Mark Shuttleworth Biography
Mark Shuttleworth (Mark Richard Shuttleworth) was born on 18th September 1973 in Welkom, South Africa. He is a South African entreprenuer, founder and CEO of Canonical Ltd. He is the second self-funded space tourist and the first-ever South African in space.
Mark Shuttleworth Education Background
He attended school at Western Province Preparatory School. He later attended Rondebosch Boys’ High School for one term and later went to Bishops/Diocesan College.
He has a Bachelor of Business Science degree in Finance and Information Systems at the University of Cape Town.
Mark Shuttleworth Career
When he was a student at the University of Cape Town he was involved in the installation of the first residential internet connections at the university.
In 1995 he founded Thawte Consulting, a company that specialized in digital certificates and Internet security.In December 1999 Thawte was acquired by VeriSign, earning Shuttleworth R3.5 billion.
In September 2000, Shuttleworth formed HBD Venture Capital, a business incubator and venture capital provider.In March 2004 he formed Canonical Ltd., for the promotion and commercial support of free software projects, especially the Ubuntu operating system.In 2009 he stepped down as the CEO of
Canonical Ltd. In July 2007 he stepped resumed the position of CEO of Canonical.
Mark Shuttleworth Linux Ubuntu
In 2004 he funded the development of Ubuntu, a Linux distribution based on Debian.
In 2005 he founded the Ubuntu Foundation and made an initial investment of 10 million dollars. In the Ubuntu project, Shuttleworth is often referred to with the tongue-in-cheek title “Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life” (SABDFL). To come up with a list of names of people to hire for the project, Shuttleworth took six months of Debian mailing list archives with him while travelling to Antarctica aboard the icebreaker Kapitan Khlebnikov in early 2004. In September 2005, he purchased a 65% stake of Impi Linux.
Mark Shuttleworth Philanthropy
In 2001 he formed the Shuttleworth Foundation, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to social innovation which also funds educational, free, and open source software projects in South Africa, such as the Freedom Toaster.
Mark Shuttleworth Awards
In September 2010 he received an honorary degree from the Open University for this work.
On 25 October 2013, Shuttleworth and Ubuntu were awarded the Austrian anti-privacy Big Brother Award for sending local Ubuntu Unity Dash searches to Canonical servers by default.
Mark Shuttleworth Spaceflight
On 25th April 2002 he became the second self-funded space tourist and the first-ever South African in space. Flying through Space Adventures, he launched aboard the Russian Soyuz TM-34 mission as a spaceflight participant, paying approximately US$20 (equivalent to $26.63 in 2016) million for the voyage.
Two days later, the Soyuz spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station, where he spent eight days participating in experiments related to AIDS and genome research. On 5 May 2002, he returned to Earth on Soyuz TM-33.
Mark Shuttleworth Private Jet
He has a private jet, a Bombardier Global Express, which is often referred to as Canonical One but is in fact owned through his HBD Venture Capital company. The dragon depicted on the side of the plane is Norman, the HBD Venture Capital mascot.
Mark Shuttleworth Wife
- He is unmarried but he has a girlfriend, Claire Newman.
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Mark Shuttleworth