Fortune Archive: Valley of the dollars

In 1999, Fortune sent Eryn Brown into Silicon Valley’s “valley of the dollars” to meet the dot-com boom’s newly minted millionaires. Her take was sharp and unsentimental. Internet wealth, she wrote, let a lucky, hard-working crowd stop worrying about bills and “live it up a little,” but it also warped how people judged themselves. In that world, success was measured in dollars, and not gently.

Brown caught the social tell in plain language. The people with money, she wrote, seemed to ooze self-esteem. The people without it looked panicked. Even the stock line about riches being beside the point sounded like a script everyone had memorized. “It’s not about the money,” the netheads told her, and then she followed with the line that actually mattered: it was all about the money.

Fast-forward to 2026 and the scale has changed. Forbes has added a record 10 new billionaires under 40 to its wealth list, and seven of them came from AI. Four are tied to Anthropic alone, which is still expected to go public in 2026. Its rival OpenAI has said it likely won’t list until next year.

The numbers now live in a different universe. Brown wrote about people running vesting math over lunch and hoping for millions or tens of millions. Today, Anthropic cofounders Tom Brown, Daniela Amodei, Jack Clark, and Sam McCandlish can each claim $15.5 billion. Even the entry fee has jumped: in 2026, $4.4 billion is enough to make the Forbes 400. The money isn’t just bigger. It’s more concentrated, more public, and a lot harder to pretend isn’t the point.