Meet the 10 most successful tech founders in history

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Meet the 10 most successful tech founders in history

After nearly 16 years at the company, Twitter TWTR founder Jack Dorsey announced on Monday that he would be stepping down as CEO, with CTO Parag Agrawal filling his shoes. Dorsey will be CEO of Square SQ, a company he founded.

He said that he was going to be CEO on 29 November and will be in an email with the Twitter staff. I am going to serve on the board through my term May-ish to help Parag and Bret Taylor with the transition. I will leave the board. Dorsey cited the reasoning behind his decision as a result of his belief that company founders serving as CEOs are severely limiting and represent a single point of failure. Here's a look at some other company founders who are currently serving as CEOs in light of his announcement.

A prolific programmer from a young age, everyone is familiar with Mark Zuckerberg's meteoric rise to prominence in business and popular culture. Zuckerberg launched Thefacebook, which was originally located at thefacebook.com and now redirects to Facebook from his dorm room at Harvard during his sophomore year in January 2004. The launch was not without its obstacles as he was accused of stealing the ideas behind Facebook from his fellow Harvard peers, the Winklevoss twins and Divya Darendra, eventually leading to a settlement of 1.2 million shares in the company.

After a Twitter scandal in September 2018, tech mogul Elon Musk was forced to step down as chairman of Tesla after he suggested that the company possessed both the funding and investor support to buy out stockholders at $420 a share. All of this resulted in a $40 million settlement with the SEC and his resignation as chairman, and ineligibility for re-election for three years for the position, but he was able to keep his job as CEO and remain on the company's board. Since then, Tesla's share value has gone up to over $1,100 per share and the company continues to produce record sales and delivery numbers.

Musk is the CEO of SpaceX, a private commercial spaceflight company he founded in 2002, a year before he founded Tesla. SpaceX is one of the few competitors Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic SPCE with their sights set on facilitating the first manned mission to Mars as early as 2024. SpaceX continues to build on its close relationship with NASA in which it has undertaken resupply and crewed missions.

Brian Chesky co-founded Airbnb in 2008, along with fellow Rhode Island School of Design alum Joe Gebbia and Harvard graduate and technical architect Nathan Blecharczyk. Each founder assumed a different role within the company, with Chesky now serving as CEO, Blecharczyk as chief strategy officer and chairman of Airbnb China, and Gebbia as chair of Samara and Airbnb.org. Airbnb was created with the mission of creating a world where anyone can belong anywhere, and this is reflected in their logo, which they call the B lo or the universal symbol of belonging. Y Combinator accepted Airbnb as part of its winter 2009 class, a cohort of fewer than 20 companies. Soon after, the company would begin expanding overseas and seeing a lot of growth in bookings. The company went public in December of 2020 with a valuation of just under $50 billion.

Evan Spiegel proposed the idea for Snapchat in a product design class in April of 2011. The idea of ephemeral messaging or communication using multimedia was based on the idea of ephemeral messaging. Spiegel would work on the project with Stanford classmates Reggie Brown and Bobby Murphy, and later produced a prototype for the app known as Picaboo. The platform was renamed Snapchat and the app was released in July 2011 on iOS. It reached 1 million active daily users by the end of 2012 and went on to become one of the most popular social media platforms in the world. The company went public in March 2017 with a valuation of around $24 billion at $24 a share, with shares worth around double that today.

John Mackey is an outspoken advocate for organic foods and animal welfare, as the CEO of Whole Foods, which was acquired by Amazon AMZN in 2017 for $13.7 billion. He currently serves on several boards of directors for several nonprofits, including the Global Animal Partnership, The Humane Society of the United States, and Conscious Capitalism.

Mackey started his first health food store named SaferWay in 1978 in Austin, Texas, with then-girlfriend Renee Lawson Hardy running the food store as well as a health food restaurant on the floor above. In 1980, SaferWay merged with Clarksville Natural Grocery, a company run by Mark Skiles and Craig Weller, renaming Whole Foods Market. Mackey, Weller, Lawson Hardy, Skiles, and Lawson Hardy are co-founders of Whole Foods.