No group has gotten richer—or more powerful—over the past decade than tech tycoons. No wonder both the left and right are now gunning for them.
What a ride it’s been for America’s tech billionaires over the past decade-plus. When Mark Zuckerberg appeared on his first Forbes wealth list in 2008, he was one of only 46 U.S. billionaires who made their money in technology. A dozen years of unbridled growth, and social unrest later, the number of tech billionaires in America has more than tripled.
In all, 147 current U.S. billionaires have made their fortune in the tech industry. They’re 546% richer than they were in 2008, even after adjusting for inflation, far outpacing the 228% gain among American billionaires in general. Contrast that to the 96% collective gain in wealth by ordinary Americans since 2008, according to Federal Reserve data. The Covid-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the gap. Their collective net worth has ballooned from $272 billion in 2008 to a recent $1.75 trillion.
“While many people have struggled one way or another during the pandemic, tech companies from a growth perspective are popping the champagne,” says Dan Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush. “We’re in a Golden Age of tech, and more institutional and retail investors want to get in, which continues to drive up the stocks and these valuations.”
Just this year, 32 tech tycoons debuted on the Forbes billionaire ranks, including Doordash CEO Tony Xu, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Bumble CEO Whitney Wolf Herd. Others like Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky saw huge gains: his fortune has more than tripled since a year ago to $12.5 billion.
“These tech companies have been setting themselves up for the last decade or more,” says Chris Ballard, managing director of investment management firm Check Capital Management. “They’re creating the world they want to operate in.”
TECH ON THE FORBES 400
One-fifth of the richest people in America made their fortune in the technology industry, a massive increase from only 9% in 2008.
When Forbes first started publishing its list of the 400 richest Americans in 1982, only Apple cofounder Steve Jobs and Intel cofounder Gordon Moore were listed with tech fortunes. As the 80s and early 90s rolled along, more joined, including Bill Gates in 1989, three years after Microsoft went public, and Michael Dell in 1991, three years after PC maker Dell listed its shares. By the late 90s, the dotcom bubble was blowing up, and 62 people in tech including Jeff Bezos (who debuted in 1998) made the list of the country’s 400 richest in 1999.
Then the bubble burst, knocking 51 people out the ranks in 2001, the vast majority tech billionaires. But it proved to only be only a minor bump in the road. By 2008, there were 46 when 23-year-old Zuckerberg joined the ranks just four years after founding Facebook, as the youngest self-made billionaire ever up to that point. (Eleven years later, Kylie Jenner was just 21 when she briefly became a billionaire.)
Over the last decade, tech has become an ever-increasing part of the way we communicate, occupy our spare time, get work done and see the world. The Silicon Valley founders taking advantage of the shift established their fortunes in the “move fast and break things” heyday of Silicon Valley startups. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey joined the billionaire club in 2013, followed by Uber founder Travis Kalanick and the founders of Airbnb in 2015.
While many tech entrepreneurs have gotten richer lately thanks to everything from soaring private company valuations and rising public markets to traditional IPOs and SPACs, a handful of billionaires accounted for a massive portion of the group’s meteoric gains.
Zuckerberg, for instance, is an astounding 7,500% richer than he was in 2008, climbing from an estimated $1.5 billion at the time to $121.1 billion today—despite damaging internal leaks at Facebook, years of criticism from lawmakers and a brand so tarnished that the social media giant ended up changing its name. Jeff Bezos’ net worth has skyrocketed into the stratosphere too; he’s 2,210% wealthier than he was in 2008. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, along with former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, are up more than 600% since then. Since September 2020, the top 10 richest people in tech saw their collective net worth grow $317.4 billion, or 42%.
The tech industry is relatively new compared to other sectors, and the vast majority—95%—of ultrarich tech moguls are self-made, which means they founded their own companies or joined companies where they amassed their own fortunes. Not enough time has passed for vast tech dynasties to accumulate generational wealth like the Waltons, heirs to the Walmart fortune. Only five of 81 tech billionaires on The Forbes 400 this year inherited their fortune: MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; Laurene Powell Jobs, Apple founder Steve Jobs’ widow; Dagmar Dolby, the widow of Dolby Laboratories founder Ray Dolby; Melinda French Gates, ex-wife of Bill Gates, and Margot Birmingham Perot, the widow of entrepreneur and 1992 presidential candidate Ross Perot.
Regardless of how these tycoons got their fortunes, the newfound money and power of the tech industry has raised alarm bells. Tech billionaires have become a regular target for lawmakers from across the political spectrum, who argue they have too much power over nearly every facet of American life, from what we see on the internet to how we get our groceries.
Progressives have taken aim at misinformation on social media platforms run by tech billionaires as well as labor practices at big tech companies, including Amazon’s treatment of warehouse workers. The recent Democrat-led proposal to tax billionaires’ unrealized capital gains would have had an outsize effect on tech billionaires, since they tend to not only be among the richest members of the ultra-rich but also ones with the vast majority of their wealth in public stocks.
The right, meanwhile, has criticized tech billionaires for supporting Democratic candidates, and accuses social media companies in particular of censoring conservative viewpoints.
"These companies are too powerful, they are too big. I think that we would be a lot less concerned about their censorship if they had less power and if you had an alternative," Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told Fox News in an interview last week.
There are plenty of people across the political spectrum who worry about tech tycoons’ role in the widening wealth gap. According to Chuck Collins, a director of the inequality program at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington D.C.-based progressive think tank, further concentration of wealth in the tech industry could result in a small segment of the population wielding enough power to advance their personal economic and political interests, from fending off regulation they don’t like to controlling space travel or dominating the world of philanthropy.
Says Collins, “I think there's got to be a way we can celebrate wealth creators and innovation while protecting society from the distorting aspects of power consolidation.”
Calls to curb billionaires’ wealth and power will surely continue, with tech moguls bearing the brunt of the criticism. In the meantime, these billionaires continue to get richer.
SEE THE FORBES 400 LIST OF 2021
