Mysterious crypto boss and handy AI developer: who are the newcomers in the FTSE 100?

The usually predictable list of the Fortune 500 was shaken up this year with various tech entrepreneurs, it was announced this morning. Notable newcomers are cryptocurrency mogul Jean-Louis van der Velde and AI developer Pim de Witte. Who are they? Jean-Louis van der Velde It is a surprising change. Almost no one knows the new number one who debuts on the list today. The mysterious crypto billionaire Jean-Louis van der Velde has made Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken leave her seat. The heir to the beer brand had been at the top for a long time. The nationality of the 62-year-old, who now lives in Hong Kong, remained unknown for a long time. But now Quote finally has the confirmation that he still has a Dutch passport. This causes him to enter the top position all at once on the list. Van der Velde's wealth, born in Arnhem as Ludovicus Jan, is estimated at 26 billion euros. That is twice as much as what De Carvalho-Heineken possesses. She is now in second place. Withdrawn existence Van der Velde earned his money with cryptocurrencies. He is the director of the crypto trading platform Bitfinex and founded Tether in 2014, the world's first and largest stablecoin. A coin linked to the US dollar that hardly changes in value. Van der Velde leads a withdrawn existence and almost never appears in the public eye. On X (formerly Twitter), it was even speculated that he no longer existed, until a video of him appeared online in 2022. Many journalists tried to reach him but were unsuccessful. Journalist Zeke Faux is one of the few who did speak to him. In his book, he tells that Van der Velde introduced himself as 'the man who does not exist'. They met each other almost by chance at a crypto conference in the Bahamas in 2022. Faux describes his appearance as that of a captain of a perfectly groomed yacht. They sat in a café near a casino for three hours, where Van der Velde repeated twice that money does not interest him and he prefers not to think about money. Remarkable, writes Faux, because his crypto company Tether issues a new form of money. Pim de Witte The youngest billionaire ever is Pim de Witte (31). He founded the AI company General Intuition last year, which is already worth several billion. Thus he is 'exemplary' for the list, according to Jeroen Molenaar, deputy editor-in-chief of Quote, because entrepreneurs in the AI sector can grow incredibly fast. He grew up in Nijmegen and now lives in New York City. Before his AI company, De Witte founded Medal.tv, a platform where gamers share images of their games. These images and the underlying data prove to be a goldmine for companies working on the next generation of AI applications. The data give insight into how people behave in a simulated world. Not many AI companies have access to this kind of data, which makes the data from Medal.tv unique. 'More fun to do it yourself' OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, had ears to the data behind this platform and offered De Witte 500 million euros for it. But he let Nieuwsuur know at the time that he would continue to develop it himself with AI technology. "It is just more fun to do it yourself." He taught himself to program and at fourteen built the largest private server on Runescape, an online game. After his secondary school education, he did not study but immediately started working for Doctors Without Borders in London. There he built MapSwipe, a platform that helps in fighting Ebola in Africa. With this, aid workers can plan routes in crisis situations via satellite images. Despite many achievements, he let Quote know that he is most proud of building MapSwipe.