Adarsh Hiremath
Source of wealth: AI Software
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Modules
Biography
Adarsh Hiremath is a cofounder of Mercor, a recruiting startup that helps Silicon Valley's biggest AI labs train their models.
Hiremath and his cofounders Brendan Foody and Surya Midha became the world's three youngest self-made billionaires in October 2025, when private investors valued Mercor at $10 billion. All three were 22 at the time, but Midha is the youngest by roughly two months.
Foody serves as CEO of Mercor, while Hiremath serves as chief technology officer. Midha transitioned from his role as chief operating officer to become the company's chairman in October 2025.
Foody, Hiremath and Midha founded Mercor in 2023. Each cofounder owns an estimated 22% stake in the company.
In September 2025, Mercor announced the company had hit $500 million in annualized revenue, up from $100 million in March.
Financial Assets
Financial assets information not available.
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Adarsh Hiremath
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Adarsh Hiremath, linked to Technology and 'AI Software', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 16 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 1.0 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.