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.
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...
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.
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.
Tim Sweeney of Epic is currently worth $10 billion.
He has been a programmer for decades and is still active at it.
Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify
Some hedge funds probably have billionaire programmers. You’d never hear of them though.
charles simonyi 4.3b
What a stupid question. Bill Gates is a programmer. As is Zuckerberg.
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.
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