LESSON # 5

You have already heard about Big Tech, the largest Information Technology companies such as:
 GAFAM - Google, Alphabet Inc.
GAMAM - Apple
- Facebook, Meta
- Amazon
- Microsoft

 NATU - Netflix
- Airbnb
- Tesla
- Uber

 BATX (China) - Baidu

- Alibaba
- Tencent
- Xiaomi
 And some more …

 Why is it important to know about the largest and most dominant companies in the
information technology industry?

 What is a technology mogul?

Mogul aka business magnate, baron, tycoon, or captain of industry, while the term media
mogul is applied to a person who dominates or controls a large media enterprise.

 Technology has important effects on business operations.

No matter the size of your enterprise, technology has both tangible and intangible benefits
that will help you make money and produce the results your customers demand.
Technological infrastructure affects the culture, efficiency and relationships of a business.

So, let’s find out about the IT giants behind these information technology companies.
- Every year, for each ITU Computer Science Semester 1, we study a new IT giant.
- In each lesson # 5, we briefly review previous presentations on IT giants.
Make sure that you will take time to read and understand what has been learned before.
Next, study your dedicated IT giant.
IT giants

1. So far …
Bill Gates (Microsoft ) ITUlesson5w1
1955: American born in in Seattle, WA.
1967: Enrolled at Lakeside School. First used computer.
1968: Began programming with Paul Allen in the computer center.
1973: Entered Harvard University.
Bill Gates is a technologist, business leader, and philanthropist.
He grew up in Seattle, Washington, with an amazing and supportive family who encouraged his
interest in computers at an early age.
He dropped out of college to start Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen.
Today, Bill co-chairs the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with Melinda French Gates, where he
works to give his wealth back to society.
Bill grew up in Seattle with his two sisters.
His late father, William H. Gates Sr., was a Seattle attorney and one of the co-chairs of the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation.
His late mother, Mary Gates, was a school teacher, University of Washington regent, and
chairwoman of United Way International. Bill has three children.
When Bill and Paul Allen started Microsoft, their vision of “a computer on every desktop and in
every home” seemed farfetched to most people.
Today, thanks to Microsoft and many other companies, that vision is a reality in many parts of
the world, and personal technology is an integral part of society.
Bill is passionate about Microsoft’s work & will always be involved with the company, including
his present role as a member of the board and technology advisor.
1975: Started Micro-soft with Paul Allen in Albuquerque, NM.
1976: Changed company name to Microsoft.
1979: Microsoft moved to Washington State.
1985: Windows 1.0 launched.
1995: Windows 95 launched.
2000: Assumed role of Chief Software Architect, as Steve Ballmer assumed role of Microsoft CEO
2001: The original Xbox released.
2008: Left his daily job at Microsoft.
2014: Stepped down as chairman, remained on the board, began serving as technology advisor.
How much Bill Gates makes in a day 2021: working off a yearly wage of $4 billion i.e. would earn
$10,959,000 per day – that's $456,625 an hour, $7,160 a minute and $127 per second! (547k ar.)
Steve Jobs (Apple ) ITUlesson5w2
American businessman and technology visionary, co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc.
His parents were two University of Wisconsin graduate students, Joanne Carole Schieble and
Syrian-born Abdulfattah Jandali, both unmarried at the time.
Steve was born in 1955 and was adopted at birth by Paul Reinhold Jobs and Clara Jobs. He
stated that they "were my parents 1,000%."
Paul was a machinist for a company that made lasers, and taught his son rudimentary
electronics and how to work with his hands. The father showed Steve how to work on
electronics in the family garage, demonstrating to his son how to take apart and rebuild
electronics such as radios and televisions. Steve became interested in and developed a hobby of
technical tinkering. Clara was an accountant who taught him to read before he went to school.
Jobs' youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. At Monta Loma Elementary
school in Mountain View, he was a prankster whose fourth-grade teacher needed to bribe him
to study. Jobs tested so well, however, that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high
school—a proposal his parents declined. Jobs then attended Cupertino Junior High and
Homestead High School in Cupertino, California. During the following years Jobs met Bill
Fernandez and Steve Wozniak, a computer whiz kid.
Following high school graduation in 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Reed was an expensive college which Paul and Clara could ill afford. They were spending much
of their life savings on their son's higher education. Jobs dropped out of college after six months
and spent the next 18 months dropping in on creative classes, including a course on calligraphy.
He continued auditing classes at Reed while sleeping on the floor in friends' dorm rooms,
returning Coke bottles for food money, and getting weekly free meals at Hare Krishna temple.
In 1976, Wozniak invented the Apple I computer. Jobs, Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, an
electronics industry worker, founded Apple computer in the garage of Jobs's parents in order to
sell it. They received funding from a then-semi-retired Intel product-marketing manager and
engineer Mike Markkula.
Through Apple, Jobs was widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer
revolution and for his influential career in the computer and consumer electronics fields. Jobs
also co-founded and served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member
of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, when Disney acquired Pixar.
In summary: - 1972–1985 Pre-Apple
- 1976–1985 Apple
- 1985–1997 NeXT computer and Pixar and Disney
- 1997–2011 Return to Apple
Jobs died in 2011, due to pancreatic cancer.
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (Facebook) ITUlesson5w3
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg born in 1984 is an American computer programmer and Internet
entrepreneur. He co-created the social networking site Facebook, of which he is the CEO.
It was co-founded as a private company in 2004 by Zuckerberg and classmates Dustin Moskovitz,
Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes while they were students at Harvard University.
Zuckerberg is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for Facebook. He
leads the design of Facebook’s service & development of its core technology & infrastructure.
Earlier in life, Zuckerberg developed a music recommendation system called Synapse and a peer-
to-peer client called Wirehog. However, he abandoned both to pursue new projects.
Zuckerberg attended Harvard University & studied computer science before founding Facebook.
While at Harvard, Zuckerberg created Facemash, a website that compared students’ dorm
photos side-by-side in a fashion similar to HOT or NOT. Harvard administration was not amused,
and Zuckerberg faced subsequent disciplinary action. 3 months later, he launched Facebook.
Zuckerberg won the 2007 Crunchie Award for ‘Best Startup CEO.’
From single-school directory featuring a high-contrast male mascot with a hauntingly creepy
expression to worldwide phenomenon, according to Forbes it eventually led Zuckerberg to a net
worth of $1.5 billion in 2008.
Net worth is the value of the assets a person or corporation owns, minus the liabilities they owe.
Computer scientists and college students hoping to start their own business have a few broad
lessons to learn from his success that may apply to careers and life alike.
In September 2010, Zuckerberg donated $100 million to the Newark Public School System to
help renovate and revamp the system.
In 2010, Zuckerberg was named Time magazine's Person of the Year.
As of 2011, his personal wealth was estimated to be $17.5 billion making him one of the world's
youngest billionaires.
May 2012 - Facebook releases its IPO - which raised $16 billion and gave the company a $102.4
billion market value for its Facebook stock.
October 2012 - Membership hits the 1 billion mark.
February 2013 - Acquisition of Atlas is announced.
June 2013 - Facebook's acquisition, Instagram, launches video capability.
February 2014 - Acquisition of WhatsApp is announced.
March 2014 - Acquisition of Oculus is announced.
April 2014 - Facebook's Business Manager service is launched.
November 2014 - Groups App is announced.
April 2015 - Over 40 million small business pages are now on Facebook.
June 2015 - Facebook's AI Research group opens in Paris.
February 2016 - Facebook's Reactions launches.
July 2016 - There are now more than 1 billion users of Messenger a month.
October 2016 - Facebook Marketplace launches - allowing users to buy and sell products.
April 2017 - F8 developer's conference is held in San Jose by Facebook.
September 2017 - News emerges that Facebook, and Microsoft, have completed work on a new
trans-Atlantic data cable.
March 2018 - Facebook is sued by shareholders, following stock plummet.
May 2018 - Facebook trial a new technology to help stop "revenge porn,"
April 2018 - Mark testifies before Congress regarding concerns over data and privacy breaches.
September 2018 - Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg testifies before Congress.
October 2018 - Launch of the new Facebook Portal: a hands-free video calling device.
December 2018 - Facebook announced the launch of "Stablecoin", a blockchain version in India.
January 2019 - Facebook invest $7.5 million to help launch a TUM Institute for Ethics in AI.
April 2019 - Facebook reportedly set aside billions to cover potential future FTC fines.
May 2019 - Facebook deletes large amounts of fake accounts from its site.
June 2019- Facebook shareholders vote to remove Zuckerberg as Facebook chairman: 68% agree
June 2019 - Facebook begins blocking Huawei from pre-installing its app on their smart devices.
June 2019 - Facebook launches its news digital wallet and currency called Calibra.
July 2019 - Facebook is helping to map roads using deep learning and AI-focussed tools.
August 2019 - Facebook file lawsuits against various Hong Kong and Singapore app developers
because of their so-called "click injection" fraudulent activities.
September 2019 - Facebook launch their Tinder-like dating feature, that also comes with
Instagram integration.
September 2019 - Facebook acquire the mind-reading startup CTRL-labs for $1 billion.
December 2019 - Facebook announces yet another major security breach.
April 2020 - Facebook announces the cancellation of all major public events until 2021 amid
COVID-19 fears.
May 2020 - Facebook purchases GIPHY for hundreds of millions of dollars.
June 2020 - Facebook unveil their new AI tool to transform 2D images into 3D models.
June 2020 - Companies begin to pull ads from Facebook in a boycott over "hate speech".
Facebook stock takes a massive hit.
June 2020 - The company announces its new "Dark Mode" for mobile devices.
October 2021, The Facebook company has changed its name to Meta, but the social networking
app Facebook will keep its name. The metaverse is a virtual world you can plug yourself into and
do — in theory — almost anything.
Mark Zuckerberg/Net worth: 121.1 billion USD in 2021, has plummeted $71 billion in 2022
Sergey Brin & Larry Page (Google) ITUlesson5w4
They came from opposite ends of the earth to create a billion dollar company that has
revolutionized the world. California-based Google Inc. has not only become the Internet’s most
popular search engine with revenues of over $6 billion yearly, but the company has also entered
the mainstream culture; the verb “to google” was recently added to the Oxford Dictionary.
Sergey Mikhailovich Brin was born in 1973, in Moscow, to Jewish parents, Michael and Eugenia.
At the age of six, Brin emigrated to the U.S. with his parents and younger brother, Samuel.
Michael Brin is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, while Brin’s mother, also
a mathematician and civil engineer, works as a specialist at NASA.
When Brin was 9 years old, his father gave him his first computer, a Commodore 64.
Brin’s interest in mathematics and computers grew. He attended Paint Branch Montessori School
in Adelphi, Maryland, followed by Eleanor Roosevelt High School.
In 1993, Brin graduated from the University of Maryland with an honors degree in Computer
Science and Mathematics. He then received a graduate fellowship from the National Science
Foundation, allowing him to pursue his Master’s degree in Computer Science at Stanford
University, which he received in 1995. Although he had intended to pursue a Ph.D., a side
project with fellow Stanford student Larry Page would soon distract his attention.

*Google was named after a googol - the name for the number 1 followed by 100 zero -
Lawrence Edward Page (Larry) was born in 1973 in Michigan. His father, Carl, is a computer
science professor at Michigan State University, where his mother, Gloria, also works as a
computer-programming teacher. Page claims to have fallen in love with computers at the age of
seven. “I was probably the first student at my elementary school to turn in a word-processed
homework assignment,” he recalls. Page attended East Lansing High School before earning his
Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan.
He then went on to earn his Master’s degree from Stanford University.
Page admits that the doctoral program was scary. But, it was while Page was pursuing his Ph.D.
in Computer Science at Stanford that he met fellow student Brin. Although the two initially
didn’t hit it off, they soon found a common interest in data-mining and retrieving relevant
information from large data sets. Together, they wrote a paper entitled, “The Anatomy of a
Large-Scale Hyper textual Web Search Engine,” which has today become the tenth most
accessed scholarly paper at Stanford.
Page and Brin began to think about the relationship between websites on the Internet, soon
realizing that not all of them were created equal. They created a software system called
“BackRub”, a search engine that checked backlinks to determine one site’s importance over
another. Soon, the two had dropped out of university – although Brin is officially still on leave
from Stanford – and began devoting themselves full-time to their thesis idea.
Tim Berners-Lee (www or the World Wide Web) ITUlesson5w5
Timothy Berners-Lee was born in 1955 to parents who were mathematicians and computer
scientists. He graduated from the Queen's College at Oxford University, England, 1976.
He built his first computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old TV.
He worked on distributed transaction systems, message relays, and bar code technology at
Plessey Telecommunications Ltd, UK.
In 1978 Tim joined D.G Nash Ltd, he wrote typesetting software for intelligent printers, and a
multitasking operating system.
In 1980 he wrote for his own private use his first program for storing information including using
random associations. This program formed the conceptual basis of the World Wide Web.
From 1981 until 1984, Tim worked at John Poole's Image Computer Systems Ltd, with technical
design responsibility (real time control firmware, graphics and communications software, and a
generic macro language).
In 1984 he worked at CERN on distributed real-time systems for scientific data acquisition and
system control. He worked on FASTBUS system software and designed a heterogeneous remote
procedure call system.
In 1989 Tim invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global
information sharing while at CERN. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990.
His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread.
He is the 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering with a joint
appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the
Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) where he also heads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG).
He is a Professor in the Electronics and Computer Science Department at a University of UK.
He is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a Web standards organization
founded in 1994 which develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines,
software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential.
He was a Director of the Web Science Trust (WST) launched in 2009 to promote research and
education in Web Science, the multidisciplinary study of humanity connected by technology.
Tim is a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation, launched in 2009 to coordinate efforts to
further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.
He is a member of the UK's Transparency Board, and president of London's Open Data Institute.
In 2001 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He won the Japan Prize, the Prince of Asturias
Foundation Prize, the Millennium Technology Prize and Germany's Die Quadriga award.
In 2004 he was knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth & in 2007 he was awarded the Order of Merit.
In 2009 he was the National Academy of Sciences foreign associate and wrote Weaving the Web
In 2013, Tim was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for "ground-breaking
innovation in engineering that has been of global benefit to humanity."
Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com) ITUlesson5w6
Jeff Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a teenage mother,
Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen, and his biological father, Ted Jorgensen. Bezos's parents were married
less than a year, and when Bezos was four years old his mother married his step-father Mike
Bezos, a Cuban immigrant.
As a child, Jeff Bezos showed an early interest in how things work, turning his parents' garage
into a laboratory. As a teenager, he moved to Miami where he developed a love for computers
and excelled in school, becoming the valedictorian of his class. In high school, he also started his
first business, the Dream Institute, an educational summer camp for 4th, 5th and 6th graders.
Bezos pursued his interest in computers at Princeton University, where he graduated in 1986
with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering.
He found work at several firms on Wall Street including Fitel, Bankers Trust, and the investment
firm D.E. Shaw where he met his wife Mackenzie and was named the youngest vice president in
1990. While his career in finance was extremely lucrative, Bezos chose to make a risky move into
the nascent world of e-commerce. He quit his job in 1994, moved to Seattle and targeted the
untapped potential of the internet market by opening an online bookstore.
Bezos founded Amazon.com, a virtual bookstore that became one of the internet's biggest
success stories.
He initially set up the company in his garage where, along with a few employees, he began
developing software. In 2007, Amazon.com released the Kindle, a handheld digital book reader
that allows users to buy, download, read and store their book selections.
Bezos is the CEO of Amazon.com, the online merchant of books and later of a wide variety of
products. Under his guidance, Amazon.com became the largest retailer on the World Wide Web
and a top model for Internet sales.
In 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, a human spaceflight startup company, partially as a result of
his fascination with space travel, including an early interest in developing "space hotels,
amusement parks and colonies for 2 million or 3 million people orbiting the Earth.
In a 2011 interview, Bezos indicated that he founded the space company to help enable
"anybody to go into space" and stated that the company was committed to decreasing the cost
and increasing the safety of spaceflight. Bezos net worth of US$114.5 billion as of 2022.
In 2013, Bezos is reportedly discussing business opportunities and strategies with Richard
Branson, multibillionaire founder of Virgin Group and Chairman of Virgin Galactic.
In 2013, Bezos made headlines when he purchased The Washington Post in a $250 million deal.
His base salary of $81,840 has remained unchanged since 1998. However, on top of his salary,
additional compensation brings his total income to $1,681,840. Broken down, this works out as
$140,153 per month, $32,343, a week, $4,608 per day, $192 per hour ( in 2021).
Marissa Mayer (Google – Yahoo!) ITUlesson5w7
Marissa Ann Mayer was born on May 30, 1975 in Wausau, Wisconsin, the daughter of Margaret
Mayer, an art teacher of Finnish descent and Michael Mayer, an environmental engineer who
worked for water companies. After her 1993 graduation from Wausau West High School, Mayer
was selected by Tommy Thompson, then the Governor of Wisconsin, as one of the state's two
delegates to attend the National Youth Science Camp in West Virginia. Mayer graduated with
honors from Stanford University with a B.S. in symbolic systems and an M.S. in computer
science. For both degrees, her specialization was in artificial intelligence. In 2009, the Illinois
Institute of Technology granted Mayer a honoris causa doctorate degree in recognition of her
work in the field of search. Mayer interned at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, and
Ubilab, UBS's research lab based in Zurich, Switzerland.
Mayer is the current CEO and President of Yahoo! since July 2012. Previously, she was a long-
time executive and key spokesperson for Google.
In 2008, at age 33, she was the youngest woman ever listed. Mayer was named one of Glamour
Magazine's Women of the Year in 2009. She was listed in Forbes Magazine's List of The World's
100 Most Powerful Women in 2012 and 2013, with ranks of 20 and 32 respectively. In
September 2013, Mayer became the first CEO of a Fortune 500 company to be featured in a
Vogue magazine spread.
In 2013, she was also named in the Time 100 and became the first woman listed as number one
on Fortune magazine's annual list of the top 40 business stars under 40-years-old.
Mayer eventually made Fortune magazine history in 2013, as the only person to feature in all
three of its annual lists during the same year:
- Businessperson of the Year (No. 10),
- Most Powerful Women (at No. 8), and
- 40 Under 40 (No. 1) at the same time.
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational Internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA.
It is globally known for its Web portal, search engine Yahoo Search, and related services,
including Yahoo Directory, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Groups, Yahoo
Answers, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, fantasy sports and its social media website.
It is one of the most popular sites in the United States.
According to news sources, roughly 700 million people visit Yahoo websites every month.
Yahoo itself claims it attracts "more than half a billion consumers every month in more than 30
languages.
Yahoo was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on
March 1, 1995.
Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) ITUlesson5w8
Satya Nadella born in India on January 6, 1967, is an Indian-American business executive.
His father was a civil servant of the Indian Administrative Service.
Nadella attended the Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet before attaining a bachelor of
engineering in Electronics & Communications Engineering from the Manipal Institute of
Technology in 1988.
Nadella went to the U.S. and got his MS degree in Computer Science at the University of
Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1990.
Later he received an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Nadella said he always wanted to build things.
He knew that computer science was what he wanted to pursue, but that emphasis was not
available at Manipal University.
And so electronic engineering was a great way for me to go discover what turned out to become
a passion, he says.
In 1992 Nadella married Anupama, daughter of his father's Indian Administrative Service (IAS)
batchmate, K.R. Venugopal.
They have three children, a son and two daughters, and live in Bellevue, Washington.
Nadella worked with Sun Microsystems as a member of its technology staff prior to joining
Microsoft.
At Microsoft Nadella was Executive Vice President of Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise group,
responsible for building and running the company's Computing Platforms, Developer Tools and
Cloud Computing Services.
He is the current Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft.
He was appointed as CEO on 4 February 2014, succeeding Steve Ballmer.
Nadella's 2013 base salary was nearly $700,000, for a total compensation, with stock bonuses,
of $7.6 million.
Previous Microsoft positions held by Nadella include:
- President of the Server & Tools Division (9 February 2011 – February 2014)
- Senior Vice-President of Research and Development for the Online Services Division
(March 2007 – February 2011)
- Vice-President of the Business Division
- Corporate Vice-President of Business Solutions and Search & Advertising Platform
Group
- Executive Vice-President of Cloud and Enterprise group
Larry Ellison (Oracle Corporation) ITUlesson5w9
Lawrence Joseph Ellison aka Larry Ellison, an American billionaire and philanthropist, co-
founded in 1977 Oracle Corporation, a major database software company.
He is executive chairman and chief technology officer of the company and served as CEO (Chief
Executive Officer) until September 2014. In 2014, he was listed by Forbes as the third-wealthiest
man in America and as the fifth-wealthiest person in the world, with a fortune of $56.2 billion.
He was born on August 17, 1944 in the Bronx in New York City to Florence Spellman, a 19-year-
old unwed Jewish mother. At his mother's request, he was given to his mother's aunt and uncle
in Chicago to raise. Lillian Spellman Ellison and Louis Ellison adopted him when he was nine
months old. Ellison did not learn the name of his mother or meet her until he was 48 and the
identity of his father is unknown.
Larry Ellison has been married four times. His first three marriages ended in divorce and he had
two children, a son and a daughter from his third marriage.
He had a difficult childhood. He grew up in a small two-bedroom apartment. He found out that
he was adopted when he was 12 years old. Around this time, his adoptive father lost his
business due to the depression and started working as an auditor. Rebellious and independent-
minded, Larry Ellison showed an aptitude for science. After dropping out of the University of
Illinois, he transferred to the University of Chicago before dropping out a semester later.
This constant changing of schools caused his adoptive father to believe that Larry would never
learn anything with his life. Instead, Ellison began to learn about computer programming. After
saving up enough money for gas, Ellison decided to move to Berkeley, California. He switched
jobs frequently for eight years before working on a mainframe system with Amdahl Corporation.
By 1977, Ellison decided to create a company with his co-workers, Ed Oates and Robert Miner.
They named their new business, Software Development Labs. After reading a paper about a
Structured Query Language, Larry started working on a range of new projects.
His company was hired by the CIA to build Oracle. They completed the project one year early
and used the remaining time to figure out commercial applications. This relational database
management system (RDBMS) was named Oracle as well. By 1981, IBM chose to adopt Oracle
and Oracle's sales doubled. For the next seven years, sales doubled annually. This success with
Oracle led to Ellison renaming the business Oracle Company and in 1986, Oracle finally went
public. By 1990, the company reported its first losses due to years of overstated revenue. To
keep the company solvent, Ellison fired top level employees and brought in more experienced
managers to focus more on product development. In 1992, Oracle 7 was released and the
company's fortunes started to improve. Throughout the 1990s, a range of financial institutions,
retail businesses and automobile companies turned to Oracle for database programs.
As ecommerce sites grew, Ellison was encouraged to find business applications for Oracle online.
Starting in 2004, Ellison worked to increase Oracle's market share by acquiring a range of other
companies. After purchasing Sun Microsystems in 2009, Oracle became the biggest software
company in the world.
In August 2010, it was reported that Ellison is one of the 40 billionaires who have signed "The
Giving Pledge".
Ellison also races sailboats, flies planes, and plays tennis and guitar.
He has had success in yachting, through Oracle Team USA, and is a licensed aircraft pilot who
owns two military jets.
Larry Ellison/Net worth: $ 100.1 billion in 2022
Elon Reeve Musk (PayPal …) ITUlesson5w10
Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. His father is a South
African-born British and engineer Errol Musk, and his mother is a Canadian-English and dietetics
expert Maye Musk. Musk spent his childhood in South Africa and at the age of 9, he got his first
personal computer, the Commodore VIC-20.
Elon immediately got interested in programming and started to learn it by himself.
At the age of 12, he earned $500 by selling a computer game Blastar he created.
At the age of 19, he entered Queens University in Kingston, Ontario.
In 1989, Elon Musk moved to Canada to his mother relatives and he worked in low paid jobs.
He immigrated to the United States without the support of his parents.
In 1992, he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and he decided to continue at The
Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for one more year and obtained a Bachelor of
Science degree in Economics as well.
In 2000, he met his future wife Justine Musk, who later gave a birth to his five sons: Damian,
Griffin, Xavier, Saxon, and Kai. However, he broke up with Justine after eight years and in 2010,
got married a second time on a British actress by the name of Talulah Riley, with whom he has
lived for 4 years and got divorced in 2014. In May 2018, Musk and Canadian musician Grimes
revealed that they were dating. Grimes gave birth to their son in May 2020 (semi-separated).
When Elon Musk started to struggle with adolescent depression, he began actively absorb
philosophical and religious literature.
Musk figured out that humanity had to expand the limits of its consciousness to learn to ask the
right questions and he had found his question: what things would have the great impact on the
future of humanity’s destiny? Elon Musk decided that those would be:
- The internet,
- The transition to renewable energy sources, and
- Space colonization.
He wanted to try to contribute in all 3 of them. To do that, he needed funds.
Musk also invested in:
Zip2 and PayPal
Musk together with his brother, Kimbal, created his first IT Company Zip2.
In 1999, Musk started to work on electronic payment systems of magnetic levitation that were
gaining popularity.
In 2001, Elon Musk became the chairman and chief executive of PayPal.
Tesla Motors
Elon Musk came into the project of Tesla Motors in 2004. It is an American automotive and
energy company specializes in electric car manufacturing, based in Palo Alto, California
SolarCity
Elon Musk is a shareholder of the SolarCity Company. This provides solar power systems for
homes, businesses, and governments.
SpaceX
In 2002 Elon Musk created a space exploration technologies corporation SpaceX.
He was inspired by an ambitious idea of reducing space transportation costs to enable people to
colonize Mars and to create Mars Oasis.
SpaceX was working on Interplanetary Transport System (ITS).
Interplanetary Transport System
In 2016, Elon announced that SpaceX was working on Interplanetary Transport System (ITS).
The spaceship is capable of carrying around 100 passengers in the pressured cabin, cargo, plus
luggage and materials to construct foundries and factories.
Hyperloop
Musk had a concept of the fifth mode of transport Hyperloop, a solar-power high-speed
transportation system driven by linear induction motors and air compressors should deliver
people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes covering the distance of 614 km.
Elon Musk (Income in 2021) Monthly : $200 Million + yearly : $2400 Million +
Elon Musk World Richest Man 2022: Net worth $ 239.3 Billion USD
Linus Torvalds (Linux) ITUlesson5w11
Childhood & Early Life
Linus Benedict Torvalds is a Finnish- American born in Helsinki, Finland in 1969.
His parents are Anna and Nils Torvalds, both of whom are journalists.
He studied at the University of Helsinki and got a master’s degree in computer science in 1996.
He interrupted his studies to serve the Army.
In 1990, he went back to university to continue his studies. It was during this time that he got
acquainted with the operating system, ‘Unix’. He wrote his Master’s thesis on ‘Linux’.
Career
In 1991, he purchased the Intel 80386-based IBM PC and obtained a MINIX operating system.
With this, he began to work and research on the Linux operating system.
In 1996, he went on a visit to the technology firm, ‘Transmeta’, where he began to work from
the following year. He later worked for the Open Source Development Labs.
From 1997 to 1999, he worked on the '86 open' project, which is a binary file format for the
‘Unix’ and Unix-like operating systems. They were to be used on a common x86 PC.
In 1999, he was offered stock options for his creation by the companies, Red Hat and VA Linux.
That very year, the stock prices increased to about $20 million after the companies went public.
In June 2004, along with his family, he relocated to Beaverton, Oregon, where Open Source
Development Labs was headquartered. The following year, he developed the software, ‘Git’.
By 2006, about 2% of the Linux kernel was written by him, which was a significant contribution.
In 2012, he stated that his contribution to the Linux kernel mostly involved merging codes that
were already written by others and did not involve much programming.
Major Works
He is the founder and the creator of the new operating system ‘Linux’, which was released in
1991. This Linux kernel is one of the most significant free and open source software.
Awards & Achievements
In 1998, he was a recipient of the EFF Pioneer Award.
In 1999, he was given the title of 'one of the top 100 innovators, under the age of 35, in the
world' by MIT Technology Review TR100.
In 2000, he was the recipient of the Lovelace Medal, conferred by the British Computer Society.
In 2001, along with Richard Stallman and Ken Sakamura, he shared the Takeda Award for
Social/Economic Well-Being.
In 2005, he was given the Vollum Award from Reed College.
In 2008, he became an inductee into the Hall of Fellows of the Computer History Museum in
Mountain View, California.
In 2010, he was awarded the C&C Prize by the NEC Corporation.
In 2012, he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.
In 2012, he was one of the recipients of the Millennium Technology Prize.
In 2014, he received the IEEE Computer Society’s “Computer Pioneer Award”, induction into the
Internet Hall of Fame, Millennium Technology Prize in 2012 and being named one of the most
influential people in the world.
He holds 35 patents (=brevet d'invention) and continues to innovate and provide free software
to Linux enthusiasts worldwide.
He even has an asteroid and an asteroid moon named after him.
Personal Life & Legacy
He is married to Tove Monni, a karate champion. The couple has three daughters.
He calls himself an atheist. He is completely irreligious and believes that religion should be a
personal choice and not a political issue.
In 2010, he became a citizen of the United States of America.

Linus Torvalds Net Worth: $50 Million Salary: $2 Million Per Year
Reed Hastings (Netflix) ITUlesson5w12
Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr. was born on October 8, 1960 in Boston Massachusetts.
He is the son of Joan Amory (Loomis) and Wilmot Reed Hastings.
His maternal great-grandfather was attorney, financier, scientist, inventor and philanthropist.
He is an American entrepreneur and philanthropist.
He is the co-founder, Chairman and CEO (=Chief Executive Officer) of Netflix.
He also serves on the boards of Facebook and a number of non-profit organizations.
A former member of the California State Board of Education, Hastings is an advocate for
education reform through charter schools.
Early life and education
He attended Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He entered Marine Corps officer training through their Platoon Leader Class (=Chef de peloton)
and spent the summer of 1981 in Officer Candidate School at Marine Corps Base Quantico. He
did not complete the training and never commissioned into the Marine Corps, choosing instead
to pursue service in the Peace Corps.
After graduating from Bowdoin College, Hastings joined the Peace Corps "out of a combination
of service and adventure" and went to teach high school math in Swaziland from 1983 to 1985.
After returning from the Peace Corps, Hastings went on to attend Stanford University.
He graduated in 1988 with a master's degree in computer science.
Founding of Pure Software
Hastings' first job was at Adaptive Technology, where he invented a tool for debugging software.
He met Audrey MacLean in 1990 when she was CEO at Adaptive Corp.
"From her, I learned the value of focus. I learned it is better to do one product well than two
products in a mediocre way,".
In 1991 he found his first company, Pure Software which had produced products to
troubleshoot software.
He lacked managerial experience and asked his board to replace him, but the board refused, and
Hastings says he learned to be a businessman.
Pure Software was taken public by Morgan Stanley in 1995.
In 1996, Pure Software announced a merger with Atria Software.
In 1997, the combined company, Pure Atria, was acquired by Rational Software, which triggered
a 42% drop in both companies' stocks after the deal was announced.
Hastings was appointed CTO of the combined companies and left soon after the acquisition.
After, Hastings spent two years thinking about how to avoid similar problems at his next startup.
Founding of Netflix
In 1998 Reed Hastings co-founded Netflix, offering flat rate movie rental-by-mail (=location) to
customers in the United States.
In 1997 Hastings and Marc Randolph co-founded Netflix, offering flat rate movie rental-by-mail
to customers in the United States by combining two emerging technologies; DVDs, which were
much easier to send as mail than VHS-cassettes, and an online Web site to order them from,
instead of a paper catalogue.
Headquartered in Los Gatos, California, Netflix has amassed a collection of 100,000 titles and
over 100 million subscribers
Hastings had the idea for Netflix after his company was acquired.
"I had a big late fee for 'Apollo 13.' It was six weeks late and I owed the video store $40. I had
misplaced the cassette. It was all my fault. I didn’t want to tell my wife about it.
And I said to myself, 'I’m going to compromise the integrity of my marriage over a late fee?'
Later, on my way to the gym, I realized they had a much better business model. You could pay
$30 or $40 a month and work out as little or as much as you wanted."
Hastings said that when he founded Netflix, he had no idea whether customers would use the
service.
Netflix culture
As Netflix grew, the company began being noticed for its innovative management practices—the
result of the culture Hastings was exploring—called "Freedom and Responsibility."
Netflix is known to pay salaries that are typically much higher than customary to attract the best
talent, and is one of the few companies where employees can choose annually how much of
their compensation they want in cash versus stock.
Other innovations include their treatment of employees who don't meet expectations.
"At most companies, average performers get an average raise".
"At Netflix, they get a generous severance package," because that way managers don't feel too
guilty to let average performers go. His company also gained notoriety for eliminating sick and
vacation time for employees, and instead allowing them to manage this time off individually.
Hastings would meet each new employee and discuss the culture and his theories about it.
Over the years his personal presentation was codified into a PowerPoint slide deck that was
widely shared internally, reviewed and tweaked by upper management, and refined actively. In
August 2009, Hastings posted this internal culture guide publicly online. It laid out his strongly
held beliefs about workers and management. The guide became a pre-employment screening
tool that dissuaded incompatible people from applying.
As of January 2015, the deck had been viewed more than 10.5 million times.
Internet television
Hastings is a proponent of Internet television and sees it as the future.
He credits YouTube for his shift in strategy for developing a video streaming service.
Netflix launched a service in 2007 to stream movies and television to computers.
Other business interests
Hastings has been a director of the board of Facebook since June 2011
As of September 2016, he is reported to own over US$ 10 million worth of Facebook shares.
Hastings also served on the board of Microsoft from 2007 until 2012.
Educational and political activism
California State Board of Education
After selling Pure Software, Hastings found himself without a goal. He became interested in
educational reform in California and enrolled in the Stanford Graduate School of Education.
In 2000, Governor Gray Davis appointed Hastings to the State Board of Education, and in 2001,
Hastings became its president. He spent $1 million of his own money together to promote the
passage of Proposition 39 in In 2000, a measure that lowered the level of voter approval for
local schools to pass construction bond issues from 66 to 55 percent.
In 2005, Hastings ran into trouble on the State Board of Education when Democratic legislators
challenged his advocacy of more English instruction & language testing for non-English-speaking
The California Senate Rules Committee refused to confirm him as the board's president.
The California State Legislature rejected him in January 2005.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had reappointed Hastings to the board after Hastings'
first term, issued a statement saying he was "disappointed" in the committee’s action.
Hastings resigned.
In 2008, Hastings had made a $100,000 contribution to California Governor Schwarzenegger's
"Voters First" redistricting campaign.
Charter schools
Hastings is active in educational philanthropy and politics.
In 2006, Hastings had donated $1 million to Beacon Education Network.
Technology
In 2004, he published a Wall Street Journal op-ed advocating the expensing of stock options.
Politics
In 2007, Hastings had donated $1 million to a committee formed to support California State
Superintendent of Schools Jack O'Connell's candidacy for Governor of California in 2010.
On April 12, 2009, Hastings donated $251,491.03 to Budget Reform Now, a coalition supporting
California Propositions 1A to 1F.
Hastings supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election.
Personal life
Hastings lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is married and has two children.
He was featured in a front-page article in USA Today in 1995, posing on his Porsche.
He has said that if he ever appears on the front page of USA Today again it will "not be on the
hood of a Porsche, but I would pose with a bunch of movies."
In 2018, Hastings was featured in a podcast series (=diffusion pour baladeur) by LinkedIn co-
founder Reid Hoffman, Masters of Scale (=émission), along with other successful businessmen
such as Mark Zuckerberg, John Elkann and Howard Schultz.
He discussed the strategy adopted by Netflix to scale.
How much is Reed Hastings worth?
In 2022: 6.3 billion USD
Jack Patrick Dorsey (Twitter) ITUlesson5w13
Jack Patrick Dorsey , an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur, is the co-
founder and CEO of Twitter, and the founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payments company.
Jack Dorsey was born in 1976 and raised in St. Louis, Missouri.
He is the son of Tim and Marcia Dorsey and he is of English, Irish and Italian descent.
His father worked for a company that developed mass spectrometers and his mother was a
homemaker. He was raised Catholic, and his uncle is a Catholic priest in Cincinnati.
He attended the Catholic Bishop DuBourg High School. In his younger days, Dorsey worked
occasionally as a fashion model. By age 14, Dorsey had become interested in dispatch routing.
Some of the open-source software he created on dispatch logistics is still used by taxicab
companies.
Dorsey attended Missouri University (1995–97) before transferring to New York University, but
he dropped out in 1999, one semester short of graduating.
He first came up with the idea that he developed as Twitter while studying at NYU.
While working on dispatching as a programmer, Dorsey moved to California.
In 2000, he started his company in Oakland to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services
from the Web.
His other projects included networks of medical devices and a "frictionless service market".
In July 2000, building on dispatching and inspired in part by LiveJournal and by AIM, he had the
idea for a Web-based realtime status/short message communication service.
When he first saw implementations of instant messaging, he wondered whether the software's
user status output could be shared easily among friends. He approached Odeo, which at the
time happened to be interested in text messaging. Dorsey and Biz Stone decided that SMS text
suited the status-message idea, and built a prototype of Twitter in about 2 weeks. The idea
attracted many users at Odeo and investment from Evan Williams, who had left Google after
selling Pyra Labs and Blogger.
Twitter
Williams, Stone and Noah Glass co-founded Obvious Corporation, which then spun off Twitter,
Inc., with Dorsey as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
As CEO, Dorsey saw the startup through 2 rounds of funding by venture capitalists.
He reportedly lost his position for leaving work early to enjoy other pursuits, such as yoga and
fashion design.
As the service began to grow in popularity, Dorsey chose the improvement of uptime as top
priority, even over creating revenue – which, as of 2008, Twitter was not designed to earn.
He described the commercial use of Twitter and its API* as two things that could lead to paid
features.
His three guiding principles are simplicity, constraint and craftsmanship.
In 2008, Williams took over as CEO, while Dorsey became chairman of the board.
In 2011, He returned to Twitter as executive chairman after Costolo replaced Williams as CEO.
In 2015, Costolo resigned as CEO of Twitter and Dorsey was named permanent CEO of Twitter.
On the day after the controversy about Twitter's new algorithms for tweets, Dorsey said it was
only a hoax (=canular).
In 2016, Dorsey announced that Twitter would not count photos and links in the 140-character
limit to free up more space for text. This was an attempt to entice (=attirer) new users, since the
number of tweets per day had dropped to about 300 million in January 2016 from about 500
million in September 2013 and its peak of 661 million in August 2014.
On November 22, 2016, Dorsey was briefly suspended from his own Twitter account with 3.9
million followers. After restoring the account, Dorsey tweeted that the suspension was due to
an "internal mistake".
In 2017, Dorsey and Executive Chairman Kordestani matched a $530,000 donation to the
American Civil Liberties Union raised by Twitter staffers. Their match brought to $1.59 million.
In 2018, Dorsey announced that an improved version of the verification system is coming to
Twitter. The purpose of redesigning verification is to let people verify more facts about
themselves, emphasizing proof of identity.
The overhaul (=révision) was not in place before the U.S midterm election of 2018 to help in
verifying the identities of the candidates.
In 2018, Dorsey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee alongside Facebook COO
Sheryl Sandberg about meddling (=se mêler) in the 2016 presidential election. Following this
testimony, Twitter shares fell 6%.
In 2019, Dorsey met privately with U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House and
discussed Trump's concerns that Twitter had limited or removed some of his Twitter followers,
and those of conservatives. After the meeting, Dorsey tweeted that their discussion included
making Twitter "healthier and more civil".
A week earlier, Dorsey took part in a TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) talk about the
social media platform's spread of abuse and misinformation, which has brought him criticism.
In 2019, Dorsey's Twitter account was breached (=violé) for an hour, with the hacker posting and
retweeting numerous racist tweets.
In 2019, Twitter's stock price fell by 24%, from $38.83 to $30.75. The reason was an earnings
miss off a third-quarter report, which Twitter blamed on an ad targeting the company's
problems. Dorsey had been making a concerted effort to dampen the effect that Twitter had on
political elections, which entailed banning all political ads. This was also seen as a large
contributor to the drop.
Square, Inc.
Dorsey, along with co-founder Jim McKelvey, developed a small business platform to accept
debit and credit card payments on a mobile device called Square, released in May 2010. The
small, square-shaped device attaches to iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or Android devices via the
headphone jack, and as a mini card reader, allows a person to swipe their card, choose an
amount to transfer to the recipient and then sign their name for confirmation. Square is also a
system for sending paperless receipts via text message or email, and is available as a free app for
iOS and Android OS. The company grew from 10 employees in December 2009 to over 100 by
June 2011. Square's office is on Market Street in San Francisco. In September 2012, Business
Insider magazine valued Square Inc. at US$3.2 billion. Dorsey is CEO of Square, Inc. On October
14, 2015, Square filed for an IPO* to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. As of that date,
Dorsey owned 24.4% of the company.
* IPO is Initial Public Offering (=introduction en Bourse)
Other projects
In 2013, Dorsey expressed admiration for Michael Bloomberg and his reinvention through
design and simple interfaces of what it means to be mayor .
Dorsey thinks becoming mayor of New York City is an aspiration that would raise the bar for him.
He served as a judge for NY City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's NYC BigApps competition in 2011.
Dorsey is an on-record donor to Democratic Party candidates.
Dorsey was a new member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2013.
In 2018, Dorsey did not seek reelection at Disney due to increased difficulty with conflicts of
interest.
Dorsey is a board member of the Berggruen Institute's Governance Center.
Philanthropy
In 2016, Dorsey fully funded about 600 Missouri public school projects registered at
DonorsChoose.
In 2019, Dorsey donated $350,000 to #TeamTrees, a nonprofit started by YouTuber MrBeast that
pledged to plant 20 million trees by the end of the year 2019.
On April 25, 2022, the Twitter board of directors agreed to a $44 billion buyout by Elon Musk,
making it one of the biggest deals to take a company private.
After a protracted period of controversy and legal battles, the deal closed on October 27.
Jack Dorsey Net worth: $ 4.1 billion in 2022
Kevin Systrom (Instagram) ITUlesson5w14
Kevin Systrom is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur born on December 30th,
1983 in Massachusetts to Diane, a marketing executive at Zipcar and Douglas Systrom, Vice
President in Human Resources at TJX Companies.
Kevin Systrom got married to his high school sweetheart, Nicole Schuetz; CEO* of Sutro - a clean
energy investment firm on October 31, 2016, in Napa, California.
Kevin Systrom is the co-founder of Instagram, along with Mike Krieger. Systrom is also the CEO.
Instagram is the world's largest social network photo sharing website and it derives its name
from the words “instant” and “telegramming”.
Systrom started his educational career at Middlesex School in Massachusetts, where he was
introduced to computer programming.
His interest grew from playing Doom 2 and creating his own levels as a child.
As he grew in age, he began creating programs to prank his friends by appearing to hack their
AOL* Instant Messenger accounts.
He was also obsessed with becoming a DJ and used to pester Boston Beat – an old-school, vinyl-
record store by writing them emails to give him a job there.
Later, he was given entry to work few hours a week.
Kevin Systrom attended Stanford University because they had a list of tech offerings and also
held deep ties with the Silicon Valley.
He graduated in 2006 with a bachelor's degree in management science and engineering.
He was a member of the Sigma Nu fraternity - a Stanford University social organization whose
mission is to develop ethical leaders, to foster personal growth and also to perpetuate
friendships and commitment (=engagement) to the fraternity.
He spent the winter term of his third year in Florence, where he studied photography.
He got his first taste of the startup world when he was chosen as one of twelve students to
participate in the Mayfield Fellows Program at Stanford University.
This also led to his internship at Odeo, the company that gave rise to the social medium, Twitter.
After his graduation in 2006, Kevin joined Google and work for 3 years.
He began as an Associate Product Marketing Manager and worked on products like Gmail,
Google Calendar, Docs, Spreadsheets and other products.
After two years he moved ahead to the Corporate Development team.
In January 2009, Kevin decided to take the risk and joined a start-up called Nextstop.com as
their Product Manager. The company used to offer travel recommendations to users and was
founded by ex-Googlers.
And this is where it all began: he got the opportunity to do more of what he always wanted all
along – write code and create app-style programs, including games revolving around photos.
Instagram was first called 'Burbn', inspired by Kevin’s taste for fine whiskeys and bourbons.
The ‘Burbn’ was built by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in the city of San Francisco.
It was a complicated product that contained too many features.
They decided to focus on a specific feature which was photo-sharing, this development led to
the birth of the top photo-sharing platform, Instagram.
Instagram derives its name from the words “instant” and “telegramming.”
The social network within a month of its launch had about one million users and currently now
has more than 1 billion monthly active users.
In April 2012, Instagram, along with 13 employees, was sold to Facebook for US$1 billion in cash
and stock. Mark Zuckerberg stated Facebook was "committed to building and growing Instagram
independently", allowing Systrom to continue to lead Instagram.
Instagram's a social network built around photos, where people can quickly comment on or 'like'
photos and share them on Twitter or Facebook."
In 2018, Systrom resigned from Instagram and would be leaving in few weeks.
Systrom owned 40% of Instagram going into the deal, and got mostly Facebook stock.
Under Systrom as CEO, Instagram became a fast growing app, with roughly 1 billion monthly
users.
As the coronavirus outbreak spread in the US, Systrom and Krieger teamed up on a new project
called rt.live, a coronavirus tracker that estimates the rate of transmission in each US state.
In 2012, Kevin Systrom was awarded the “Founder of the Year” at the ‘6th Annual Crunchies
Awards’, he also shared the “Webby Breakout Award’ with the co-founder of Instagram.
In 2013, Kevin Systrom was listed in Forbes 30 under 30 list under the Social/Mobile category.
He was also the recipient of the ‘CFDA Social Media Award’ in 2015.
In 2014, Systrom was listed in the Forbes 30 under 30 list under the Social/Mobile category.
In 2016, the magazine ranked Systrom as a billionaire with an estimated net worth of US$1.1
billion.
In 2021, Kevin Systrom was named "Sexiest Businessman Ever" by Glam'mag readers issue for
the second consecutive year.
How much Kevin Systrom makes in a day in 2021: Working off a yearly wage of 258,640,533€,
he would earn 21,553,377 € monthly – that's 4,973,856 € weekly, and 994,771 € daily.
Kevin Systrom Net worth $ 1.1 billion in 2022
Patrick Paul Gelsinger ITUlesson5w15

 Patrick Paul Gelsinger, born March 5, 1961, is an American business executive and engineer,
currently serving as CEO of Intel.

 Based mainly in Silicon Valley and in Oregon since the late 1970s, Gelsinger graduated from
Stanford University with a master's degree in engineering.

 Previously, he was CEO of VMware* and president and Chief Operating Officer (COO) at EMC,
following more than three decades at Intel.
*VMware Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company.

 Gelsinger:
- architected the Intel 80486 processor in the 1980s,
- Served as:
- Intel's first CTO, then as
- senior vice president and general manager of the Digital Enterprise group,
returning in early 2021 to serve as CEO.
Early life & education
 Gelsinger was raised on family farms by his parents, June and Paul Gelsinger, in rural
Robesonia, in an Amish and Mennonite part of Pennsylvania.
 As a teenager, he received the high score on a Lincoln Tech electronics technology test,
winning an early-admission scholarship.
 He then skipped his final year at Conrad Weiser High School and left home at 16 to attend.
 There, he:
- earned the remainder of high school credits for graduation and
- worked at a fledgling WFMZ-TV Channel 69 as a technician,
while obtaining an associate’s degree from Lincoln Tech in New Jersey, in 1979.
 He moved to Silicon Valley in California to work at Intel as quality-control technician, at age
18.
 While at Intel he earned a:
- a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, graduating magna cum laude from
Santa Clara University in 1983, then
- a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Stanford
University in 1985.
Career
 Having started at Intel in California in 1979, he spent much of his career with the company in
Oregon, where he maintains a home.
 In 1987, he co-authored his first book about programing the 80386 microprocessor.
 Gelsinger was the architect of the 80486 processor, introduced in 1989, which later evolved
into the Pentium processor.
 At age 32, he was named the youngest vice president in the history of Intel.
 Mentored by former Intel CEO Andrew Grove, Gelsinger became the first CTO of Intel in
2001, leading key technology developments, including:
- Wi-Fi,
- USB,
- Intel Core and
- Intel Xeon processors, and
- 14 chip projects.
 He also launched the Intel Developer Forum conference as a counterpart to Microsoft's
WinHEC.
 In September 2009, he left Intel to join EMC as president and chief operating officer.
 In 2012, he became the CEO of VMware.
 Intel announced the appointment of Gelsinger as their new CEO on January 13, 2021,
effective February 15.
 Intel appointed its former engineer to the top post following reorganization pressure, due to
languishing share prices, from its newest activist investor Third Point Management, which
threatened a proxy fight.
 Gelsinger leads Intel’s course correction, modeling a more transparent company culture and
a return to the foundry model, including construction of two new $20 billion Arizona fabs
(=usines) for its planned expansion as a major microchip manufacturer for global firms.
 Media reported positive responses to Gelsinger's appointment and credited the decision for
driving Intel share prices up nearly 8%.
 On March 23, 2021, Intel shares again rose over 6% subsequent to Gelsinger’s public remarks
regarding company strategy.
 In 2021, Gelsinger stated that Intel plans to catch up with the:
- Taiwanese chip manufacturer TSMC and
- Korean chip manufacturer Samsung within next five years.

 He also announced a planned three and a half-billion dollar upgrade to its fab in New Mexico.

 In 2008, he:
- was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and
- serves as a director of the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA).

 He is also a member of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee

(NSTAC).

 Gelsinger holds eight tech industry design patents, developed for:

- communications,
- computer architecture and
- VLSI design.
Personal commitments

 Gelsinger and his wife, Linda, are Christians who "support multiple worthy causes", including
sponsorship of disaster relief medical teams.

 In 2013, Gelsinger co-founded Transforming the Bay with Christ (TBC), a coalition of:
- business leaders,
- venture capitalists,
- non-profit leaders and
- pastors
aiming to convert one million people over the next decade.

 He helped establish the Sacramento area William Jessup Christian University, and was
identified in Money, Inc. magazine in 2018 as "among the most generous billionaires in the
world.“ at least $53.6 Million dollars as of 31 October 2022.

Net worth
 The estimated Net Worth of Gelsinger is at least $72.6 Million dollars in 2021.
Mr. Gelsinger owns over 10,000 units of Vmware stock worth over $29,637,683 and over the
last 17 years he sold VMW stock worth over $410,273.
II. Radia Joy Perlman
Introduction
 Radia Joy Perlman (born December 18, 1951) is an American computer programmer and
network engineer.
 Radia Perlman, who some refer to as the “mother of the Internet,” was one of very few
women involved in process at that time.
 She is most famous for her invention of the Spanning-Tree Protocol (STP), which is
fundamental to the operation of network bridges, while working for Digital Equipment
Corporation.
 She also made large contributions to many other areas of network design and
standardization, such as link-state routing protocols.
 Perlman was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2015 for
contributions to Internet routing and bridging protocols.
 More recently she has invented the TRILL protocol to correct some of the shortcomings of
spanning-trees.
 She is currently employed by Dell EMC.

*TRILL: Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links

1. Early life
 Perlman is Jewish and grew up in Loch Arbour, New Jersey.
 Both of her parents worked as engineers for the US government.
 Her father worked on radar and her mother was a mathematician by training who worked as
a computer programmer.
 During her school years Perlman found math and science to be “effortless and fascinating”,
but had no problem achieving top grades in other subjects as well.
 She enjoyed playing the piano and French horn and while her mother helped her with her
math homework, they mainly talked about literature and music.
 Despite being the best science and math student in her school it was only when Perlman
took a programming class in high school that she started to consider a career that involved
computers.
She was the only woman in the class and later reflected "I was not a hands-on type person.
 It never occurred to me to take anything apart.
 I assumed I'd either get electrocuted, or I'd break something".
 She graduated from Ocean Township High School in 1969.
2. Education
 As an undergraduate at MIT Perlman learned programming for a physics class.
 She was given her first paid job in 1971 as part-time programmer for the LOGO Lab at the
MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, programming system software such as debuggers.
 Working under the supervision of Seymour Papert, she developed a child-friendly version of
the educational robotics language LOGO, called TORTIS ("Toddler's Own Recursive Turtle
Interpreter System").
 During research performed in 1974–76, young children—the youngest aged 3½ years,
programmed a LOGO educational robot called a Turtle.
 Perlman has been described as a pioneer of teaching young children computer programming.
 As a math grad at MIT she needed to find an adviser for her thesis, and joined the MIT group
at BBN Technologies (the Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.).
 There she first got involved with designing network protocols.
 Perlman obtained a B.S. and M.S. in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT
in 1988.
*MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
 Her doctoral thesis at MIT addressed the issue of routing in the presence of malicious
network failures.
 When studying at MIT in the late 60s she was one among the 50 or so women students, in a
class of about 1,000 students.
 To begin with MIT only had one women’s dorm, limiting the number of women students that
could study.
 When the men’s dorms at MIT became coed Perlman moved out of the women’s dorm into a
mixed dorm, where she became the "resident female".
 She later said that she was so used to the gender imbalance, that it became normal.
 Only when she saw other women students among a crowd of men she noticed that "it kind
of looked weird".
3. Career
 She is most famous for her invention of the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), which is
fundamental to the operation of network bridges, while working for Digital Equipment
Corporation.
 Perlman is the author of a textbook on networking and coauthor of another on network
security.
 She holds more than 100 issued patents.
 She was a Fellow at Sun Microsystems and has taught courses at the University of: -
- Washington,
- Harvard University and
- MIT,
and has been the keynote speaker at events all over the world.
 Perlman is the recipient of awards such as Lifetime Achievement awards from Usenix and the
Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communication
(SIGCOMM).
4. Spanning Tree Protocol
 Perlman invented the spanning tree algorithm and the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP).
 While working as a consulting engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1984 she
was tasked with developing a straightforward protocol which enabled network bridges to
locate loops in a Local Area Network (LAN).
 It was required that the protocol should use a constant amount of memory when
implemented on the network devices, regardless of how large the network was.
 Building and expanding bridged networks was difficult because loops, where more than one
path leads to the same destination, could result in the collapse of the network.
 Redundant paths in the network meant that a bridge could forward a frame in multiple
directions.
 Therefore loops could cause Ethernet frames to fail to reach their destination, thus flooding
the network.
 Perlman utilized the fact that bridges had unique 48 bit MAC addresses, and devised a
network protocol so that bridges within the LAN communicated with one another.

*MAC: Media Access Control

 The algorithm implemented on all bridges in the network allowed the bridges to designate
one root bridge in the network.
 Each bridge then mapped the network and determined the shortest path to the root bridge,
deactivating other redundant paths.
 Despite Perlman's concerns that it took the spanning tree protocol about a minute to react
when changes in the network topology occurred, during which time a loop could bring down
the network, it was standardized as 802.1d by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (IEEE).
 Perlman said that the benefits of the protocol amount to the fact that "you don't have to
worry about topology" when changing the way a LAN is interconnected.
 Perlman has however criticized changes which were made in the course of the
standardization of the protocol.
 From the paper "An Algorithm for Distributed Computation of a Spanning Tree in an
Extended LAN":

Algorhyme
I think that I shall never see
A graph more lovely than a tree.
A tree whose crucial property
Is loop-free connectivity.
A tree which must be sure to span
So packets can reach every LAN.
First the root must be selected.
By ID it is elected.
Least cost paths from root are traced.
In the tree these paths are placed.
A mesh is made by folks like me
Then bridges find a spanning tree.
5. Other network protocols
 Perlman was the principal designer of the DECnet IV and V protocols, and IS-IS, the OSI
equivalent of OSPF.
 She also made major contributions to the Connectionless Network Protocol (CLNP).
 Perlman has collaborated with Yakov Rekhter on developing network routing standards, such
as the OSI Inter-Domain Routing Protocol (IDRP), the OSI equivalent of BGP.
 At DEC she also oversaw the transition from distance vector to link-state routing protocols.
 Link-state routing protocols had the advantage that they adapted to changes in the network
topology faster.
 DEC's link-state routing protocol was second only to the link-state routing protocol of the
Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET).

*DECnet :Digital Equipment Corporation network

*IS-IS: Intermediate System to Intermediate System
*OSI: Open Systems Interconnection
*OSPF: Open Shortest Path First
* BGP :Border Gateway Protocol
 While working on the DECnet project Perlman also helped to improve the intermediate-
system to intermediate-system routing protocol, known as IS-IS, so that it could route :
- the Internet Protocol (IP),
- the AppleTalk and
- the Internetwork Packet Exchange (IPX) protocol.
 The Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) protocol relied in part on Perlman's research on fault-
tolerant broadcasting of routing information.
 Perlman subsequently worked as a network engineer for Sun Microsystems, now Oracle.
 She specialized on network and security protocols and while working for Oracle obtained
more than 50 patents.
6. Awards
 National Inventors Hall of Fame induction (2016)
 Internet Hall of Fame induction (2014)
 SIGCOMM Award (2010)
 USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award (2006)
 Recipient of the first Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award for Innovation in 2005
 Silicon Valley Intellectual Property Law Association Inventor of the year (2003)
 Honorary Doctorate, Royal Institute of Technology (June 28, 2000)
 Twice named as one of the 20 most influential people in the industry by Data
Communications magazine: in the 20th anniversary issue (January 15, 1992) and the 25th
anniversary issue (January 15, 1997).
Perlman is the only person to be named in both issues.
 Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, class of 2016
Practice
Work in groups of twelve on the task below, in a responsible and collaborative
manner.

I. Read today’s lesson:

1. So far …
2. Radia Joy Perlman

II. Fill up the IT Giants table with your partner. (2 printed pages maximum).
(due next week)
Name Childhood & Early Life Career
Awards & Achievements
Year of birth (age) Background education Major Works
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