5 Richest People in Technology
#1 Michael Dell - net worth: $15.5 billion
Born in 1966 and raised in Texas. He founded the world’s largest PC maker Dell. He started selling PC’s from his dorm room and eventually dropped out of the University of Texas in 1988 to start his mega-company. Now has 60% of his net worth invested in other ventures such as real estate and restaurants. He has 4 kids and lives in Austin Texas with his wife Susan. Susan created fashion label Phi and sells her luxury apparel products via 24 international boutiques.
#2 Sergey Brin - net worth: $14.1 billion
33 years old now, born and raised in Russia. He now lives in Palo Alto, CA. While pursuing his graduate degree at Stanford in computer science he dropped out to co-found Google in 1998. He now serves as Google’s president of technology. His total net worth has soared 250% in 2 years making even Bill Gates’ growth look shameful. He has Promised to “do no evil” with his riches; plans to pour $1.2 billion into Google’s charitable organization.
#3 Larry Page - net worth: $14.0 billion
Also 33 years old and the other “half” of Google. Larry grew up in Michigan and now lives in San Francisco. He operates Google’s products division (which includes adsense and adwords.) He too was pursuing his graduate degree at Stanford in computer science but chose to drop out with Sergey to get their company started. [and they say dropping out doesn’t pay off ]
#4 Pierre M Omidyar - net worth: $7.7 billion
Born and raised in France and then immigrated to the good old USA. Launched online auction giant Ebay in 1995; Today his site lets consumers buy and sell everything from real estate to candy. He also has shares in various other huge online ventures including Shopping.com, Craigslist, Skype, and Paypal. Google Checkout (from his two contenders above) is challenging Paypal to a huge duel over the market right now.
#5 Eric Schmidt - net worth: $5.2 billion
He began his software career at Bell Labs and Xerox after getting his electrical engineering degree from Princeton, Ph.D. from UC, Berkeley. Worked on Java technology at Sun Microsystems in the mid 80s. Short run at software outfit until he jumped to Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin (big boys at the top of this list)appointed him chief executive of Google 2001. He continues to bust his ass and introduce new services (Google Desktop, Google Checkout), but he’s starting to re-focus on search technology again.
My side notes:
Think Google’s successful enough? 3 of the 5 richest tech men are employees. Now, they’re moving in on number 3 trying to take over a huge part of his empire - Paypal.
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