HACKER Q&A
📣 jamestimmins

Are there any billionaire programmers?


I don't mean people like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg who worked on the early version before becoming CEOs. I mean people for whom programming (or architecture) is their primary activity.

Obvious candidates:

-Satoshi Nakamoto (if he is actually a single person)

-Early Google engineers

  👤 colesantiago Accepted Answer ✓
Markus Persson / notch - Creator of Minecraft ($1.6BN)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Persson

And more recently:

Tom Preston-Werner / mojombo - Founder of GitHub ($1.25BN)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Preston-Werner

👤 k00b
John Carmack is one of my favorite examples.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack - https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack

He might not be a 10+ digit billionaire but he's likely at least a 9 digit millionaire.

👤 mtmail
I guess the founders of whatapps though I wouldn't know how much architecting/programming they did at the time the company sold to Facebook. The company was 55 people at that point. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/whatsapps-55-employee...
👤 quickthrower2
Other early bitcoin hoarders might be - 100K btc would almost get you three commas. That may have cost $1000 maybe back in the day.

To have $1bn and still code full time, it would have to be 'hands off' money, which is rare because to make that much money you'd probably need a wildly successful business which you kind of need to manage yourself.

Someone else mentioned trading firms, that might be one way, with enough luck and negotiation skills.

👤 logicx24
Early Google engineers are either not billionaires or became executives, divorced from architecture, long ago.

Otherwise, I think becoming a billionaire while purely working on software is extremely unlikely, bordering on impossible. Billion-dollar net worths necessitate leading billion-dollar businesses, and those aren't made solely with code.

👤 adventured
Tim Sweeney of Epic is currently worth $10 billion.

He has been a programmer for decades and is still active at it.

👤 haidrali
Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobias_L%C3%BCtke

👤 corporateslave5
Some hedge funds probably have billionaire programmers. You’d never hear of them though.
👤 eugenejen
charles simonyi 4.3b

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simonyi?wprov=sfti1

👤 NicoJuicy
I think the problem is what I call the wealth step.

So, you have 4 layers:

- poor

- doing ok

- rich

- super rich ( > 1 billion)

Each generation can only go up 1 step. It's mostly that show because of social aspects.

And I don't think rich people or their children will be programmers. They will probably employ them.

Fyi, It's extremely rare that you can skip a step.