Colombian expat in Brazil joins list of world’s 25 wealthiest ‘millennials’

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – At 39 years of age, David Vélez is the founder of Brazilian fintech Nubank and his wealth reaches US$5.2 billion.

On May 27th, Visual Capitalist website published the list of the world’s wealthiest young people, which includes a Colombian. The website disclosed that there are at least 2,755 billionaires around the world and that their capital totals over “US$13 trillion.”

Among this group of billionaires, very few are young people born between 1981 and 1996. The combined net worth of young wealthy people is US$573.1 billion, according to the publication.

Within this list is Colombian David Vélez, who at 39 years of age ranks 24th for being the founder of Nubank and his net worth reaches US$5.2 billion.

“To be a multimillionaire? I don’t care about that. I get my energy and my motivation from seeing that we are building something that solves a problem, people’s lives, that is having an impact on society,” said Vélez in an interview with Forbes magazine.

Nubank, the company whose equity propelled Vélez into one of the world’s wealthiest men, is a digital bank. That is, it does not have physical branches, and has become one of the most innovative institutions in Latin America, as it offers its users a credit card that is fully managed through a mobile app, in addition to providing other products with no management fee or commissions.

This concept, according to a statement by the entrepreneur, was born in 2013 in a two-story house in São Paulo, Brazil, and made him the second billionaire in the country -and the youngest-, behind Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo, whose net worth amounts to US$11 billion.

Within his stories, the Antioquia native recounted that when he was only 12 years old, with all the money he collected working during vacations and what he saved during his birthdays, he made his first investment: he bought a cow. “I always heard that the way to control my own destiny was to undertake,” said Vélez.

Since then, his personal achievements did not stop, thanks to his savings and his entrepreneurial spirit, he financed part of his studies at Stanford University, where he attended business and engineering, and according to Forbes, where he would later return to pursue an MBA. Some time later, unknowingly, he would found one of the most successful financial technology companies in the market, which would make him the 539th wealthiest man in the world.

Today, Nubank, co-founded by Vélez together with Brazilian Cristina Junqueira and American Edward Wible, has more than 34 million users in countries such as Brazil and Mexico. The company reached Colombia in late 2020, where it is starting to take its first big steps.

But Vélez is not the only Latin American on the list, Brazilian Eduardo Saverin, from Facebook, at 39 years of age and with US$14.6 billion, is the 8th in the ranking.

This list is headed by people like the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, 36 years old and with a net worth of US$97 billion. He is followed by Chinese Zhang Yiming, founder of Tik Tok, the popular social network through which he accumulated US$35.6 billion.

Source: infobae

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