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Ask HN: Are there any billionaire programmers?

15 points by jamestimmins ↗ HN
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

20 comments

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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.
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.

corporateslave5
Some hedge funds probably have billionaire programmers. You’d never hear of them though.
arbhassan
What do they do and how does one start working at a hedge fund?
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

corporateslave5
Yeah, there’s them. But there’s other ten man funds that can generate massive returns.
kevindeasis
Depends on the role, but usually for software engineers one requirement is to pass an algorithms interview. so being really good at leet code. people have told me they did at least 600 leet code questions just for that specific portion of the interview
perl4ever
Some of them, possibly the most successful, are reputed to hire pretty much exclusively people with non-financial backgrounds - mathematicians and physicists who are also really good programmers.
[dead] mattmanser
What a stupid question. Bill Gates is a programmer. As is Zuckerberg.
jamestimmins
As you'll see if you read the description, I'm referring to people who still program every day. Neither Bill Gates nor Zuck still do this.

There's also no need to be rude. In fact, that violates HN's rules.

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?
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.