# Austin Russell Founder and CEO of Luminar Technologies, an autonomous vehicle sensor company, and a [[Peter Thiel]] Fellowship recipient who dropped out of Stanford at 17. Backed by [[Founders Fund]] and other [[Thiel Network]] investors, Russell became the world's youngest self-made billionaire when Luminar went public in 2020. His trajectory exemplifies Thiel's thesis that elite education is overrated and that backing young technical founders can produce outsized returns.