Technology has become a springboard for founders to quickly achieve 10-figure net worths, e.g. artificial intelligence scaleof Lucy Guo and Alexander Wang Just a few years after creating their innovations, they became billionaires. But others are forced to play the long game to win the jackpot. take Steve Hoffman: Twenty years after co-founding Redditthe CEO finally joins the super-rich club.
After recent Reddit post, Huffman’s net worth soars to $1.2 billion victorious earnings report. On Thursday, the company announced a net profit of $163 million, its fifth consecutive quarter of profit since going public in March 2024. Reddit’s stock price closed at $208.95 on Friday, up 7.5% from the previous day and 75% from the previous year.
It’s a welcome change since the social media platform has been in business for the better part of 20 years strive to be profitable.
As one of Reddit’s largest individual shareholders, Huffman has reaped vast wealth from Reddit’s newfound success, having owned 3.1 million shares and holding about 2% to 3% of the company. His executive compensation was $193 million Caught the attention of unpaid moderators last yearwhich includes an annual salary of $550,000 and the rest in stock. Forbes reported that The rest of his wealth consists of $190 million in cash and other investments.
wealth Reddit and Huffman were contacted for comment.
Reddit’s rocky journey from college creation to multi-billion dollar behemoth
It’s been exactly two decades since Huffman founded the company with a friend and roommate in 2005 Alexis Ohanian. As final-year students at the University of Virginia, they pitched My Mobile Menu, an online food delivery business, to Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, but were rejected.
Rather than dwelling on rejection, young innovators pivoted.
This time, they came up with different ideas: create “Front Page of the Internet,” which later became Reddit. It attracted Y Combinator and received a $12,000 grant and three months of housing and office expenses to give their idea a fresh start after graduation. Huffman, then 21, coded the site in 20 days while Ohanian handled the business side of things. Investors quickly took notice; by summer, they had secured another $100,000 in funding.
Within 16 months of Reddit’s creation, Condé Nast acquired the platform for just $10 million. But things changed for the company. Aaron Swartz, one of Reddit’s founders who led development of the platform, left in 2007. In 2008, the site allowed users to create their own feeds, called subreddits, that created trending topics on topics such as politics and science, but also spread controversial content.
In 2009, Ohanian and Hoffman left on Halloween after their three-year contracts expired. In the years that followed, Reddit came under scrutiny for child pornography, celebrity nudes, and conspiracy theories that proliferated on the platform.
Reddit’s new CEO at the time, Yishan Wongtrying to turn the situation around. In 2014, he met with Y Combinator’s Sam Altman and proposed Reddit raises $50 million from celebrity investors including Josh Kushner, Jared Leto, Snoop Dogg and Peter Thiel. But the platform is still losing money.
The next year, Hoffman returned as CEO and spent a decade turning the company around. By 2024, the company will start its IPO at $34 per share and reach an intraday high of about $55.39 per share, which is about 63% higher than the starting price.
Today, Reddit’s market capitalization is approximately $38 billion.
Other CEOs who worked hard and became billionaires
Hoffman isn’t the only tech CEO to earn billions years after founding his company. FigmaCEO of Dylan Field In 2012, he dropped out of college to start a business. 10 years later, adobe Seeking to acquire the software company for $20 billion, his stake in the company expand to 2 billion US dollars. Earlier this year, his wealth expanded to A breakthrough IPO that valued the company at $5 billion.
Netflix Co-Founder and Chairman Reed Hastings It wasn’t until 2014, nearly two decades after founding his entertainment empire in 1997, that Hastings joined the club of the ultra-rich. The year Hastings became a billionaire, Netflix’s stock price soared to $400. After a decade of offering DVD subscriptions, Hastings is finally becoming a billionaire thanks to the newfound success of his streaming service. Today, he is expected Valued at $7.5 billion.
and NVIDIAof Jen-Hsun Huang May be the ninth richest person in the world today, with a net worth of $176 billion, but he doesn’t rank among the richest people. Bloomberg The Billionaires Index continues until 2016, more than two decades after co-founding the chip giant in 1993. Nine years ago, his fortune stood at $1.4 billion, but money has been pouring in as he strategically refocused his graphics processing units (GPUs) from gaming to serve the current artificial intelligence boom.
By the beginning of 2020, Huang Probably Valued at US$5.75 billion; approximately end of November 2022, Chat GPT According to reports, his wealth reaches US$15 billion. Since then, his wealth has soared.