Today we have decided to highlight the top 100 internet entrepreneurs in the world, their respective companies, and their net worth. This insightful piece provides an overview of the most successful individuals who have ever started a website, shedding light on their significant contributions and achievements.
The Current 10 Richest Internet Entrepreneurs
2) Mark Zuckerberg: Founder of Facebook is worth $155 billion
3) Larry Ellison: Founder of Oracle is worth $145.8 billionRich List
100 Wealthiest Internet Entrepreneurs
| 1 |
Jeff Bezos: Founder of Amazon is worth $198 Billion
Jeff (60) is an American technology and retail entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist best known as the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Amazon.com, the world’s largest online shopping retailer. The company was founded in Jeff’s home garage and began as an as an online bookstore, but now it is best known for selling and offering a wide range of products and services, including electronics, clothing, groceries, and digital content like video and audio streaming. Amazon.com is currently the world’s largest Internet sales company on the World Wide Web and earns $386 billion annually. |
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Mark Zuckerberg: Founder of Facebook is worth $155 billion
Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard University dormitory room. He was assisted by his college roommates and fellow Harvard students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. |
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Larry Ellison: Founder of Oracle is worth $145.8 billion
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Larry Page: Founder of Google is worth $142.5 billionLarry (51) is an American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Google with Sergey Brin (famously in a garage). Page is the chief executive officer (CEO) of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc. After stepping aside as Google CEO in August 2001 in favour of Eric Schmidt, he re-assumed the role in April 2011. Page is the 12th richest person in the world. Page is the inventor of PageRank and an investor in Tesla Motors. |
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Sergey Brin: Founder of Google is worth $136.6 billionSergey (50) is a Russian-born American computer scientist, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. Together with Larry Page, he co-founded Google. President of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., Brin is not just limited to Google. He is passionately working on other, more personal projects that reach beyond Google, aiming to make a significant impact on the world’s energy and climate problems. Brin and Page are leading the charge at Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, which invests in the alternative energy industry to find wider sources of renewable energy. |
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Ma Huateng: Founder of Tencent is worth $37.8 billionMa (52) also known as Pony Ma, is a Chinese internet entrepreneur. He is the founder, president, chief executive officer and executive board member of Tencent Inc., one of the largest Internet companies in China. The company controls China’s biggest mobile instant messaging service and its subsidiaries provide media, entertainment, the internet and mobile phone value-added services. |
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Ding Lei: Founder of NetEase is worth $30.6 billionDing (52) also known as William Ding, is the founder and CEO of 163.com (NetEase). Ding made significant contributions to the development of computer networks in mainland China. After graduation, he first worked in a local state department in Ningbo as an engineer, and then he went to Guangzhou and worked for Sybase there. He founded NetEase and became the richest individual in the Chinese mainland in the year of 2003. |
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Masayoshi Son: Founder of SoftBank is worth $27 BillionMasayoshi (66) is a Korean-descendant Japanese businessman and the founder and current chief executive officer of SoftBank, the chief executive officer of SoftBank Mobile, and current chairman of Sprint Corporation. He is the richest man in Japan, despite having the distinction of losing the most money in history (approximately $70bn during the dot-com crash of 2000).In 2011 as a response to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, Masayoshi Son criticized the nuclear industry for creating “the problem that worries Japanese the most today”, and engaged in investing in a nationwide solar power network for Japan. |
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Eduardo Saverin: Co-founder of Facebook is worth $24.7 billionEduardo (42) is a Brazilian Internet entrepreneur and angel investor. Saverin is one of the co-founders of Facebook. During his junior year at Harvard, Saverin met fellow Harvard undergraduate, sophomore Mark Zuckerberg. Noting the need for a dedicated social networking website for Harvard students, the two worked together to launch The Facebook. As co-founder, Saverin was the chief financial officer and business manager. As of 2015, he owns 53 million Facebook shares (approximately 0.4% of all outstanding shares). He has also invested in early-stage startups such as Qwiki and Jumio. |
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Ma Yun: Founder of Alibaba is worth $24.7 billionMa (59) is known professionally as Jack Ma, is a Chinese business magnate who is the founder and executive chairman of Alibaba Group, a family of Internet-based businesses. He is currently the richest person in Asia and the 14th richest in the world. He has become a global icon in business and entrepreneurship, one of the world’s most influential businessmen, and a philanthropist known for expounding his philosophy of business. |
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Andy Bechtolsheim: Co-founder of Sun Microsystems is worth $14.7 billionAndy (68) is a German electrical engineer, entrepreneur, investor, and self-made billionaire. He co-founded Sun Microsystems and was its chief hardware designer. The first product, the Sun-1, included the Stanford CPU board design with improved memory expansion, and a sheet-metal case. By the end of the year, the experimental Ethernet interface designed by Bechtolsheim was replaced by a commercial board from 3Com. |
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David Cheriton: One of Googles first investors is worth $14 billionDavid (72) is a Canadian computer scientist, mathematician, businessman, philanthropist, and venture capitalist. He is a computer science professor at Stanford University, where he founded and heads up the Distributed Systems Group. He is a distributed systems and networking expert with keen insight into identifying big market opportunities and building the architectures needed to address these opportunities. He has founded and invested in technology companies, including Google, where he was amongst the first investors |
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Azim Premji: Founder of Wipro is worth $11.8 billionAzim (78) is an Indian business tycoon, investor, and philanthropist, who is the chairman of Wipro Limited. He is informally known as the Czar of the Indian IT Industry. He was responsible for guiding Wipro through four decades of diversification and growth to finally emerge as one of the global leaders in the software industry. Premji owns 73% percent of Wipro and also owns a private equity fund, PremjiInvest, which manages his $2 billion worth of personal portfolio. |
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Hasso Plattner: Co-founder of SAP SE is worth $11.5 billionHasso (80) is a German businessman. A co-founder of SAP SE software company, he has been chairman of the supervisory board of SAP SE since May 2003. For his commitment to economics and science, Plattner has received a number of honours. Leadership Award for Global Integration to the “technology guru” and inaugurated him into their Hall of Fame, which honours those who promote economic and social development in Germany. |
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Brian Chesky: Co-founder of Airbnb is worth $10.8 billionis an American Internet entrepreneur who co-founded the hospitality exchange service Airbnb. Chesky is the CEO of the company and was named one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People of 2015”. Chesky started attending the Rhode Island School of Design. He received his Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Industrial Design. After college, Chesky worked as an industrial designer and strategist at 3DID, Inc. in Los Angeles. He later moved to San Francisco, where he shared an apartment with Gebbia. |
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Liu Qiangdong: Founder of JD.com is worth $10.7 billionLiu (50) is a Chinese Internet entrepreneur, also known as Richard Liu. He is the founder of JD.com or Jingdong Mall, one of the leading e-commerce industry leaders in China. As a young man, Liu Qiangdong had an interest in politics. Liu enrolled in the department of sociology at the People’s University of China, known for its connection to China’s political elites. However, Liu spent all his spare time learning computer programming. |
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Nathan Blecharczyk: Co-founder of Airbnb is worth $10.5 billionNathan (40) is an American business executive and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and chief strategy officer of Airbnb and was the company’s first chief technology officer. He continued writing programs while attending Harvard University in pursuit of a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and began his career as an engineer at OPNET Technologies. He served as a lead developer at Batiq. Later Blecharczyk partnered with Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia to found Airbnb, he served as the company’s first chief technology officer and coded the company’s original website using Ruby on Rails. |
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Wang Xing: Founder and CEO of Meituan is worth $9.8 billionWang (45) is a Chinese billionaire entrepreneur and investor with a net worth of $9.8 billion. He is the founder and CEO of Meituan, a Chinese tech company that operates one of China’s largest online marketplaces for food delivery, travel bookings, and other services. Meituan is often referred to as the “Groupon of China” due to its initial focus on group-buying deals before expanding into other areas. Before founding Meituan, Wang Xing had founded several other companies, including Fanfou, a Chinese microblogging site, and Xiaonei, a social networking site for college students. |
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Marc Benioff: Founder of Salesforce is worth $9.7 billionMarc (59) is an American internet entrepreneur, author and philanthropist. He is the founder, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, a large enterprise cloud computing company (started in an apartment he rented). Benioff started Salesforce in March 1999 in a rented San Francisco apartment and defined its mission in a marketing statement as “The End of Software” Benioff has long evangelized software as a service as the model that would replace traditional enterprise software. |
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Joe Gebbia: Co-founder of Airbnb is worth $9.6 billionJoe (42) is an American designer and Internet entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Airbnb. In 2009, Gebbia was listed in BusinessWeek’s Top 20 Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs. Gebbia convinced Chesky to move to San Francisco in 2007 to start a business together. When they both quit their jobs, their landlord raised their rent and so they were in need of money. Knowing the Industrial Design Society of America conference was coming to San Francisco and many hotels were booked. Gebbia believed they could rent out airbeds in their apartment to conference goers, they marketed this idea by creating a website called “AirBed & Breakfast.” |
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Jan Koum: Co-founder of WhatsApp is worth $9.7 billionJan (48) is an American internet inventor and computer programmer. Koum and Acton applied, and failed, to work at Facebook. Latter Koum bought an iPhone and realized that the then-seven-month-old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps. Koum almost immediately chose the name WhatsApp because it sounded like “what’s up”. He is the CEO and co-founder of WhatsApp (with Brian Acton), a mobile messaging application which was acquired by Facebook Inc. in February 2014 for US$19.3 billion. |
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James Goodnight: Co-founder of SAS Institute is worth $8.8 billionJames (81) is an American businessman and software programmer. He and several other faculty members of North Carolina State University left the university in 1976 to co-found SAS Institute. Since the first day of incorporation, he has served as the company’s CEO. His leadership style and the work environment he created at SAS, now a multibillion-dollar company, have been studied by other businesses and by academics. |
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Joseph Tsai: Co-founder of Alibaba is worth $8.6 billionJoseph (60) is a Taiwanese-Canadian businessman. He is the co-founder and vice chairman of Alibaba Group. Joseph Tsai was born in Taipei, Taiwan, but holds a Canadian passport. He is also the president of Crimson Group, chairman of the football club Rakuten Vissel Kobe, chairman of Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, and a board member of Lyft. He attended high school at the Lawrenceville School and has undergraduate and law degrees from Yale University where he also played collegiate lacrosse. |
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Denise Coates: Founder of Bet365 is worth $8.4 billionDenise (56) is an English businesswoman, founder and joint chief executive of online gambling company Bet365. While working in a temporary building on a car park near one of her shops, she spent a year creating a new online betting site. The business borrowed £15 million from RBS against the family’s betting shop estate. In 2005 these shops were sold to Coral for £40 million which also paid off the loan to RBS. |
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David Duffield: Co-founder of PeopleSoft is worth $7.4 billionDavid (83) is an American businessman in the software industry. He is the co-founder and former chairman of PeopleSoft, the co-founder and co-CEO of Workday, Inc., and has been on the Forbes World’s Richest People list. Implementation focuses on PeopleSoft’s proprietary PeopleTools technology. PeopleTools includes many different components used to create web-based applications. |
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John Collison: Co-founder of Stripe is worth $7.2 billionJohn (33) is an Irish entrepreneur. He is best known for having co-founded Stripe with his brother, Patrick. The brothers are worth at least $1.1 billion each after San Francisco-based Stripe raised $150 million from CapitalG, an investment division of Google parent company Alphabet, and General Catalyst Partners. In November 2016, the Collison brothers became the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. |
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Patrick Collison: Co-founder of Stripe is worth $7.2 billionPatrick (35) is an Irish entrepreneur from County Limerick. He is the co-founder and CEO of Stripe, which he started with his younger brother, John, in 2010. He won the 41st Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in 2005 at the age of sixteen. He lives in San Francisco, California. The brothers are now worth at least $1.1 billion each after San Francisco-based Stripe raised $150 million from CapitalG, an investment division of Google parent company Alphabet, and General Catalyst Partners. |
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Peter Thiel: Co-founder of PayPal is worth $7 billionPeter (56) is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, philanthropist, political activist, and author. Thiel was born in Frankfurt and holds German citizenship. After graduation, he worked as a judicial clerk for Judge James Larry Edmondson He then co-founded PayPal in 1999, and served as a chief executive officer until its sale to eBay. After the sale of PayPal, he founded Clarium Capital, a global macro hedge fund. He launched Palantir Technologies, an analytical software company, in 2004 and continues to serve as its chairman as of 2017. |
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Zhang Zhidong: Co-founder of Tencent is worth $7 billionZhang (52) also known as Tony Zhang, is a Chinese businessman, co-founder, former CTO and second-largest individual shareholder of Tencent, a Chinese internet company. He was in the same class at Shenzhen University as Tencent’s founder, fellow billionaire Ma Huateng. Tencent shares have more than doubled in the past year. The company is about 30% owned by Naspers of South Africa. He also has a master’s degree from the South China University of Technology. |
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Brian Acton: Co-founder of WhatsApp is worth $6.5 billionBrian (52) is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is the co-founder (with Jan Koum) of WhatsApp a mobile messaging application which was acquired by Facebook Inc. He later graduated from Stanford University in 1994 with a degree in computer science. In 1992, he became a systems administrator for Rockwell International, before becoming a product tester at Apple Inc. and Adobe Systems. |
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Pierre Omidyar: Founder of eBay is worth $6.4 billionPierre (56) is a French-born Iranian-American entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is the founder of the eBay auction site (which he started at home) where he served as chairman from 1998 to 2015. He became a billionaire at the age of 31 with eBay’s 1998 initial public offering (IPO). Omidyar and his wife Pamela are well-known philanthropists who founded Omidyar Network in order to expand their efforts beyond non-profits to include for-profits and public policy. Since 2010, Omidyar has been involved in online journalism as the head of investigative reporting and public affairs news service Honolulu Civil Beat. |
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Travis Kalanick: Former Uber CEO is worth $6.3 billionTravis (47) co-founder of the peer-to-peer file sharing company Red Swoosh and former CEO of transportation network company Uber. In 2014, he entered the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans at position 190. Kalanick started his first business, an online file-exchange service called Scour. In 1998, he dropped out of UCLA to work at the start-up full time. |
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Kwon Hyuk-Bin: Founder of Smilegate is worth $6.3 billionKwon Hyuk-Bin (50) founded Smilegate in and built it into one of the most successful gaming companies in South Korea. Partnership with Chinese Internet giant Tencent, it released its most popular title, CrossFire. Through his Smilegate Foundation, Kwon has established schools in China and Vietnam, providing education in IT, among other subjects. Kwon’s Smilegate Holdings, of which he owns 100%, is the largest shareholder of Korean mobile game developer SundayToz. |
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Hiroshi Mikitani: Founder of Rakuten is worth $6.1 billionHiroshi (59) is a Japanese billionaire businessman and the founder and CEO of Rakuten. In 1996, Mikitani started looking at various business models and decided to launch an online shopping mall. At the time, Netscape was around, Amazon.com had recently launched, and Google didn’t yet exist. Mikitani founded the e-commerce company MDM, Inc. with three co-founders and of their own money, launching the online marketplace Rakuten Ichiba in Japan. The company was renamed Rakuten, Inc. It started as a small online marketplace and has since grown into an e-commerce giant. |
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Robin Li: Founder of Baidu is worth $6 billionRobin (55) co-founded the Chinese search engine Baidu. Since founding Baidu Li has turned the company into the largest Chinese search engine, with over 80% market share by a search query, and the second largest independent search engine in the world. Li studied information management at Peking University and computer science at the State University of New York at Buffalo, In addition, Li also serves as the member of the 12th Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. |
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Mark Scheinberg: Founder of PokerStars is worth $5.6 billionMark (51) is an Israeli-Canadian businessman, co-founder and former co-owner of the online gambling company PokerStars. Together with his father, computer programmer Isai Scheinberg. In June 2014, it was reported that Rational Group Ltd, the PokerStars parent company was being bought by Amaya Gaming Group of Canada for $4.9 billion. Scheinberg was CEO and 75% owner of Rational, which also owned Full Tilt Poker. |
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Ralph Dommermuth: Founder of 1&1 Internet is worth $5.5 billionRalph (60) leads United Internet AG, one of Germany’s largest Internet access providers, which serves mostly home users and small- to medium-sized enterprises and also provides web hosting, storage and email services. Dommermuth launched United’s predecessor company, 1&1 AG, in 1988 with a borrowed desk and $285,000 saved from working as a computer salesman. Dommermuth trained as a banker, before moving into computer sales in Montabaur, Germany. Dommermuth is Germany’s sole Internet billionaire and the country’s youngest self-made billionaire. |
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Kim Jung-Ju: Founder of Nexon is worth $5 billionKim (56) is a Korean businessman who co-founded Korea’s largest gaming company, Nexon. He owns NXC, the 20-year-old holding company of Nexon. Education. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in computer science and engineering from Seoul National University. He attained his masters and PhD in electronic engineering and computer science at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. |
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Garrett Camp: Co-founder of Uber is worth $4.7 billionGarrett (45) is a Canadian businessman and investor. He co-founded StumbleUpon a web-discovery platform, while in graduate school at the University of Calgary in 2002 and co-founded Uber, an on-demand car service available via a mobile application in 2009. Garrett occasionally invests in and advises new start-ups. Previously Garrett invested in Prism Skylabs, SoundTracking, WillCall and PSDept. Garrett was also a Series-A investor in Behance, prior to its acquisition by Adobe. |
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Rony Abovitz: Founder of Magic Leap is worth $4.5 billionRony (53) is an American entrepreneur, founder and CEO of augmented reality startup Magic Leap. In October 2014, the startup raised over $540 million of venture funding from Google and other investors. In October 2017, Magic Leap announced the partnership with online comic book publisher Madefire. Prior to Magic Leap, Abovitz co-founded MAKO Surgical Corp., a company manufacturing surgical robotic arm assistance platforms. He attended the University of Miami, where he obtained a master’s degree in biomedical engineering. |
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Jack Dorsey: Co-founder of Twitter is worth $4.5 billionJack (47) is an American computer programmer and internet entrepreneur widely known as a co-founder and CEO of Twitter, and as the founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payments company. Williams, Stone and Noah Glass co-founded Obvious Corporation, which then spun off Twitter Inc. with Dorsey as the CEO. After Dorsey, along with co-founder Jim McKelvey, developed a small business platform to accept debit and credit card payments on a mobile device – Square. |
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Gabe Newell: Founder of Valve is worth $4.3 billionGabe (61) often nicknamed Gaben, is an American computer programmer and businessman who is best known as the co-founder and president of the video game development and digital distribution company Valve Corporation. Born in Seattle, Newell attended Harvard University in the early 1980s, but dropped out shortly before graduating and soon went to work for the American technology company Microsoft, where he spent the next decade working as a producer for some of their early Windows operating systems. |
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David Filo: Co-found |
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Martin Lorentzon
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