The 20 Richest People In Tech: Forbes 400
From Larry Ellison to MacKenzie Scott and Michael Dell, here are the richest people in technology, according to Forbes’ recent ranking.
To make the Forbes 400 list in 2022, the minimum net worth an individual must make was down $200 million to $2.7 billion. The drop was the first of its kind since the Great Recession, according to Forbes. The wealthiest people are, in fact, not as wealthy as they were a year ago.
Because of the drop, 42 people, ranging from ages 29 to 90, joined or rejoined the ranks of the richest people. Their fortunes were calculated using stock prices from September 2, 2022, according to Forbes.
While many on the list range from oil-and-gas tycoons to sports moguls to real estate investors, many of the top 20 are in the technology industry.
From tech magnate Michael Dell to Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, here are the 20 richest people in technology, according to Forbes.
20. Rocco Commisso
Worth: $7.7 billion
Overall ranking: #93 (tie)
Rocco Commisso is the founder and CEO of cable company Mediacom, based in Blooming Grove, New York.
He held previous positions as CFO at Cablevision Industries and is currently the owner of Italian soccer team Fiorentina.
Commisso moved to the U.S. from Italy at 12 years old and played the accordion during movie theater intermissions as his first job, according to Forbes.
He attended Columbia University on a full scholarship, which has sinced renamed its soccer stadium in honor of him in recognition of his donations to the school.
19. Nathan Blecharczyk
Worth: $7.7 billion
Overall ranking: #93 (tie)
Nathan Blecharczyk cofounded home rental company Airbnb with Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky in 2008. He has a net worth of $7.7 billion.
He is the chief strategy officer and Airbnb’s first engineer. He is also the chair of Airbnb China.
Airbnb went public in December 2020, operates in more than 100,000 cities in 191 countries, has 5.6 million listings worldwide and has rented to 500 million guests and counting.
18. Dustin Moskovitz
Worth: $8.1 billion
Overall ranking: #83
Along with Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz launched Facebook in 2004. After leaving Facebook in 2008, he cofounded Asana, a workflow software company, which went public in September 2020.
While most of Moskovitz’ fortune is in his 2 percent stake in Facebook, he and his wife have built a charitable foundation called Good Ventures. The nonprofit gives millions of dollars to eradicate malaria and promote marriage equality.
The couple also backs the Open Philanthropy Project, an organization that advises donors and makes grants.
17. Jay Chaudhry
Worth: $8.3 billion
Overall ranking: #79
Jay Chaudhry is the CEO of Zscaler, the cloud security firm that he founded in 2008. He and his family own 42 percent of the company.
In 1996, Chaudhry and his wife, Jyoti, quit their jobs and used their savings to start cybersecurity firm SecureIT. Since then, he founded three other tech startups, CoreHarbor, CipherTrust and AirDefense, which have all been acquired.
16. Brian Chesky
Worth: $8.9 billion
Overall ranking: #74
Brian Chesky is the CEO of home rental company Airbnb which he cofounded with with Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia in 2008.
Airbnb went public in December 2020 with a share price more than doubling to upwards of $144. Before creating Airbnb, Chesky was an industrial designer in Los Angeles and made $40,000 a year.
During the pandemic, Airbnb had reportedly struggled to stay afloat and took on $2 billion in private equity funds before going public in December 2020.
15. David Duffield
Worth: $9.4 billion
Overall ranking: #68
David Duffield cofounded two software companies by age 40, PeopleSoft and Workday.
PeopleSoft was founded in 1987 and sold to Oracle for $10.7 billion in cash in 2005.
Duffield resigned as chairman of Workday in April 2021. He started his first business at 28 and was a systems engineer at IBM after college.
He has donated $345 million to Maddie’s Fund and an additional $400 million to his alma mater Cornell University among other organizations.
14. Pierre Omidyar
Worth: $9.9 billion
Overall ranking: #65
Pierre Omidyar, with a net worth of $9.9 billion, founded eBay in 1995 and serves on the company‘s board.
The company bought PayPal, an online payment company, in 2002 and spun it off in 2014. Omidyar currently owns five percent of eBay and six percent of Paypal.
Omidyar also owns stakes in resort properties in California and Mexico and is the founder of First Look Media, the parent company of The Intercept, a digital news site and entertainment company Topic Studios.
13. Jensen Huan g
Worth: $12.9 billion
Overall ranking: #48
Jensen Huang cofounded chipmaking giant Nvidia in 1993. He still serves as CEO and president and owns 3.6 percent of the company, which went public in 1999.
Nvidia started in computer gaming chips and has since expanded to design chips autonomous cars and data centers.
Huang has also given $30 million to the engineering center at Stanford University and $5 million for cancer research to Oregon Health & Science University.
12. Jan Koum
Worth: $13.7 billion
Overall ranking: #47
Jan Koum cofounded mobile messaging app WhatsApp, in 2009 after working at Yahoo for nine years.
In 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp for $22 billion in cash and stock, and in 2018 Koum resigned as CEO of the company. He also stepped down from the board at Facebook.
After stepping down, Koum donated $1.15 billion of Facebook stock to multiple nonprofits including to his own, Koum Family Foundation.
11. Robert Pera
Worth: $17.6 billion
Overall Ranking: #37
Robert Pera is the founder and CEO Ubiquiti Networks, a wireless equipment maker focusing on emerging technologies. The company had revenues of $1.2 billion in 2020.
Ubiquiti is a publicly-traded company and Pera owns about 75 percent.
Pera worked at Apple in 2003 but founded Ubiquiti 10 months into his job. In 2005, he left Apple to lead Ubiquiti full time.
10. Er ic Schmidt
Worth: $18.4 bilion
Overall Ranking: #34
Eric Schmidt was Google‘s CEO from 2001 to 2011. Before Google, he held previous positions at Novell as CEO and Sun Microsystems as chief technology officer.
In 2019 he left the board of Google parent company Alphabet in June 2019 but stayed on as a technical advisor until February 2020.
He is the co-founder of venture capital firm Innovation Endeavors, which has invested in multiple companies such as Uber.
9. MacKenzie Scott
Worth: $37.7 billion
Overall Ranking: #18
MacKenzie Scott is a philanthropist and ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The two divorced in 2019 after 25 years of marriage where she received 25 percent stake in the company as part of her divorce settlement.
Shortly after her divorce, she signed the Giving Pledge and promised to give away at least 50 percent of her fortune throughout her lifetime.
Since July 2020, she has given away more than $12 billion to about 1,200 charity organizations. Her approach to donation giving allows the nonprofit to use funds however they choose.
Scott has published two novels and was a student of author Toni Morrison at Princeton University. She also worked as a research assistant for the famed author.
8. Michael Dell
Worth: $50 billion
Overall Ranking : #16
Michael Dell is the chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies. In 2016, the company acquired storage firm EMC for an estimated $60 billion, making is the largest technology acquisition in history at the time.
After the deal, Dell Technologies went public again in 2018 after a complex financial restructuring
The majority of Michael Dell‘s wealth is in his private investment firm MSD Capital, which has holdings in hotels and funding in liquid corporate credit.
In 2017, Dell donated $1 billion to his foundation which focuses on childhood poverty.
7. Mark Zuckerberg
Worth: $57.7 billion
Overall Ranking: #11
Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook at Harvard University in 2004 at the age of 19. After taking Facebook public in May 2012, he now owns about 13 percent of its stock.
In December 2015, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced that they would give away 99 percent of their Facebook shares over both their lifetimes.
In November 2021, Facebook changed its name to Meta to ready the company for the metaverse, a fictional, virtual universe.
That same year, a judge dismissed antitrust cases brought on by both federal and states government. If the case went further in court, Facebook could have been forced to sell Instagram and WhatsApp.
6. Steve Ballmer
Worth: $83 billion
Overall Ranking: #8
Steve Ballmer is the former CEO of Microsoft and owner of the Los Angeles Clippers bansketball team.
Ballmer joined Microsoft in 1980 as employee No. 30 as a dropout of Stanford University. He was CEO of the software company from 2000 to 2014 and, the same year, bought the La Clippers for $2 billion.
He invested $59 million in 2018 into software firm Social Solutions. The company makes software for nonprofits and government agencies. Since 2014, has also donated more than $2 billion to charities that help Americans living in poverty.
5. Sergey Brin
Worth: $89 billion
Overall Ranking: #7
Sergey Brin cofounded Google in 1998 with Larry Page. The two were both Stanford University students studying computer science.
Google went public in 2004 and is traded as Alphabet, Google’s parent company, in 2015.
Brin stepped down as president of Alphabet in December 2019 but remains a board member and shareholder.
In 2019, he spent most of his time on Alphabet‘s moonshot research lab X and is reportedly a financial backer for a high-tech airship project.
4. Larry Page
Worth: $93 billion
Overall Ranking: #6
Larry Page is the cofounder and chairman of Google which he started in 1998 with Sergey Brin, a Ph.D. student at Stanford. The two invented Google’s PageRank algorithm which powers the website’s search engine.
He was CEO until 2001 then became CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet from 2011 until 2015. He has since stepped down as CEO but remains a board member and shareholder.
Page is also investing in Planetary Resources, a space exploration firm, and flying car startups Kitty Hawk and Opener.
3. Larry Ellison
Worth: 101$ billion
Overall Ranking: #4
Larry Ellison is the cofounder, chairman and chief technology officer of software company Oracle.
He stepped down as CEO in 2014 after leading the company for 37 years. He still owns 35 percent of the company.
Oracle has grown exponentially through multiple acquisitions, including the $28 billion acquisition of Cerner, an electronic health records company, in 2021.
In 2020, Ellison relocated to the Hawaiian island Lanai, which he bought the majority of in 2012 for $300 million. He also sat on the board of Tesla from December 2018 to August 2022 and still owns about $15 million in shares.
2. Bill Gates
Worth: 106$ billion
Overall Ranking: #3
Bill Gates diversified his wealth from software company Microsoft into a multitude of holdings including investments in green energy.
Gates cofounded Microsoft with the late Paul Allen in 1975. In March 2020, Gates stepped down from the Microsoft board and owned about 1.3 percent of the company‘s shares.
Other investments outside of Microsoft include Republic Services and Deere & Co. He is also one of the largest owners of farmland in America.
He’s also a philanthropist and has donated about $57 billion to the Gates Foundation. The majority of his donations early on were gifts of Microsoft stock.
In May 2021, Bill and Melinda Gates announced on Twitter they were divorcing after 27 years of marriage. Gates transferred more than $6 billion in shares to Melinda in the divorce settlement. They still co-chair the Gates Foundation.
1. Jeff Bezos
Worth: $151 billion
Overall Ranking: #2
Jeff Bezos founded tech goliath Amazon in 1995 as “the world’s biggest bookseller,” growing it into the world’s largest online retailer and technology innovator with annual sales of nearly $500 billion.
He stepped down as CEO last year but remains on board as the executive chairman and owns just shy of 10 percent of the company.
Bezos divorced his wife MacKenzie in 2019 after 25 years of marriage and gave a quarter of his then-16 percent Amazon shares to her.
Bezos has donated more than $400 million worth of stock to charity organizations so far this year. He also owns The Washington Post and aerospace company Blue Origin.