{"id":116717,"date":"2020-12-05T13:22:15","date_gmt":"2020-12-05T21:22:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/luminars-25-year-old-founder-austin-russell-becomes-billionaire-after-ipo"},"modified":"2020-12-05T13:22:15","modified_gmt":"2020-12-05T21:22:15","slug":"luminars-25-year-old-founder-austin-russell-becomes-billionaire-after-ipo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/luminars-25-year-old-founder-austin-russell-becomes-billionaire-after-ipo","title":{"rendered":"Luminar\u2019s 25-year-old founder Austin Russell becomes billionaire after IPO"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/luminars-25-year-old-founder-austin-russell-becomes-billionaire-after-ipo.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The founder of a startup that helps cars drive themselves just became a billionaire \u2014 and he\u2019s barely old enough to rent a car on his own.<\/p>\n<p>Luminar Technologies CEO Austin Russell, 25, secured a hefty fortune after his company\u2019s stock market debut this week. The Florida-based firm \u2014 which he founded when he was just 17 \u2014 makes so-called lidar scanners that use lasers to give autonomous cars a three-dimensional view of the road and what\u2019s around them.<\/p>\n<p>Luminar\u2019s share price surged nearly 28 percent on its Thursday debut to close at $22.98, giving the company a market value of about $7.8 billion, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/luminar-rises-in-market-debut-making-25-year-old-founder-a-billionaire-11607027565?mod=tech_lead_pos10\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the Wall Street Journal reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The founder of a startup that helps cars drive themselves just became a billionaire \u2014 and he\u2019s barely old enough to rent a car on his own. Luminar Technologies CEO Austin Russell, 25, secured a hefty fortune after his company\u2019s stock market debut this week. The Florida-based firm \u2014 which he founded when he was [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,6,1491],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-finance","category-robotics-ai","category-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116717\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}