Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg & Co.: At this age they founded their first company

• Founder of the 11 largest technology companies
• Start at a young age
• Company founded out of his parents’ garage


Elon Musk is not the founder of Tesla, but his name is inextricably linked to that of the company originally founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. As CEO of the electric car manufacturer, Elon Musk became one of the richest people in the world, but was previously involved in numerous company start-ups.

Just like Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, who even dropped out of his studies to devote himself entirely to his company vision.

Here is an overview of the founders of the largest technology companies and how old they were when they started the company:

Elon Musk – SpaceX

According to the New York Times, at the age of 24, Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal founded the company ZIP2 – an online city guide for newspapers such as the New York Times. It was in the hands of the brothers for four years before it was bought by the computer company Compaq.

Incidentally, the Tesla boss helped found numerous other companies. He was co-owner, technical director and co-founder of X.Com, the predecessor of PayPal, and founder of the space company SpaceX. To this day he works in the management level of SpaceX. Thanks to shares in the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, which he also financed with money from the sales of companies he founded, he has since become the richest person in the world.

Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg founded the social network Thefacebook in 2004 at the age of 19 while studying at Harvard University with the purpose of enabling Harvard students to network with each other. However, he dropped out of his studies that same year to focus fully on his company. Facebook is now called Meta and is one of the largest Internet companies in the world.

Michael Dell -Dell Technologies

Michael Dell studied at the University of Texas. As a small part-time job, he began upgrading computers for money and founded Dell Technologies at the age of 21. The student job soon became a full-time job and he left the university early, according to CNBC.

Pierre Omidyar – eBay

Pierre Omidyar studied at Tufts University. A few years after graduating, he founded the computer company Ink Development with friends, which was later converted into an online shopping software company and sold to Microsoft in 1996. A year earlier, at age 23, Omidyar launched the online marketplace eBay, according to CNET. Today, Omidyar is no longer active in the company but lives with his family in Hawaii.

Jack Dorsey – Twitter co-founder

Jack Dorsey enrolled at NYU for a short time. At the age of 23, he and a friend founded the software company dNet, which enabled same-day delivery of online purchases. Although a group of investors secured financing, the project ultimately failed. It wasn’t until six years later that Dorsey helped found Twitter. The microblogging service Twitter was taken over by Elon Musk in spring 2022 and is no longer listed on the stock exchange.

Evan Spiegel – Snapchat-Co-founder

Evan Spiegel studied at Stanford University. A few months later, at the age of 22, Spiegel launched Picaboo, now known as Snapchat, together with the other two co-founders Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown. Snapchat is a free instant messaging service and is now used by around 150 million users per day.

Bill Gates – Microsoft co-founder

According to CNBC, Bill Gates and his friend Paul Allen founded a company (Traf-O-Data) while in high school at the age of 16, which automated analysis processes for the traffic situation in Washington (USA). Just three years later, the two started Microsoft and even dropped out of college to do it. Microsoft is now one of the largest Internet companies in the world.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin – Google

The two met in 1995 at the renowned Stanford University. They left university after a short time and founded the company Google in 1998 at the age of 25 in the garage of former YouTube managing director Susan Wojcicki. Today, Google is the largest search engine in the world with a market share of well over 90 percent. The search engine business now operates as a subsidiary under the umbrella of the Internet company Alphabet.

David Karp – Tumblr

David Karp does not have a high school or college degree. He learned HTML at the age of eleven and was soon designing websites for companies. He became chief technology officer at a company called UrbanBaby, which was purchased by media company CNET in 2006, according to the New York Times.

At the age of 21, he founded the blogging platform Tumblr, which has been owned by the operator of the blogger platform WordPress.com, Automattic, since August 2019.

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in his garage in Seattle at the age of 30. The company itself reports on its founding story that Bezos derived the name from the largest river in the world, the Amazon. He wanted to symbolize the large selection. Today, Amazon is actually one of the largest online mail order companies with the largest selection of diverse product ranges in the world.

Steve Jobs – Apple co-founder

Steve Jobs founded Apple in 1976 at the age of 21 together with Steve Wozinak and Ronald Wayne. The company logo consists of a bitten apple. The idea for this is said to have arisen from Job’s fruitarian eating style at the time. Apple is now one of the largest software and technology companies and, for example, sold around 238 million iPhones in the 2022 financial year.

In August 2011, Steve Jobs resigned as CEO due to health reasons. Tim Cook was his successor. Just a few weeks later, in October 2011, Jobs died of pancreatic cancer.

Editorial team finanzen.net

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