Person attributes
Other attributes
Austin Russell is an engineer, business leader, and industry pioneer. He is the founder, CEO, and chairman of the board of Luminar Technologies (NASDAQ: LAZR), a company he started in 2012 when he was seventeen and a senior in high school. Luminar is the global leader in automotive LiDAR (light detection and ranging) hardware and software technology.
Luminar went public in December 2020, making Russell the world's youngest self-made billionaire at age twenty-five. He was also awarded the Thiel Fellowship in 2013 when he was eighteen, and he has been named in the MIT Tech Review Innovators Under 35, Forbes' 30 under 30, Fortune's 40 under 40 and MotorTrend's PowerList.
Russell lives in Orlando, Florida, near the Luminar Technologies headquarters, and he also has property in Southern California. His net worth in 2022 is estimated at $1.4 billion.
Forbes portrait on Austin Russell
Russell developed his first visioning system at age eleven by building prototype supercomputers and optoelectronic systems with real-world applications in mind. At age fifteen, his parents connected him to a mentor, Jason Eichenholz, who was an accomplished entrepreneur in the field of lasers and later became a Luminar cofounder. After meeting Russell, Eichenholz helped him get a job while still a teenager at the Beckman Laser Institute, a research organization in Irvine, California.
Russell developed the idea for and founded Luminar in 2012, when he was seventeen and a senior in high school.As of 2022, Russell has raised over $1 billion for Luminar, and the company is valued at $7 billion.
In the spring of 2013, he was awarded the $100,000 Thiel Fellowship, a program funded by billionaire Peter Thiel. Russell was awarded the fellowship to focus on 3D depth mapping and projection of interactive holograms through a compact laser-based module.
In December 2021, he made a $70 million donation to Orlando-based nonprofit Central Florida Foundation, which locally stewards philanthropic dollars on behalf of individuals, families, and nonprofits. On January 1, 2022, he donated $4 million to TeamSeas to help them reach their $30 million goal in the final hours of their fundraiser to aid in their mission to remove 30 million pounds of trash from beaches, rivers, and oceans.
In 2013, he graduated high school from St. Margaret’s Episcopal School in San Juan Capistrano, California, and started studying applied physics at Stanford University.He dropped out of Stanford three months later to focus full-time on the Thiel Fellowship and Luminar.
Russell was born March 14, 1995. His hometown is Newport Beach, California. He states he memorized the periodic table of the elements when he was two years old, and by the time he turned eleven, he was tinkering with supercomputers.
In sixth grade, he converted a Nintendo DS to a mobile phone by modifying the firmware because his parents refused to buy him a phone. In eighth grade, Russell designed a recycling system that recaptured water that flowed from his yard into street drains and out to the ocean for his science fair project. He won first place in the state science fair and filed a patent for that system. The patent was final on December 5, 2017.
As a teenager, he spent time doing research at the University of California at Irvine's Beckman Laser Institute and did his own experiments in 3D-depth mapping, early cancer detection systems, wireless power, and interactive holograms. He conducted his work in his family's garage, which he converted into an office and workspace.
