Steve Chen Net Worth | Celebrity Net Worth

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What is Steve Chen’s net worth?

Steve Chen is a Taiwanese Internet entrepreneur who has a net worth of $500 million. He is best known for being the co-founder and previous chief technology officer of the popular website YouTube. Google acquired YouTube in October 2006 for $1.65 billion in Google stock. Steve and his YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley later co-founded another video company called MixBit.

early life

Steve Chen was born on 18 August 1978 in Taipei, Taiwan. He was eight years old when his family moved to Prospect Heights, Illinois.

For college he attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It is unclear if this is a total coincidence, but his future YouTube co-founder Jawad Karim attended the same school. Jawad dropped out in his junior year.

paypal

Steve and Jawad both moved to Silicon Valley, where once again not convinced it was a coincidence, they were both working at PayPal, a budding startup at the time.

At PayPal, Steve and Jawad also befriended a co-worker named Chad Hurley.

In August 2000, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in cash. Steve, Jawad and Chad all made a little money from the sale. These three also stayed here and there for many more years. By early 2005 they had all left PayPal/eBay and were looking for the next big idea. They met frequently at Max’s Opera Cafe in Palo Alto, California, to brainstorm startup ideas. Meanwhile, Steve actually worked at Facebook for several months.

youtube

There are two versions of how YouTube was conceived. In the first edition, Jawad has suggested only one video sharing website in one of his brainstorming sessions. Jawad reportedly had the idea after Janet Jackson’s breasts were exposed during the Super Bowl halftime show, and the next day he found it difficult to locate the clip on the Internet. The second version, which may or may not be a bit of corporate PR/fiction, claims that Chad filmed a video at a dinner party hosted by Steve and he realized there was no easy way to upload that clip to the web. Was.

Anyhow, the first version of the YouTube website was launched in February 2005. Jawad uploaded the first video to the site in April 2005, a video taken months earlier while visiting the San Diego Zoo.

Around the time of its launch, MySpace was rapidly growing as one of the most popular websites in the world. As millions of people created MySpace accounts, they soon discovered that YouTube would allow them to upload and embed a popular music video on their MySpace page. YouTube evolved in lock-step with MySpace.

YouTube reached a turning point in December 2005 thanks to a “Saturday Night Live” sketch called “Lazy Sunday”. At the time, DVRs were still not in widespread use, so the day after “Lazy Sunday” aired and people wanted to see the video, they heard a lot from friends who caught it live, took to the Internet. YouTube has made videos easy to find and watch online. This temporarily caused a copyright conflict between YouTube and SNL, and the video was actually removed from the platform in February 2006. The clip would not reappear on YouTube until August 2013 when it was officially re-uploaded by the SNL account.

google acquisition

On October 9, 2006, Google announced that it had reached a deal to acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock.

Steve Chen received 625,366 Google shares in the sale. The shares were worth $326 million on the day the deal closed. If it never sold a single share, those shares would be worth about $2 billion by 2021.

Chad Hurley received shares worth $345 million. Jawad received shares worth $64 million. Sequoia received $442 million in shares and Artis received $83 million.

personal life

In 2009, Steve Chen married Park Ji-hyun (now Jamie Chen). Jamie was a Google Korea Product Marketing Manager at the time. Steve and Jamie have a son named Joseph and a daughter named Clara. They moved to Taipei, Taiwan in 2019.

Chen is a prominent supporter of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco where Jamie was appointed trustee in July 2012.