Jawed Karim net worth: Jawed Karim is an internet entrepreneur who has a net worth of $140 million. Jawed Karim is most famous for being a co-founder of Youtube.com. Karim was born on January 1st, 1979 in Merseburg, East Germany. He is of Bangladeshi ethnicity. After moving to the United States with his family in 1992, Jawed attended Central High School in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He then studied Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign but left school early to work for PayPal in California. While working at PayPal, Jawed befriended his future Youtube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Together, the three partners founded Youtube in 2005. Jawed has the distinction of starring in the very first video ever uploaded to Youtube. The video, titled “Me at the zoo”, was shot by a friend named Yakov Lapitsky during a trip to the San Diego Zoo. The 19 second video shows Jawed standing in front of a group of elephants briefly describing the elephant’s trunks. It was uploaded to Youtube by the username “Jawed” at 8:27 pm on Saturday, April 23, 2005.
Shortly after co-founding the company, Jawed decided to leave to enroll in graduate school at Stanford. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen proceeded to turn Youtube into the world changing media empire that we all know and use today. Despite leaving the company, Jawed still owned a fairly significant percentage of Youtube by the time it was sold to Google in October 2006. Google bought Youtube for $1.65 billion worth of stock. Jawed received 137,443 shares of Google which were worth $64 million on the day the deal closed. Thanks to Google’s continued success and rising stock price, today those shares are worth more than $140 million. In case you are curious, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley each received roughly 700,000 shares of Google which were worth $345 million on the day the deal closed. Today those shares are worth $700 million.
Me At The Zoo:
[The photo of Jawed Karim used on this page was taken by Robin Brown and then made Public Domain by user Jawed via wikimedia creative commons]