The Top 10 Richest Social Media Entrepreneurs
Let’s take a look at the top 10 richest social media entrepreneurs, based on the latest Forbes’ overall net worth list…
10) Hae Jin Lee, of Line – $1.7 billion
D.O.B: June 22, 1967
Nationality: South Korean
Source of Wealth: Line
Marital Status: Married
Residence: Seoul, South Korea
• Self-made billionaire Hae Jin Lee is the founder and director of Naver Corporation – a South Korean company that operates one of Japan’s most popular social networking apps, Line.
• Line Corporation, a Japanese subsidiary of Naver Corporation, runs Line. Users can exchange texts, images, audio and video clips and can also conduct video conferences and VoIP conversations free of charge.
• After being launched in Japan in 2011, the site had reached 100 million users within just 18 months. Today, there are 164 million users.
• Hae Jin Lee ranks at number 14 on Forbes’ list of Korea’s 50 richest people.
9) Reid Hoffman, of LinkedIn – $1.9 billion.
D.O.B: August 5, 1967
Nationality: American
Source of Wealth: LinkedIn
Marital Status: Married
Residence: Palo Alto, CA
• American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author Reid Hoffman studied at Stanford and Oxford universities, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Science degrees.
• He was responsible for creating two of the most successful social networking sites in history: LinkedIn and Facebook. He co-founded the business platform LinkedIn, the source of his wealth, in 2002.
• His first job was at the age of 12, when he edited for a gaming company called Chaosium in his hometown.
• LinkedIn has around 660 million users today, spread over more than 200 countries.
8) Sean Parker, of Napster – $2.7 billion
D.O.B: December 3, 1979
Nationality: American
Source of Wealth: Napster
Marital Status: Married
Residence: Los Angeles
• While a pupil at Chantilly High School, he spent most of his time writing code in the computer lab and won the Virginia state computer science fair for developing a Web crawler.
• When he was 15, Parker met computer programmer Shawn Fanning. Five years later, in June 1999, they had raised the £50,000 needed to launch Napster – a peer-to-peer file-sharing site. It became the fastest-growing business of all time and within a year, there were tens of millions of users.
• Parker has donated millions of pounds to charities and in 2015, he donated $600 million to set up the Parker Foundation to support global public health and life sciences.
7) Evan Spiegel, of Snapchat – $4.9 billion
D.O.B: June 4, 1990
Nationality: American
Source of Wealth: Snapchat
Marital Status: Married
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
• Evan Spiegel founded Snapchat, the social media platform that allows people to communicate via one to ten-second “snaps”. Something so simple has boosted his net worth to an estimated $4.9 billion!
• By the end of 2012, his Snapchat app had reached one million daily active users. He was named the youngest billionaire in the world in 2015.
• The 30 year old father-of-two married his wife Miranda three years ago.
• Spiegel and fellow Stanford classmate Bobby Murphy have created the Snap Foundation – a non-profit organisation, which has recently donated $3 million to people affected by Covid-19.
6) Jack Dorsey, of Twitter – $8 billion
D.O.B: November 19, 1976
Nationality: American
Source of Wealth: Twitter
Marital Status: Single
Residence: San Francisco, CA
• Twitter is used by more than 330 million people on a monthly basis, making Jack Dorsey a multi-billionaire through ads and affiliates.
• In his youth, he dropped out of New York University and at the age of 23, he became a certified masseur!
• In 2006, he collaborated with Ev Williams, Noah Glass and Biz Stone to create Twitter. In 2008, he became the company chairman.
• Dorsey is a renowned philanthropist and in August 2020, he donated $10 million of his wealth to Boston University’s Centre of Anti-Racist Research.
5) Jan Koum, of WhatsApp – $9.9 billion.
D.O.B: February 24, 1976
Nationality: American
Source of Wealth: WhatsApp
Marital Status: Single
Residence: Santa Clara, CA
• Koum no longer owns WhatsApp, but it has made the 44-year-old Ukrainian-born businessman the world’s fifth-richest social media entrepreneur.
• He moved with his family to California in 1992 and is now an American citizen. He always had a knack with computers and joined Yahoo in 1998 as a security and infrastructure engineer. After nine years, he left the company.
• Jan launched WhatsApp in 2009. It’s now the world’s largest mobile messaging service, with two billion users across the globe.
• Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion – its biggest acquisition to date.
4) Zhang Yiming, of ByteDance – $22.6 billion
D.O.B: April 1, 1983
Nationality: Chinese
Source of Wealth: ByteDance
Marital Status: Married
Residence: Beijing, China
• Internet entrepreneur Yiming founded ByteDance in 2012 and developed the video sharing platform TikTok, which had more than one billion monthly users by the end of 2019.
• ByteDance is currently valued at $75 billion, making it the most valuable startup on the planet.
• With personal wealth of an estimated $22.6 billion, Yiming is the ninth richest person in China.
• Aged only 37, he studied microelectronics and software engineering at Nankai University in Tianjin, graduating in 2005. He is known as an intensely private person.
3) Ma Hueateng, of Tencent – $55.3 billion
D.O.B: October 29, 1971
Nationality: Chinese
Source of Wealth: Tencent Holdings
Marital Status: Married
Residence: Hong Kong
• Ma Hueateng founded Asia’s most valuable company, tech company Tencent, in 1998. He went on to launch the instant messaging service WeChat, which has an estimated one billion active users.
• The 48-year-old, nicknamed Pony Ma, was born in Shantou, Guangdong, and graduated from Shenzhen University in 1993 with a BSc in computer science. His first job was working for telecommunications firm China Motion Telecom Development for $176 per month.
• He co-founded Tencent with four classmates, but almost sold the company in the early days, when he had massive cash problems and was shored up by bank loans.
• Today, he’s a well-known philanthropist and transferred $2.3 billion of his personal wealth to his charitable foundation, the Ma Huateng Global Foundation.
2) Larry Page, of Google – $64.4 billion.
D.O.B: March 26, 1973
Nationality: American
Source of Wealth: Google
Marital Status: Married
Residence: Palo Alto, CA
• Larry Page amassed his personal wealth from his successful search engine Google, but has created, owned and managed numerous social networking sites.
• As the CEO of Google, Page had high expectations of Google+ and the platform was expected to outperform Facebook, but it didn’t do as well as anticipated. Some people have even classed Google+ as a failure!
• Despite Google+ under-performing, Page is still worth an estimated $64.4 billion, so if that’s a measure of failure, everyone would like to try it!
• Page is now 47 years old and married with a child. In July 2020, he was named the 13th-richest person in the world by Forbes. He also part-owns YouTube.
1) Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook – $92.9 billion.
D.O.B: May 14, 1984
Nationality: American
Source of Wealth: Facebook
Marital Status: Married
Residence: Palo Alto, CA
• Just about everyone you speak to uses Facebook on a daily basis. In fact, there are around 2.6 billion monthly active users on the world’s most popular social networking site, which was launched thanks to the creativity and imagination of Mark Zuckerberg.
• Mark, 36, created Facebook in 2004, when he was only 20 years old. He was exceptionally talented, as most 20-year-olds aren’t well on the way to becoming a billionaire. He’s currently ranked the fourth richest person in the world and is the only person aged under 40 in Forbes’ list of the 20 richest people on the planet.
• It should come as no surprise that he’s ranked as the number one social media entrepreneur in the financial stakes – he has held the position for many years. His wealth has grown rapidly since 2017, when he was ranked number one with a net worth of $71.5 billion.
• Zuckerberg was a university drop-out, as he concentrated his intelligence on his passion for technology instead. He is a philanthropist who has signed The Giving Pledge, in which he promised to donate at least half his wealth to charity