZuckerberg has been honing his hydrofoiling skills, having been pictured multiple times having fun in the water on his $12,000 Efoil board, which allows users to glide above the water at speeds up to 25mph.\n\nHe also actively trains in martial arts. He is a blue belt and trains with top-tier coaches and fighters, notably earning gold and silver medals in his competitive Brazilian jiu-jitsu debut.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/gilded-lives-of-ai-barons-how-tech-tycoons-have-become-new-jet-setting-elite-and", "canonical_source": "https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15999525/Gilded-lives-AI-barons-tech-tycoons-new-jet-setting-elite-Palm-Beach-mansions-golf-Trump-private-jets.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=1490", "published_at": "2026-08-02 14:13:16+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-02 14:52:01.171663+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-startups"], "entities": ["Donald Trump", "Elon Musk", "Ian Hathaway", "OpenAI", "Eugenie Bouchard", "Lucy Guo", "Taylor Swift", "Sam Altman"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/gilded-lives-of-ai-barons-how-tech-tycoons-have-become-new-jet-setting-elite-and", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/gilded-lives-of-ai-barons-how-tech-tycoons-have-become-new-jet-setting-elite-and.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/gilded-lives-of-ai-barons-how-tech-tycoons-have-become-new-jet-setting-elite-and.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/gilded-lives-of-ai-barons-how-tech-tycoons-have-become-new-jet-setting-elite-and.jsonld"}}