The World's Youngest Billionaire: Will He Keep It?

March 7, 2008 — -- It's an almost-brilliant move.

This has been a landmark week for Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old founder of social networking site Facebook.

First, Forbes magazine — that arbiter of all things obscenely wealthy — declared Zuckerberg to be the youngest "self-made" billionaire on the planet. Then, associate editor Matthew Miller took the title up a notch by adding, "He is the youngest billionaire in the world right now — and we also believe he is the youngest self-made billionaire in history."

That last probably isn't true — but unlike, say, Alexander the Great, Zuckerberg didn't have to lead an army to conquer Asia Minor but merely created a venue for college girls to post photos for which they'll have to apologize for the rest of their lives (appropriately enough, because Facebook reportedly started out as a coed rating service for Zuckerberg's classmates at Harvard).

The actual historic value of Zuckerberg earning this title is probably negligible, because I doubt he'll hold it very long — or, for that matter, whether he'll still be a billionaire a few years from now, when Facebook follows MySpace as the Last Big Thing.

Here in Silicon Valley we are used to young geniuses who wave their paper billions — then get creamed by a stock price collapse just before their lock-out period ends.

That's why I can still count the real billionaires in this town on two hands (though I wouldn't worry about Mark: no matter what happens he'll walk away very rich and with at least seven decades to enjoy it).

Nevertheless, this is a watershed event of a sort. It is a reminder, as if we need another one, that the barriers to entry into tech by a bright young entrepreneur get lower every year, while the chances of early success get higher.

I may have written this a few years ago, but now's a good time to revisit it: In the 1950s, about the only way you could start a high-tech company was if you were a Ph.D. in solid-state physics or electrical engineering.

It wasn't until the end of the 1960s that the first professional businesspeople (Irwin Federman of Monolithic Memories comes to mind) actually began to run tech companies.

But two trends were already at work.

First, the infrastructure of entrepreneurship — facilities, venture capital, consultants, marketers — grew more sophisticated by the year, which enabled fewer veteran managers into the game.

Second, the technology itself became increasingly removed from the silicon-and-code world of early tech to high-level applications — i.e., now you didn't need to be a chip guy or a code writer to start a tech company.

is a website where you can search for the most interesting early stage companies and college experiments. It's quite ambitious: their startup predictor (not yet launched) claims it will be able to predict successful start up companies with mathematical analysis and and historical data. If you ever wanted to get involved in a new start-up -- or become an angel investor -- and perhaps strike it rich, this is the site for you.

This is the opinion of the columnist, and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Michael S. Malone is one of the nation's best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News, as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world's largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom. Malone is the author or co-author of a dozen books, notably the best-selling "Virtual Corporation." Malone has also hosted three public television interview series, and most recently co-produced the celebrated PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, "The New Heroes." He has been the ABCNEWS.com Silicon Insider columnist since 2000.