Some of the world’s richest entrepreneurs have made their fortune through the internet. Below is a list of eight such people, including information on how they made their millions (in some case billions)!
Mark Zuckerberg
One of the five co-founders of Facebook and the subject of the film, ‘The Social Network’, Zuckerberg has a net worth of $9.4 billion. A qualified software programmer, Zuckerberg and his friends set up Facebook from his dormitory at Harvard, eventually allowing students from other universities and then the public to join.
Facebook is a social networking site allowing users to connect with others for the sharing of information, photographs and videos and as of October 2012 the site had 100 million users. It is the third largest business in the USA after Google and Amazon, with an estimated value of $41 billion.
Larry Page
Larry Page is the co-founder of Google, the world’s largest search engine, which receives more than one billion visitors a month. Google has more than 30,000 employees and recently purchased YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 million. Larry Page founded the site whilst studying for a PHD at Stanford; he also has a BSc in Engineering and a Masters in Computing.
The son of a computer science professor, he built an inkjet printer out of Lego bricks as a child! After raising $1 million from investors, including friends and family, Google launched in 1998. Larry Page is now the 31st richest person in the world and has a net worth of $17.5 billion.
Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, setting up from his garage at home. Amazon is now the largest web retailer in the world, worth around $90 billion. Bezos was always scientifically minded; as a child he rigged up a camera in his room to keep his brothers and sisters out.
He studied for a BSc in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Princeton. Amazon is responsible for creating the Kindle, one of the best-selling E-readers available today. Jeff Bezos’ net worth is estimated at $23.2 billion and he has gone on to invest in ‘Blue Origin’, a space flight start-up.
Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar created eBay on the 3rd September 1995. eBay is ‘the world’s marketplace’ an online auction site where users can bid to buy and sell practically anything!
An American-Iranian born in Paris to an academic mother and surgeon father, Omidyar’s family moved to America when he was just six years old. Studying for a degree in Computer Science, he went on to work for Claris, a subsidiary of Apple, before founding eBay with his wife Pam.
With an estimated net worth of $8.2 billion, Omidyar used his profits to create the Omidyar Network in 1998, helping the world’s poorest people by investing in their ideas for promising social enterprise.
Kevin Systrom
Instagram, one of the most recent developments in the world of online photo sharing, is an app for Android and Apple smartphones, which allows users to take pictures, edit them with the included filters and share them online. Co-founded in 2010 by Kevin Systrom, the app now has more than 10 million users and was recently purchased by Facebook in a rather controversial deal.
Systrom always had a passion for photography, studying Management Science & Engineering at Stanford. Upon graduation, he interned at Odeo (which would go on to become Twitter) and then spent two years working for Google, providing a solid base for his business start-up. At the tender age of 27, Systrom’s net worth is estimated at $400 million.
Daniel Ek
Daniel Ek is a Swedish-born entrepreneur. In 1997, at the age of 14, he started his first company, designing websites for local businesses and bringing in thousands of dollars in revenue every month.
In 2007, aged 24, he co-founded Spotify, an online music streaming service, which began as a free service and progressed to offer different levels of membership, including a paid service for subscribers.
To date, Spotify is worth $3 million, with 15 million active users, four million of whom are subscribers. Ek’s net worth as of April 2012 was $310 million.
Caterina Fake
An American businesswoman born in Pennsylvania, Caterina would never have thought that she would go on to be one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs. Co-founding Ludicorp in 2004 with her husband, Stewart Butterfield, the original use for their software was to create an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game).
Quickly realising that the software had more potential in a different field, Flickr was born an online image and video sharing site that has gone on to be acquired by Yahoo for $35 million and now boasts 51 million registered users worldwide.
Dave Hyatt
Dave Hyatt is an American software developer and the co-founder of Mozilla Firefox who has a net worth of $60 million. Founded in 2004 with Blake Scott, when Hyatt was just 32 years old, the free to use, open-source web browser, which runs on Mac OS X, Linux and Windows, is now the second most popular browser in use in the world today (the most popular being Microsoft Internet Explorer). Today, Hyatt works for Apple and is responsible for developing Safari (the Apple browser).
[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’][/author_image] [author_info]This post was contributed by Conosco; a company that provides fixed-price IT support to businesses in London.[/author_info] [/author]
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