Tech has become a launchpad for founders to quickly gain 10-figure net worths, with the likes of Scale AI’s Lucy Guo and Alexandr Wang skyrocketing to billionaire status just a handful of years after creating their innovations. But others have been forced to play the long game to see the jackpot. Take Steve Huffman: Two decades after cofounding Reddit, the CEO has finally made it to the ultra-rich club.
Huffman’s net worth just soared to $1.2 billion after Reddit’s recent victorious earnings report. Last Thursday, the company announced it reeled in a net income of $163 million—its fifth consecutive quarter of profitability since going public in March 2024. Reddit’s stock closed out at $208.95 on Friday, 7.5% higher than the day before, and up 75% from the previous year.
It’s a welcome change as the social media platform has spent the bulk of its 20 years in business struggling to be profitable.
As one of Reddit’s largest individual shareholders, Huffman is reaping a massive fortune from Reddit’s newfound success, having amassed 3.1 million shares and holding around a 2% to 3% stake in the company. His $193 million executive compensation, which turned the heads of unpaid moderators last year, included a $550,000 annual salary, with the rest tied up in stock. Forbes reports that the rest of his riches lies in $190 million in cash and other investments.
Fortune reached out to Reddit and Huffman for comment.
Reddit’s rocky journey from college creation to billion-dollar behemoth
It’s been exactly two decades since Huffman founded the company in 2005 with friend and roommate Alexis Ohanian. As students in their final year at the University of Virginia, they pitched My Mobile Menu—an online food delivery business—to startup accelerator Y Combinator but were turned away.
Instead of dwelling on the rejection, the young innovators pivoted.
This time, they submitted a different idea: to create the “front page of the internet,” which became Reddit. It wooed Y Combinator, resulting in a $12,000 grant and three months of paid housing and office expenses to get their idea off the ground, fresh after graduating. Huffman, who was 21 at the time, wrote the site’s code in 20 days while Ohanian handled the business side of things. And investors quickly took notice; By the summer, they’d secured another $100,000 in funding.
Within 16 months of Reddit being created, Condé Nast acquired the platform for a mere $10 million. But things shifted at the company. One of Reddit’s founding figures who led the platform’s development, Aaron Swartz, left in 2007. And in 2008, the site allowed users to create their own feeds—called subreddits—creating popular threads on topics like politics and science, but also spreading controversial content.
In 2009, Ohanian and Huffman left on Halloween after their three-year contracts expired. In the years following, Reddit came under intense scrutiny for child pornography, nude photos of celebrities, and conspiracy theories proliferating on the platform.
Reddit’s new CEO at the time, Yishan Wong, sought to turn things around. In 2014, he met with Y Combinator’s Sam Altman and raised $50 million in funding for Reddit, with celebrity investors including Josh Kushner, Jared Leto, Snoop Dogg, and Peter Thiel. But the platform was still losing money.
The next year, Huffman returned as CEO and spent a decade turning the company around. By 2024, the company began its IPO at $34 per share, reaching an intra-day high of about $55.39 per share, about 63% higher than its starting price.
Today, Reddit’s market cap sits at about $38 billion.
Other CEOs who played the long game and became billionaires
Huffman isn’t the only tech CEO reeling in billions after many years of building up a company. Figma’s CEO Dylan Field dropped out of college in 2012 to work on his business, and 10 years later when Adobe sought to buy the software company for $20 billion, his stake in the business ballooned to $2 billion. Earlier this year, his fortune swelled to $5 billion after a breakout IPO.
Netflix cofounder and chairman Reed Hastings also didn’t join the mega-wealthy club until 2014, nearly two decades after founding his entertainment empire in 1997. The year that Hastings became a billionaire, Netflix’s shares had surged to $400. Riding the newfound success of its streaming offering after being a DVD subscription service for a decade, Hastings finally joined the billionaires list. Today, he’s expected to be worth $7.5 billion.
And Nvidia’s Jensen Huang might be the ninth richest person in the world today, boasting a net worth of $176 billion, but he didn’t make the Bloomberg Billionaires Index until 2016—more than two decades after cofounding the chip giant in 1993. Nine years ago, his fortune rested at $1.4 billion, but thanks to strategically adapting its graphic processing units (GPUs) from gaming to serve the current AI boom, money has been flooding in.
By the start of 2020, Huang was estimated to be worth $5.75 billion; around the end of November 2022, when ChatGPT was introduced, his wealth stood at $15 billion. And his fortune has only soared since.
