- Billionaire AI boss Michael Intrator has just seen a near-record-breaking increase in his net worth. His cloud-computing company, CoreWeave, had a sluggish start after its IPO earlier this year. But with contracts from Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia rolling in, it is now reaping benefits from Wall Street. In the last two months, CoreWeave’s stock price has tripled.
Forget Apple, Amazon, or Microsoft—this year’s breakout tech stock comes from a company few had even heard of six months ago.
CoreWeave, a once-obscure AI cloud startup, went public in March at a disappointing $40 per share. But in the last two months alone, its stock has surged by nearly 300%—and so has the fortune of its shareholders, including its co-founder and CEO Michael Intrator.
The 56-year-old former hedge fund manager’s net worth has more than doubled in the last 12 days, from $5 billion to $10 billion, according to Bloomberg. Making the jump to a double-digit billionaire is no easy feat. In fact, the average time is three years and four months; Intrator achieved it about 101x faster.
Despite the company’s initial lackluster start on the market, Intrator always knew that CoreWeave (and by extension, himself) would go on to “generate enormous value.”
“I don’t really care where it is today or tomorrow or the day after, but I believe fundamentally, the business model that we have, the software solutions that we have, the capacity to build and deliver this and the demand we see in front of us will lead to enormous value to our clients over time,” Intrator previously told Fortune.
It doesn’t take a tech genius to disrupt the tech industry
The company’s CEO is not alone in benefiting from the stock’s success. The wealth of fellow cofounders also has soared. According to Bloomberg, CoreWeave’s chief strategy officer, Brian Venturo, is now worth $6.4 billion, and Brannin McBee, the company’s chief development officer, is worth $4.7 billion.
The rise in their net worths may be credited to the fact that CoreWeave has secured many of the world’s biggest tech companies as clients and partners, with the list including Nvidia, OpenAI, and Microsoft.
And despite their success disrupting the tech industry, all three founders interestingly do not come from tech backgrounds; they come from the world of finance—underscoring that breaking into AI doesn’t require a resume line from a top tech company.
At the same time, it is helpful to know someone who does; CoreWeave brought in Nitin Agrawal last year to serve as chief financial officer after most recently serving as the VP of finance for Google Cloud and holding leadership roles at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. Helping to build a company from the ground up requires a careful balance of being optimistic—with the right people.
“At the end of the day, it’s the people that matter, so make sure you take people along with you in your journey,” he told Fortune in March 2024. And you should “always keep a healthy disregard for the impossible while being grounded in reality.”
Past success doesn’t guarantee future performance
Despite CoreWeave’s bullish year, that doesn’t mean it will stay around—and other companies have learned the hard way about IPO bubbles.
The stock of conservative media outlet Newsmax surged 735% after its IPO in March, giving its founder and CEO Christopher Ruddy a $3.3 billion fortune. However, after the stock fell back down dramatically, Ruddy lost his billionaire status.
Moreover, Omada Health Inc. saw significant gains after its IPO in June—raising $150 million and its stock rose 21%. However, shares have since dropped below its initial price of $23.
Fortune reached out to CoreWeave for comment.
