Sean Parker net worth: Sean Parker is an American internet technology businessman and entrepreneur who has a net worth of $3 billion. Sean Parker is famous for co-founding the file-sharing site Napster as well as being the first president of Facebook.
Early Life: Sean Parker was born on December 3, 1979, in Herndon, Virginia. When he was seven, his father, an oceanographer for the U.S. government, taught him to program on an Atari 800. He told his son: "if you are going to take risks, take them early before you have a family." As a teen, Parker's hobbies were programming and hacking. One night, he hacked into the private network of a Fortune 500 company and was unable to log out because his father took his keyboard away. As a result, his IP address was exposed and the FBI tracked him down. Because he was 16, he was sentenced to community service.
While attending Chantilly High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, Parker wrote a letter to the school administration and persuaded them to count the time he spent coding in the computer lab as a foreign language class. By the end of his senior year, he was mostly writing code and starting companies. While still in high school, he interned for Zynga founder Mark Pincus's Washington D.C. startup FreeLoader. He won the Virginia state computer science fair for developing a Web crawler and was recruited by the CIA. By his senior year of high school, Parker was earning more than $80,000 a year from his projects, enough to convince his parents to allow him to skip college and pursue a career as an entrepreneur. Parker graduated from high school in 1998. Parker considers his time at Napster to be his college education and refers to it as "Napster University" due to the fact that he became well acquainted with intellectual property law, corporate finance, and entrepreneurship.
Career: When Parker was 15 he met Shawn Fanning over the internet. The two teenagers bonded over the shared interest in theoretical physics and hacking. A few years later, in June 1999, Parker and Fanning co-founded Napster, a free file-sharing service for music. At the time, Napster was revolutionary and within a year, had tens of millions of users. In 1999 iTunes, Spotify, and Pandora didn't exist yet. The Recording Industry Association of America, Metallica, and others opposed the site and brought lawsuits against it. Napster was eventually shut down as a result of the lawsuits. It has been called the fastest-growing business of all time and it definitely revolutionized the music industry.
In November 2002, Parker launched Plaxo, an online address book and social networking service that worked with Microsoft Outlook. Plaxo was an early social networking tool, which influenced the growth of LinkedIn, Facebook, and Zynga later on. Two years after founding Plaxo, the company's financiers ousted Parker.
In 2004, Parker came across a site called "The Facebook" on his roommate's girlfriend's computer. She was a student at Stanford. Parker met with Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin and a few months later, joined the five-month-old company as its president. Parker was the first person to see the potential for Facebook to be really big. Parker brought in Peter Thiel as the company's first investor. He also made sure that Zuckerberg had three of the five board seats, so that he would retain control of the company and so that it would allow Facebook the freedom to remain a private company.
Parker was pressured to step down as president of Facebook after police raided a vacation home Parker was renting in 2005 and found cocaine. He was arrested on suspicion of drug possession. Even after he left his role as president, he continued to be involved in the growth of Facebook.
In 2006, Parker joined Founders Fund as a managing partner. Founders Fund is a San Francisco-based venture capital fund founded by Peter Thiel. The company is focused on investing in early-stage companies. Parker has free reign when it comes to investing the fund's $500 million in capital in startups. In 2009, Parker was introduced to the Swedish music streaming service Spotify. He sent an email to Daniel Ek, the founder. In 2010, Parker invested $15 million in Spotify. He currently sits on the board of directors. He also negotiated with Warner Music and Universal Music Group on behalf of Spotify, which was integral to the company launching in the U.S. in July 2011.
In April 2014, Parker announced that he was backing an online platform for civic engagement called Brigade. The goal of Brigade, according to Parker is to "combat a lack of political engagement and interest in all levels of government across America." He is the Executive Chairman and he invested $9.3 million in the company. That same year, Brigade acquired Causes, an online platform for social impact and political activism.
Personal Life: In 2011, Parker got engaged to singer-songwriter Alexandra Lenas. They married in 2013 in Big Sur, California in a wedding that reportedly cost $4.5 million. The three-day ceremony was attended by tech industry titans including Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Each and every one of the 364 guests were given Tolkein-esque costumes made by Lord of the Rings costume designer Ngila Dickson to wear during the ceremony.
The wedding was the subject of an article in The Atlantic which covered the environmental damage Parker's wedding did to the redwood forest. He did not have a permit for the event, which was required. The venue he hired the space from was not permitted to close it to the public. The California Coastal Commission issued a statement saying: "Mr. Parker, in essence, leased an ongoing Coastal Act violation when he leased the campground." As part of his settlement with the Commission, Parker gave $2.5 million and created a beach-mapping app.
Parker and his wife have a daughter, Winter Victoria Parker, born on January 6, 2013, and a son, Zephyr Emerson Parker, born on December 1, 2014.
Parker was played by Justin Timberlake in the 2010 Facebook movie The Social Network.
Parker has been an active donor to cancer research, global public health and civic engagement since 2005. In 2012, he pledged a $5 million grant to Stand Up to Cancer and the Cancer Research Institute to create the Immunotherapy Dream Team, uniting laboratory and clinical efforts that will lead to the immunological treatment, control, and prevention of cancer. In December 2014, Parker pledged $24 million to create the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford. In 2015, he made a $4.5 million grant to support the Malaria Elimination Initiative at the University of California San Francisco's Global Health Group, and a $10 million grant to create the Sean N. Parker Autoimmune Research Laboratory at UCSF. Parker donated $250 million in 2016 to create the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.
In June 2015, Parker announced a $600 million contribution to launch the Parker Foundation, which focuses on three areas: Life Sciences, Global Public Health, and Civic Engagement.
Real Estate: In 2011, Parker paid $20 million for a Manhattan townhouse known as the "Bacchus House," due to its party-animal past. He had been renting the townhouse for $45,000 a month prior to purchasing it. Over the next several years, Parker purchased two adjacent townhouses for $20 million and $16.5 million.
In 2014, Parker bought a nine-bedroom Los Angeles mansion called "The Brody House," for $55 million. The home's previous owner was Ellen DeGeneres.
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