December 23 is the birthday of 33 notable people we've found so far, including entrepreneurs, historical figures, scientists and authors, and 2 of them are billionaires.
Thomas Denny Sanford was an American businessman and philanthropist. He was the founder of First Premier Bank and the chairman and chief executive officer of its holding company, United National.
Bang Jun-hyuk is a South Korean businessman. The founder and chairman of the largest mobile gaming company in the country, Netmarble, he is among the richest people in South Korea. When Netmarble acquired Coway in 2019, he also became the chairman of Coway.
Share of the 33 people we list, by documented field. People can belong to more than one.
Entrepreneurs36% (12 people)
Authors24% (8 people)
Scientists24% (8 people)
Inventors12% (4 people)
Musicians12% (4 people)
Politicians12% (4 people)
Actors6% (2 people)
Countries
19 countries, most often United States
Citizenship as recorded on Wikidata, one country per person.
United States9 (9 people)
Italy3 (3 people)
Belgium2 (2 people)
France2 (2 people)
Spain2 (2 people)
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland2 (2 people)
Canada1 (1 people)
Life timeline
What were people born on December 23 doing at your age?
Dated milestones from Wikidata (company foundings, awards, top jobs, notable works), placed at the age each person reached them. Add your birth year above to see the ones you have passed.
By 25
19AkihitoReceived the Order of the Elephant (1953)
Akihito is a member of the Imperial House of Japan who reigned as the 125th emperor of Japan from 7 January 1989 until his abdication on 30 April 2019. The era of his rule was named the Heisei era, Heisei being an expression of achieving peace worldwide.
Malacañang Photo Bureau, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Eddie Jerome Vedder is an American musician who is the lead vocalist and primary lyricist for the rock band Pearl Jam. He was previously a guest vocalist for supergroup Temple of the Dog, a tribute band dedicated to singer Andrew Wood.
marco annunziata, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Juan Ramón Jiménez Mantecón was a Spanish poet, a prolific writer who received the 1956 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his lyrical poetry, which in the Spanish language constitutes an example of high spirit and artistic purity".
Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Madam C. J. Walker, Mrs. Charles Joseph Walker upon her third marriage, was an American entrepreneur, philanthropist, and political and social activist. Walker is recorded as the first woman to become a self-made millionaire in America in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Addison Norton Scurlock / Adam Cuerden, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Chesney Henry Baker Jr. was an American jazz trumpeter and vocalist. He is known for major innovations in cool jazz that led him to be nicknamed the "Prince of Cool".
Studio Harcourt., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Susan Victoria Lucci is an American actress. She is best known for portraying Erica Kane on the ABC daytime drama All My Children during that show's entire network run from 1970 to 2011.
The Heart Truth, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
James Buchanan Duke was an American tobacco and electric power industrialist best known for the invention of modern cigarette manufacture and marketing techniques, and his involvement with Duke University. He was the founder of the American Tobacco Company in 1890.
Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko was a Soviet and Russian theatre director, writer, pedagogue, playwright, producer and theatre administrator, who founded the Moscow Art Theatre with his colleague, Konstantin Stanislavski, in 1898.
Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Donna Louise Tartt is an American novelist. She wrote the novels The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2002), and The Goldfinch (2013), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted into a 2019 film of the same name.
Antonio Monda, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Helmut Heinrich Waldemar Schmidt was a German politician and member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), who served as the chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982.
Hans Schafgans, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
David Michael Murray is an English guitarist, best known as a member of the heavy metal band Iron Maiden. He joined Iron Maiden early in its history, and is the second-longest serving member of the band after founder Steve Harris.
Yousuf Karsh was an Armenian-Canadian photographer, known for his portraits of notable individuals. He has been described as one of the greatest portrait photographers of the 20th century.
Giuseppe Tomasi, 11th Prince of Lampedusa, 12th Duke of Palma, GE, known as Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, was a Sicilian writer, as well as the last generation of Tomasi Princes of Lampedusa before the family's and their titles' extinction.
Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Mikhael Leonidovich Gromov is a Russian-French mathematician known for his work in geometry, analysis and group theory. He is a permanent member of Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in France and a professor of mathematics at New York University.
Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Dan Gertler is an Israeli businessman. He has been a subject to U.S. trade sanctions. He was accused by the Central Intelligence Agency of receiving illegal kickbacks in violation of U.S. sanctions against Iraq.
Robert Elliot Kahn is an American electrical engineer who, along with Vint Cerf, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the heart of the Internet.
Вени Марковски | Veni Markovski, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Bertrand Jean Louis Gachot is a former racing driver and businessman who competed in Formula One from 1989 to 1995. In endurance racing, Gachot won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1991 with Mazda.
1812–1904 · United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
Samuel Smiles was a British author and government reformer. Although he campaigned on a Chartist platform, he promoted the idea that more progress would come from new attitudes than from new laws.
Dino Risi was an Italian film director. With Mario Monicelli, Luigi Comencini, Nanni Loy, and Ettore Scola, he was one of the masters of commedia all'italiana.
Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Henri Pirenne was a Belgian nationalist and historian. A medievalist of Walloon descent, he wrote a multivolume history of Belgium in French and became a prominent public intellectual.
Unknown photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
1810–1873 · United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
Edward Blyth was an English zoologist who worked for most of his life in India as a curator of zoology at the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta. He catalogued the specimens in the collection in his Catalogue of the Birds of the Asiatic Society in 1849.
produced by Woodbury Company, published by Allan Octavian Hume (1829 - 1912), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Roberto Cingolani is an Italian physicist, academic, and manager who served as Minister for Ecological Transition in the Draghi government from 2021 to 2022.
Niccolò Caranti, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Wilhelm Hisinger was a Swedish physicist and chemist who in 1807, working in coordination with Jöns Jakob Berzelius, noted that in electrolysis any given substance always went to the same pole, and that substances attracted to the same pole had other properties in common.
Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
This page lists 33 people born on December 23, every one traced to a Wikidata record and, where shown, a Wikipedia summary (CC BY-SA) and a licensed Wikimedia Commons photo. 2 of them carry a dated net-worth estimate citing Forbes or Bloomberg; combined wealth is the sum of the low end of those estimates, the newest as of July 2026. Rankings compare all 366 dates in the dataset built on 2026-09-28. Milestone ages come from dated Wikidata statements; a tilde marks year-only dates. Nothing on this page is a prediction about anyone born on December 23. Read the full methodology.
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