
Ask HN: Are there any billionaire programmers? - jamestimmins
I don&#x27;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.<p>Obvious candidates:<p>-Satoshi Nakamoto (if he is actually a single person)<p>-Early Google engineers
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colesantiago
Markus Persson / notch - Creator of Minecraft ($1.6BN)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Persson](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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Preston-Werner)

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k00b
John Carmack is one of my favorite examples.

\-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack)
\- [https://twitter.com/ID_AA_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.

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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...](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-
news/whatsapps-55-employees-are-rich-so-now-what-n34851)

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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.

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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.

~~~
jamestimmins
See, I'm not so sure about that. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat both joined
Google when it was less than a year old, and still work in technical roles. If
they each own > 0.1%, they would be billionaires. That seems possible for a
very early hire, although I don't know how dilution/IPO would change that.

If not billions, I think it's fair to assume they're each worth several
hundred million.

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

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

~~~
jamestimmins
This is fascinating. Are you sure he still works in a technical capacity?

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haidrali
Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobias_L%C3%BCtke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobias_L%C3%BCtke)

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corporateslave5
Some hedge funds probably have billionaire programmers. You’d never hear of
them though.

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arbhassan
What do they do and how does one start working at a hedge fund?

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adventured
Renaissance Technologies is one of the few places where you'll see billionaire
engineers and scientists in the world of Wall Street. Due to the nature of how
they capture returns in their primary fund (it's now for insiders only, so
their outsized returns go to the employees with a stake).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies)

~~~
corporateslave5
Yeah, there’s them. But there’s other ten man funds that can generate massive
returns.

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eugenejen
charles simonyi 4.3b

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simonyi?wprov=sfti1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simonyi?wprov=sfti1)

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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.

~~~
sethammons
While I disagree for multiple reasons, I’m curious what your thresholds are
for the other levels besides super rich being worth over a billion.

