Two Belarus-born billionaires make Forbes’ Richest Immigrants 2026 list

Forbes has published its America's Richest Immigrants 2026 ranking, which includes two people born in Belarus — Perplexity co-founder Denis Yarats and WorldQuant investment firm founder Igor Tulchinsky.

Yarats, who was born in Homiel, ranked 97th with a net worth of $2.1 billion. The 39-year-old entrepreneur currently lives in San Francisco. He became a billionaire thanks to his stake in the AI search startup Perplexity, which was valued at $20 billion in 2025. Before founding Perplexity, Yarats worked as a researcher at the Facebook AI Research lab, and earlier contributed to the development of the Bing search engine at Microsoft. He co-founded the startup in August 2022 together with Aravind Srinivas, Andy Konwinski and Johnny Ho, with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and other prominent figures from the technology and artificial intelligence sectors among the company's investors.

Tulchinsky came in at 113th place with a net worth of $1.7 billion. He moved to the United States with his family as a child, and began his career at AT&T Bell Laboratories before going on to work at Interactive Brokers and the hedge fund Millennium. In 2007, Tulchinsky founded WorldQuant, a firm specialising in quantitative investment strategies that currently manages approximately $17 billion in assets.

In total, the Forbes ranking included a record 144 billionaires — US citizens born outside the country — with a combined net worth of approximately $2.2 trillion. The previous year, the list featured 125 people with a combined net worth of $1.3 trillion. The top spot among the richest immigrants in the US went to Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa.