In October 2025, Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha became the three youngest self-made billionaires in recorded history, all at age 22, after private investors valued their company, Mercor, at $10 billion. The three didn’t meet in Silicon Valley. They met years earlier on the speech and debate team at Bellarmine College Preparatory, a Bay Area high school, where an unusually formidable partnership was already forming long before any of them had heard of a data-labeling startup.
The debate team that became a founding team
Foody, a natural talker who struggled with debate’s heavy reading load because of his dyslexia, leaned into the format’s verbal strengths. Hiremath had been pushed into debate in middle school by parents worried he was too quiet, and went on to form a historically formidable duo with Midha — the first team ever to win all three national policy debate tournaments in the same year. The skills that made them dominant on a debate stage — building a case under real time pressure, finding the load-bearing argument in a pile of noise, arguing a position from first principles rather than borrowed talking points — turned out to transfer directly into building a company from nothing.
Dropping out to chase a pivot that hadn’t happened yet
After graduating high school in 2021, Hiremath enrolled at Harvard while Midha and Foody went to Georgetown. All three dropped out to focus on Mercor full-time and were later awarded Thiel Fellowships, which fund young founders on the condition that they skip or pause traditional college. Mercor’s first version wasn’t the company that made them billionaires — it originally connected freelance programmers in India with U.S. companies through an AI-driven interview and matching platform. The business that actually took off was a pivot: shifting toward expert data labeling, matching skilled contractors with the AI labs — including OpenAI — that need human expertise to train their models. That pivot, not the original idea, is what took Mercor from a scrappy freelance marketplace to a $10 billion company.
The three youngest self-made billionaires in history didn’t get there on their first idea. They got there on a debate team’s worth of practice arguing their way to the load-bearing point in a mess of information — and the discipline to drop the original pitch once the pivot proved stronger.
Where they stand now
Foody serves as Mercor’s chief executive, Hiremath as chief technology officer, and Midha — the youngest of the three by roughly two months — moved from chief operating officer into the role of chairman as the company crossed the billion-dollar threshold. It’s a genuinely rare story: three friends from the same high school debate team, none of whom finished a college degree, building a company that now sits at the center of the infrastructure the world’s largest AI labs depend on to train their models. Talmyn will be watching what they build next.