America's Youngest Billionaires

The Facebook phenomenon strikes again, this time helping catapult two new 20-somethings into the ranks of America's richest for the first time and bringing down the average age of America's richest ever so slightly to 65.7. Only eight American billionaires are under the age of 40, and three of them co-founded Facebook.

More from Forbes.com: • In Photos: Youngest American Billionaires • 15 Ways to Raise a Young Mogul • Billionaires in the Making

The youngest? It isn't who you think it is. The world's youngest billionaire is now 26-year-old Dustin Moskovitz, who is eight days younger than his former Harvard roommate and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. The social-networking site's first chief technology officer, Moskovitz left in 2008 and started Asana, a software company that allows individuals and small companies to better collaborate. The company has attracted several of the same early backers as Facebook and may one day be worth something. For now, though, Forbes estimates Moskovitz's entire $1.4 billion fortune comes from his 6 percent stake in Facebook.
Zuckerberg may no longer reign as the youngest member of the Forbes 400, but he has bragging rights as the year's biggest percentage gainer -- his net worth jumped to $6.9 billion, up from $2 billion, making him worth nearly five times as much as Moskovitz and more than even Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL - News) Steve Jobs.
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The third Facebook co-founder among the ranks is 28-year-old Eduardo Saverin, who once owned a one-third stake in Facebook. When Zuckerberg and Moskovitz quit school to relocate to California, Saverin stayed behind to graduate. A year later Facebook sued him; he countersued. The parties settled with Saverin apparently getting a 5 percent stake and a co-founder bio on Facebook's site. Don't feel bad. We estimate that share makes him worth $1.15 billion.
Technology, and in particular the Internet, has long been the best bet for getting rich at a young age. Bill Gates made his debut on the list in 1986 at age 30 with a net worth of $315 million. Michael Dell debuted at age 26; 19 years later, he is still among the list's 20 youngest. So too for Yahoo's (Nasdaq: YHOO - News) David Filo and Jerry Yang, who first made the ranks a dozen years ago. Indeed half of the 20 youngest America billionaires have made their fortunes in the tech industry, most via the Internet.
Outside the world of the Internet, young rich-list members have been able to cash in from a few other industries such as finance and sports. Hedge fund manager John Arnold, 36, got his start as an oil trader for Enron in 1995. He is said to have earned $750 million for the company in 2001. When Enron collapsed a year later, he went into business for himself, founding Centaurus, a hedge fund focusing mostly on natural gas, energy trading.
Five of the 20 youngest inherited their fortunes, including Scott Duncan, the only billionaire in his 20s who didn't strike it rich with Facebook. He and his siblings assumed control of the family's $12.4 billion pipeline empire after their father Dan Duncan's death last March.
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Worth noting about this bunch is not simply how quickly they've made their money, but how they are choosing to spend it, not so much on luxury homes or expensive toys but on causes about which they are passionate. Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG - News) Larry Page is buying up chunks of residential Palo Alto for a network of houses that use new types of fuel cells, geothermal energy and rainwater capture. He also rides a Zero X electric dirt bike and an electric sports car from Tesla Motors, in which he and Sergey Brin are investors. EBay's (Nasdaq: EBAY - News) Pierre Omidyar has donated to everything from a company that designs solar powered lanters to a political satire show in Kenya. Moskovitz gave $70,000 in support of Proposition 19, which is seeking to legalize marijuana in California in November. John Arnold has agreed to take the Giving Pledge, making the commitment to give the majority of his wealth to charity.
As for Zuckerberg, he still lives in a relatively modest rental home in Palo Alto, Calif. So what's he doing with his wealth? Not much so far, given that most of it is tied up in non-public shares of Facebook. Still, the 26-year-old announced on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" in September that he is giving away $100 million to Newark's schools. The gift is the largest philanthropic act by a person his age in American history.
Here's a look at the list:

©Kimberly White/Getty Images

Dustin Moskovitz
Net Worth: $1.4 billion
Source: Facebook
Age: 26
America's youngest billionaire is eight days younger than his former Harvard roommate Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook's first chief technology officer, he left in 2008 to start Asana, a software company that allows individuals and small companies to better collaborate. For now, his entire fortune comes from his 6 percent stake in Facebook.

©Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

Mark Zuckerberg
Net Worth: $6.9 billion
Source: Facebook
Age: 26
The Harvard dropout and Facebook CEO was the biggest percentage gainer on this year's Forbes 400 list and the unwitting star of box-office hit "The Social Network." Last month he agreed to donate $100 million to Newark's troubled schools.

Scott Duncan
Net Worth: $3.1 billion
Source: pipelines
Age: 27
The son of the late Dan Duncan assumed control of part of his family's $12.4 billion pipeline empire after his father's death last March. Their energy company, Enterprise Products, owns more than 49,000 miles of pipelines.

©PatrickMcMullan.com

Eduardo Saverin
Net Worth: $1.15 billion
Source: Facebook
Age: 28
Brazilian-born Saverin co-founded Facebook with Harvard classmate Mark Zuckerberg and for a brief time had a one-third stake. When Zuckerberg quit school to relocate to California, Saverin stayed behind to graduate. A year later Facebook sued him; he countersued. The parties settled with Saverin apparently getting a 5 percent stake and co-founder bio on Facebook's site.

©J. Scott Applewhite/AP

John Arnold
Net Worth: $3.3 billion
Source: hedge funds
Age: 36
The former Enron oil trader founded hedge fund Centaurus after the energy outfit famously collapsed. His fund now has $5 billion under management, and he and his wife Laura recently pledged half of their wealth to the Gates-Buffet challenge.

©Courtesy of Google

Sergey Brin
Net Worth: $15 billion
Source: Google
Age: 37
Emigrated from Russia at age 6; his mother was a research scientist at NASA. He met Larry Page in computer science Ph.D. program at Stanford and dropped out in 1998 to start Google. Brin now focuses on raising margins with Instant Search and building new businesses in communications, and he invests in space travel initiatives and Parkinson's research on the side.

©Courtesy of Google

Larry Page
Net Worth: $15 billion
Source: Google
Age: 37
The Google co-founder dropped out of his Stanford Ph.D. program in 1998 to start the search engine. Nowadays his personal passions include buying up chunks of residential Palo Alto for a network of houses that use new types of fuel cells, geothermal energy and rainwater capture. He also rides a Zero X electric dirt bike and an electric sports car from Tesla Motors, in which he and Sergey Brin are investors. Page is a board member of the X Prize Foundation, a nonprofit looking for breakthroughs in genomics, energy and space exploration.

©Victoria Will/Splash News/Newscom

Daniel Ziff
Net Worth: $4 billion
Source: inheritance, hedge funds
Age: 38
The youngest son of the late William Ziff Jr., who built the Ziff-Davis publishing empire (PC Magazine, Car & Driver, Boating) and later sold out. Daniel and his brothers Dirk and Robert inherited their father's fortune, which they have since reinvested in Ziff Brothers Investments. He recently got married.

©Eric Jamison/AP

Lorenzo Fertitta
Net Worth: $1 billion
Source: casinos, Ultimate Fighting Championship
Age: 41
Fertitta returns to billionaire status thanks to growing martial arts league Ultimate Fighting Championship, which he owns with his older brother Frank. Abu Dhabi investment is helping UFC go international. A scuba diver, he swims with sharks -- including tigers and great whites -- for fun.

©J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Jerry Yang
Net Worth: $1.15 billion
Source: Yahoo!
Age: 41
Born in Taiwan, Yang moved to the U.S. at age 10. He created his Web directory in 1994 with partner David Filo when both were Stanford grad students. Yahoo! co-founder made his debut among America's 400 richest at age 29. Still with Yahoo!, but no longer its head honcho. He sits on other boards and makes a number of charitable donations.
Click here to see the full list of Youngest American Billionaires

What $300,000 Buys In Homes Across America

There's good news for Americans thinking about buying a new house. Sure, the real estate market continues to struggle. But the median sale price for a single-family home is 22% lower than it was at its 2006 peak, and would-be buyers who've saved up a nest egg can get themselves some real bargains.
Some experts are still bullish on a housing recovery. But meanwhile, many American families have been unable to get financing as banks tighten lending standards, or are purposefully waiting out the market. That means there's pent-up demand, says Dr. Richard Green, director of the Lusk Center for Real Estate at the University of Southern California, "but you can still get about 33% more house than you could at the peak."
The bargains are better in some cities than others. A dollar buys a lot more in cities that were particularly hard-hit by the bursting real estate bubble--and you could spend the same on a tiny apartment in New York than you might for a five-bedroom manor in Florida.
In Pictures: What $300,000 Buys In Homes Across America In order to compare what you can get for your money across the country, we asked Realtor.com to look at 10 large U.S. cities and find a typical $300,000 single-family home in each. We chose $300,000 because it's a price that, depending on where you live, either barely scratches the low end of the market, or soars above the median price. In most cities, buyers can find a respectable house at that price--but the homes' features, size and proximity to the city center vary dramatically depending on geography.

Miami, Florida

In Miami, where record foreclosures and the collapse of a construction-dependent economy has decimated jobs, even the most speculative of investors are wary of buying new property. But with home prices well below their peak, deals abound. For $300,000 you'd be able to buy the largest house on our list, a pristine 3,449-square-foot, five-bedroom villa built in a sprawling subdivision in 2005, near the height of Miami's building frenzy.
In contrast, the same amount of money in Seattle, you'd have to settle for a simple three-bedroom one-third that size.

Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C., has a robust real estate market, at least compared with most other metros. The median sales price for a single-family home in the second quarter of 2010 was $331,600, according to the National Association of Realtors, so $300,000 will only buy you a modest stucco three-bedroom in a far-flung neighborhood. In Chicago, where houses sell for a median $203,800, you'll have more options, including a pleasant two-story with the same number of bedrooms, but double the bathrooms, and located in the city's "Bungalow Belt."

San Diego, California

By far the tiniest dwelling on our list is a 576-square-foot one-bedroom San Diego home that's in danger of foreclosure. But San Diegans might consider this potential short-sale with an upgraded kitchen, fireplace and tidy backyard a deal. While prices have fallen far from their peak in the city, they are still well above the national average--the median home price is $392,600.
You can get a lot more for your money in Houston, where $300,000 will buy a 3,193 square foot villa with 4 bedrooms and a hot tub. Lush palmetto trees frame the front door and a vaulted ceiling greets you on entry. In Houston, prices have always been more realistic. "Price drops are correlated with how far out of whack prices got in the first place," says Green. "Houston never went up very much, so it didn't have far to fall."

Atlanta, Georgia

In Atlanta $300,000 is more than double the median sale price. You can live quite well there for the money, in a charming brick two-bedroom built in 1938 in the city's historic Grant Park neighborhood. Wainscoting and crown moldings deck the interior, and the lot includes a large, shady backyard.
You'll also get a historic house for that price in Boston, but one that's far more run-down. The Victorian fixer-upper has potential, but the siding and interior details need work, and the rooms feel small and dark.

Boston, Massachusetts

Whether a few hundred grand will get you a sprawling great room and southern exposure or a dingy box on the outskirts of town, the most important consideration for home buyers should always be their personal circumstances, says Green. Viewing a home as an investment and not just a place to live is a dangerous move, since most buyers can't time or predict the vagaries of the housing market. "If you're buying it thinking ‘I'll probably make some money on it,' you're probably already buying it for the wrong reason."

What $300,000 Buys In Homes Across America

Atlanta, Ga.
Listing
Price: $305,000
Bedrooms/bathrooms: 2/2
Square Feet: 1,241
Description: 1930s brick bungalow with hardwood floors, central air conditioning and a library. Keller Williams Realty Peachtree Road has the listing.
Baltimore, Md.
Listing
Price: $299,999
Bedrooms/bathrooms: 3/1
Square Feet: 1,446
Description: Craftsman style stone-and-siding home with kitchen upgrades, oak floors and fireplace. Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage Towson has the listing.
Boston, Ma.
Listing
Price: $300,000
Bedrooms/bathrooms: 4/2
Square Feet: 1,989
Description: Traditional row house on a corner lot with hardwood floors, a fireplace and finished basement. Coldwell Banker Residential Mortgage Milton has the listing.
Chicago, Ill.
Listing
Price: $305,000
Bedrooms/bathrooms: 3/2.5
Square Feet: 1,731
Description: Georgian brick home with ceramic-tiled kitchen, oak staircase and expansive patio and backyard. Century 21 Pro-Team has the listing.
Miami, Fla.
Listing
Price: $299,000
Bedrooms/bathrooms: 5/4
Square Feet: 3,449
Description: Tract home built just before the bust in a sunny subdivision. Williams Realty Premier Properties has the listing.

A Day in the Life of Web 2.0

The latest powerful online tools can be harnessed to transform and expand the learning experience.
An 8th grade science teacher, Ms. S, retrieves her MP3 player from the computer-connected cradle where it's spent the night scanning the 17 podcasts she subscribes to. Having detected three new programs, the computer downloaded the files and copied them to the handheld. En route to work, Ms. S inserts the device into her dash-mounted cradle and reviews the podcasts, selecting a colleague's classroom presentation on global warming and a NASA conference lecture about interstellar space travel.
As with all the teachers at her middle school, Ms. S keeps a regular blog where she writes about everything from homework assignments to reflections on course topics, with a full description posted each Monday morning on the how, what, and why of course material to be taught in the upcoming week.
The teachers' blogs are all syndicated using RSS — Rich Site Summary, or the more informal and descriptive, Really Simple Syndication. With aggregation software, students, parents, administrators and other teachers can subscribe and have the freshly written blog entries immediately and automatically delivered to their desktops. Professional development, communication, cross-curricular lesson planning and articulation among grade levels are all served as educators regularly read each other's blogs and learn about topics and activities taking place in the various classrooms.
The Monday reports in particular enable them to benefit by sharing strategies and materials with colleagues who teach the same subject or those in other departments. For instance, Mr. K, a health and P.E. teacher, frequently finds ways of integrating science issues covered in Ms. S's classroom with his health topics. He knows that Ms. S will focus on genetics this week, and he will be teaching about disease next week, so he arranges for them to meet and discuss a combination assignment. In preparation for the meeting, Mr. K conducts a Web search to find the most informative sites and adds the Center for Disease Control to his social bookmarks. (See the sidebar "How to Search and Tag," at bottom, right.)
Meanwhile, social studies teacher Ms. L scans through sites tagged genetics in the school's social bookmark service. Her students may need quick access to them as they discuss genetic engineering current events during class. Mr. K's CDC site appears along with others that have been saved and tagged genetics. All assignments in Ms. L's class are turned in via blogs because she finds that their conversational nature encourages students to think and write in more depth than traditional formal essays or short answer assignments. Another advantage of receiving assignments in blog format is that both she and her students can subscribe, which means all of the kids' blogs appear in her aggregator, and students can reap the benefits of seeing each other's work.
Ms. L crafts the blog assignments with an eye toward training students to think critically and to post informed, well-considered opinions. A common classroom activity, for instance, is to have students read the blogged entries of others and write persuasive reactions — one in agreement, another in disagreement — and post these writings as comments to their classmates' blogs. Initially, the students struggled with the task, but they eventually learned the goal was not necessarily to find an idea with which they personally disagreed but to find another side to an idea and write persuasively from that perspective. For the genetics assignment, students assume a range of positions — some that discourage work in genetic manipulation based on security, cost, and ethics, and others that support it based on the potential cure for disease, life extension, and increased food production. In response to these blogged assignments, Ms. L posts assessments in the form of comments.
A few doors down the hall, veteran English teacher Mr. P is reviewing a new batch of student wikis. In an effort to help the students become better communicators, he never provides study guides for tests, instead relying on students to construct their own study resources using their team wikis. He rewards teams that create the most useful/popular study guides.

How to Search and Tag To create a combination science/health lesson, Mr. K goes to Google News and searches for diseases that are in the news, cross-referencing them with the words genetics and mutation. The search engine returns references to about 10,000 articles from news sources from around the world. He sees several references to bird flu, so he right-clicks on the term and selects Search Google. A second browser window appears that reports 57.1 million hits, starting with a list of the top 10. The Web pages at the top are those most linked to by other pages — ranking by recommendation. Among the top links are sites from the Center for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, MSNBC, and the National Institute of Health. After selecting a facts page from the CDC, the health teacher clicks a link in the linksbar of his Web browser, adding the site in view to his online social bookmarks, what Mr. K calls his "personal digital library." In the page that follows, the health teacher selects from a list of tags to attach to the CDC Web page. These tags serve to categorize the Web page, enabling him to assign several categories (or tags) to a single page. He selects and clicks disease, genetics, health, Mr. K, and charlestonmiddle school. Because his online bookmarks are syndicated by tag, the site he has just added automatically appears on his Disease Unit Web page.

Mr. P uses a wiki tool installed on the school's network. He devotes one part of the wiki site to general information and resources that he and the most accomplished students can edit. This part of the site serves as the class textbook. He also maintains other parts of the site for class teams, usually four students per team. These sections have their own passwords, and team members can log in to their wikis and enter text, images, links to audio and video files, and format their content in a variety of ways. Mr. P is able to track the number of unique views for each page so that he can measure and reward teams for producing the most useful communications.
Earlier in the day, Student A had left Mr. P's room in a jubilant mood because she'd just learned that her team produced the most useful study guide for yesterday's test, which earned them 10 points toward level three in the class. Level three will give the team much more editing access to the class wiki and more opportunities to contribute to the class literary Web site and the literary book the students will publish at the end of the school year.
Mr. P begins adjusting the volume on the microphone that hangs from his classroom ceiling. Today's discussion about The Grapes of Wrath will be recorded and posted in an audio file as a class podcast, as are all significant class presentations and discussions. Students, parents, community members, and other educators subscribe to his podcast programs. In fact, on the other side of town, Mrs. B, the parent of one of Mr. P's students, is listening to a podcast classroom conversation about a science fiction short story the students recently read. She and other parents subscribe to the podcasts so they can more easily engage their children in conversations about school.
At about the same time Mrs. B is listening to the lively classroom discussion, her son, Student B, is keying a text message from his school desk to his social studies class team. He briefly describes an idea for putting together a video as part of their current class project on rural cultures. The video idea had occurred to him a few days earlier while he and his mother were talking about one of the lesson recordings she'd listened to. Student C happens to be in study hall when she receives Student B's message and is excited about using a video in their presentation. She immediately accesses the school's social bookmarks, looking for sites that have been submitted by their science teacher, Ms. S, tagged with soil and plantgrowth. She identifies two sites, one from the Discovery Channel and the other from the USDA, called Ask a Worm. The idea is to create a video animation illustrating how soil quality affects cultures.
As Student C tags the sites for her team, school librarian Ms. J is conducting research on behalf of a new math teacher. She and the school tech facilitator both subscribe to all of the teachers' Monday report blogs. With access to these weekly updates, they can use a shared spreadsheet to maintain an ongoing curriculum map of what's being taught in the school. The librarian and tech educator use the map to support teachers, finding and identifying resources and strategies related to what they are teaching. Ms. J is using a blogging search engine to find some serious Weblogs about mathematics so that the new teacher can include more practical applications in her current unit on real-world math. She finds several blogs: Galileo's Dilemma (math, physics, and chemistry), Dr. Katte's Blog (engineering), and BizImpresario (entrepreneurship). The librarian then adds the three blogs to the school's social bookmarks and tags them for the meeting that she has just noted on the school's collaborative social calendar.
Meanwhile, the principal is also looking at the school calendar. She is finishing up a weekly blog entry that describes happenings at the school for the next seven days, including two class podcasts, a band concert (also to be podcasted), a guest speaker, an interesting lesson about ancient civilizations, and the PTO meeting. The administrator subscribes to and scans all of the teachers' Monday report blogs for material to include in her weekly report. She always posts the blog entry by the end of the day on Monday, which is read not only by parents but also by other schools, district leadership, and people from other parts of the community and country.
Early that evening the district superintendent reads the principal's recently posted blog. He also subscribes to the teachers' Monday report blogs, finding that their writing gives him a bank of ideas for promoting the district and its efforts toward continued improvement. After he finishes the reading, he briefly accesses the wiki site where he and a committee of educators and community members are collaborating to develop a district improvement plan. He jots down a couple of ideas that occurred to him while reading the digital conversations that have come to define the middle school. He moves on to publish the wiki version of the improvement plan, inviting interested community members to edit the improvement plan within the wiki and insert their reflections and ideas through attached comments. This superintendent truly believes that, "It takes a village..."