The super rich may have lost some of their lustre this past year, as the likes of Bezos, Musk and Branson race to extend their egos into the outer realms of space, and dead-eyed tech gurus like Mark Zuckerberg add several zeroes to their fortune on the back of a global pandemic. But the young and wealthy? Well, that’s still an alluring, intriguing combination, and one, we believe, that is worth digging into — especially when it’s home grown. Here are the billionaires and multi-millionaires of this sceptred isle — those figures under 30 with several commas to their bank balance.

The Duke of Westminster and the Grosvenor family: £10.054bn — Property

Back in the 1720s, the area now known as Mayfair was a tangle of swamps, orchards and grasslands, best known for hosting a country fair each year in the month of May. The Grosvenor family were the first to develop the spot all those years ago, and have transformed it, decade by decade, into the social and business honeypot of the shifting global elite.

Hugh Grosvenor — who became the 7th Duke of Westminster, and Britain’s youngest billionaire, after his father died in 2016 — is the latest in that storied line of landowners. Hardworking, conscientious and sincere, Grosvernor’s property empire still centres on prime Mayfair and Belgravia — but also includes land in more than 60 cities around the world, and some 165,000 acres in the British countryside. Net assets for clan Grosvenor totalled £4.7 billion in 2020. But the more interesting number, perhaps, is £12.5million — the amount the Grosvenor Foundation set aside last year for those communities hit particularly hard by the pandemic.

Alejandro Santo Domingo and Lady Charlotte Wellesley: £2.4bn — Inheritance, Brewing, Investment

A 30-year-old descendant of Queen Victoria, and the daughter of the 9th Duke of Wellington, Lady Charlotte Wellesley had long been stationed in the upper echelons of British society. But it was her marriage to billionaire financier Alejandro Santo Domingo which catapulted her up the rich list in 2016 — forging a new old money/new-ish money power couple in the process. Alejandro sits at the helm of his family’s investment and brewing conglomerate, the Colombia-based Santo Domingo Group. He is also the managing director of a New York-based investment advisory firm and was elected to the Board of Trustees at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009. Between them, the two now sit on a fortune of an estimated £2.4 billion.

Johnny Boufarhat, Britain’s youngest self-made billionaire, created online events platform Hopin as recently as March 2020 — and it’s a testament to his ingenuity and hard work that it has so quickly rocketed him into the three comma club. Laid low by an autoimmune disease three years ago, and holed up at his girlfriend’s flat in King’s Cross, Boufarhat began playing around with code for a video conferencing app which he thought might help others like him to work and network remotely. Soon, he’d taken the idea to Seedcamp, the Shoreditch start-up incubator, where it quickly generated a great deal of interest. But it was only as the pandemic took hold last year that the real value of the start up emerged — a happy coming together of preparation and opportunity. The software — which allows clients to host and stream speeches, video chats, and live events — quickly shot to five million active users, while its latest in a series of investment rounds valued the business at $5.7 billion (£4.13 billion). Sales are expected to jump to $150 million in the current year, and will surely continue to rise as the homeworking revolution takes flight.

Jack Sullivan and family: £1.04bn — Football and media

The youngest ever football executive in British history, the story goes that Jack Sullivan turned to his mother while on holiday in Spain at 14, and begged her to buy him West Ham Ladies. At 17, young Jack’s dream was realised, when he was installed as managing director of the team by his father, the joint chairman and largest shareholder of the club. Though most of the family’s fortune is now tied up in an extensive property portfolio, it originally derived from patriach David’s success in the 1970s as a softcore pornographer — a controversial venture that made him a millionaire at 25. Today, David and Jack’s combined assets sit just above the £1 billion pound mark.

Ben Francis’s life story is the fantasy daydream of all young entrepreneurs. A Pizza Hut delivery boy in his teenage years, Francis was studying at Aston University when he decided to start selling gym kit out of his parent’s garage, just eight years ago. He did everything himself and by hand for the first few years, even stitching tee-shirts on a sewing machine that his mother taught him to use. But it was Francis’ cunning deployment of social media influencers that really helped the brand to explode, pumping followers to 5.2million on Instagram alone. The sales soon follows, with revenues jumping to £176.2 million last year — a number that pumped the company’s valuation to a neat £1 billion last summer. Francis’s majority stake is now worth some £700 million. But his sites are set much higher than this.. “My aspiration is for this to be one of the greatest brands in the world,” he said last year. “In the States you’ve got Nike, in Germany Adidas. And I think Gymshark can be that for the UK.”

India Rose James and family, £721m — Property

The de facto Queen of Soho, 29-year-old India Rose James’s fortune derives from the 70-acre central London estate left to her (and half-sister Fawn) by her grandfather, club kingpin and property magnate Paul Raymond, who died in 2008. Expelled from St George’s Ascot for an “uncontrollable attitude,” and known in her early twenties as a much Getty-ed socialite, James is now a commanding figure in London property — cleaning up the Soho area, and re-devleoping many of its shabbier, seedier sites. Her recent projects include the successful Revue art gallery, and the £100million Ilona Rose House development on the Charing Cross Road — not to mention a beautifully revamped version of Madame Jojos’s, once the seat of her grandfather’s club empire.

In a quieter year for the music industry, Sheeran has still managed to stack another £20 million on to his net worth — chiefly via his extensive back-catalogue, which includes both his own songs and those penned for other artists. Streaming has been a huge driver to Sheeran’s wealth in recent years. With 73 million followers on Spotify — the highest on the platform — and 53 million monthly listeners, he is a giant in this game. But even that may be dwarfed by the contribution taken in by live performances. The singer-songwriter’s two-and-a-half year Divide tour grossed some £562 million across 255 performances — and is now believed to be the biggest musical tour in history.

Melanie and Dan Marsden: £200m — Lingerie

Married couple Melanie and Dan Marsden first met when they were just eighth years old, and have been together since they were 15. Their relationship is at the core of their business success, they believe — not least because their lingerie business, Lounge, was built out of their front room. On the couple’s first ever black Friday Sale, they made £64,000 in a single weekend, packing and shipping the orders by hand. Five years layter, they were processing 25 orders a second. Like Gymshark, Lounge’s success was built around early adoption and canny use of influencers, and a direct-to-consumer model which mainly took place over Instagram. Now 28 and 29, the Marsden’s fortune is valued at £200m — and rising.

Harry Styles’ bankability above any of the other One Direction boys seems to stem from his versatility — as well as his punchy brand cachet. A garlanded solo artist with the second best selling UK album of 2020 under his belt, Styles is also an actor (his Dunkirk debut was solidly received) and a business owner (his Erskine’s Tour Company posted profits of £17.9 million in 2018-19.) More tellingly, he was also the first man to ever appear solo on the cover of American Vogue, cementing him as the twinkle-eyed clothes horse of our era (his lucrative lock up with Gucci, for example, continues to earn him big bucks. A one man brand as much as a one man band, Styles’ fortunes look set to climb again in 2021.

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