Photos: Meet the world's youngest self-made billionaire, 25 y.o Tech wiz, Austin Russell

A young CEO who founded his company at the age of 17 has become an overnight billionaire after taking the firm public.

Austin Russell, 25, saw his stake in Luminar Technologies soar to be worth about $2.4 billion after taking the lidar sensor technology company public on the Nasdaq exchange on Thursday. 

That makes him the world's youngest self-made billionaire, according to Forbes. 

Russell is private. 

He does not have any public social media accounts. 

According to public records, he is building a house on land in Atherton, a wealthy suburb of San Francisco. Russell filed for his first patent at age 13, when he invested an underground system to recycle sprinkler water for use in gardening. Instead of high school, he spent his teen years at the University of California at Irvine's Beckman Laser Institute. 

Russell was accepted to Stanford to study physics, but soon dropped out to accept a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship stipend for his lidar concept, and founded Luminar. He was barely old enough to drive when he set out to create a safer navigation system for self-driving cars. Luminar makes a lidar sensor, which helps gives vehicles a three-dimensional view of the road using laser ranging equipment. Lidar systems work by bouncing lasers off nearby objects and measuring the reflections to build up a detailed 3-D picture of the surrounding environment. 

The technology is similar to radar, which uses radio waves instead of lasers.