Peter Thiel, PayPal Co-Founder & Early Facebook Investor Now Worth $1.2 Billion

[photo credit: Wikipedia]

Peter Thiel has been on fire lately.  Thiel started Clarium Capital Management LLC in 1996, a hedge fund worth over $6 billion today.  Clarium has been showing their investors a 30% return over the last 6 years.  Then Thiel co-founded and sold PayPal for $1.5 billion to eBay in 2002.  After that Thiel acquired 7% of Facebook when he put in $500,000 seed funding.   After Facebook started taking off, Thiel started The Founders Fund with Ken Howery and Luke Nosek.  The Founders Fund raised about $220 million to invest in Web 2.0 start-up companies.

Thiel, who is only 40 years old, is now worth $1.3 billion.  Thiel made about $60 million from the eBay-PayPal deal.  And when Facebook really started taking off, Microsoft bought 1.7% of the social network for $240 million. 

Here is a list of the other web billionaires published by Forbes:
1. Sergey Brin – $18.7 billion
2. Larry Page – $18.6 billion
3. Jeff Bezos – $8.2 billion
4. Pierre Omidyar – $7.7 billion
5. Eric Schmidt – $6.6 billion
6. Jeff Skoll – $3.6 billion
7. Shi Yuzhu – $2.8 billion
8. Hiroshi Mikitani – $2.6 billion
9. Mark Cuban – $2.6 billion
10. David Filo – $2.5 billion
11. Jerry Yang – $2.3 billion
12. Omid Kordestani – $2.2 billion
13. Andreas Von Bechtolsheim – $2 billion
14. Kavitark Ram Shriram – $1.8 billion
15. John Sperling – $1.7 billion
16. L John Doerr – $1.7 billion
17. Peter Sperling – $1.7 billion
18. Anurag Dikshit – $1.6 billion
19. David Cheriton – $1.6 billion
20. Todd Wagner – $1.5 billion
21. Mark Zuckerberg – $1.5 billion
22. James (Jim) Clark – $1.4 billion
23. Ma Huateng – $1.4 billion
24. Robin Li – $1.4 billion
25. Barry Diller – $1.3 billion
26. Meg Whitman – $1.3 billion
27. Michael Moritz – $1.3 billion
28. Marc Benioff – $1.2 billion
29. Steve Case – $1.2 billion
30. Peter Thiel – $1.2 billion
31. Sameer Gehlaut – $1.2 billion
32. J Joseph Ricketts – $1.2 billion
33. Jack Ma – $1.1 billion
34. William Ding – $1 billion

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