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By
now everyone knows that the rules for getting really, really rich aren't
quite what they used to be. No longer is it necessary to spend years ascending
the craggy rungs of a corporate ladder. Don't have much expertise in a field
or any real experience running anything? Forget about it. It's not necessary.
Neither are any of the accouterments --rich parents, advanced degrees, friends
in high places--that used to be essential if you wanted a nosebleed tax bracket
while still on the sunny side of 30. All you need to do these days is start
an Internet company and crown yourself CEO. Nothing illustrates this rerouting
of the road to riches better than our tally of the top
17 wealthiest americans between the ages of 18-34
which casts a bright light on the Internet era's unprecedented intersection
of youth, technology, and serious money. Sure, much of this instant wealth
is crazy. The assets of many of our young tycoons could be sliced in half
were the market's enthusiasm for tech stocks to fade. For others it's as
if they'd won the late-century equivalent of the lottery. One day 29-year-old
Jeffrey Arnold is sitting in Atlanta with a little health-care
Website known as WebMD. The next day Healtheon buys it, and Arnold is now
worth $321 million, good enough to be No. 16 on our list. Michael Robertson,
32, bought the MP3.com name for $1,000, and today he's No. 6 on our list,
worth $903 million. Pretty damn lucky, aren't they? So why are these
megamillionaires still working, many still running around like sleep-deprived
college students before a final exam, taking cell phone calls at midnight,
getting stranded at airports at inconvenient hours? To try to answer that,
we spent a good portion of the past few weeks hanging out with three of the
17 on our list: Henry Jeffrey Arnold, of WebMD (No. 16); and
Eric Brewer and Paul Gauthier ,of Inktomi (Nos. 10 and
11, respectively). What strikes you immediately is how deeply they profess
to love their jobs. Every day they march into their offices with the belief
that they are changing the world for years to come. Their innovations are
certainly making technology more ubiquitous in our lives--a good thing, the
way they see it--providing easier access to information and enabling new
forms of communication. Brewer and Gauthier want to streamline the search
for information and products on the Web. And Arnold wants to harness the
Net to improve health care in this country. What could be cooler than that?
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