The 43 Richest in Silicon Valley

The billionaires on our list made their money in real estate, the tech industry, and the old-fashioned way—they inherited it. Those such as the Pritzker family are famous for their trust-fund squabbling, while others represent rags-to-riches stories of those who invented a product that has changed the world forever (for instance, the Apple computer). Throw in a movie mogul, an environmentalist venture capitalist, and a famous San Francisco clothing coterie, and you have our 43-strong list of the Bay Area’s richest residents.

Lawrence Ellison
NET WORTH: $26 BILLION
Home: Redwood City
Title: Founder and CEO, Oracle Corporation
Age: 63
Status: Married; two children from a previous marriage

Larry Ellison was born in New York City to an unwed 19-year-old-mother. Nine months later, his great aunt and uncle adopted him, and he grew up in a lower-middle class Chicago neighborhood. After his great aunt’s death, he dropped out of the University of Illinois, where he was a star pre-med student. He soon enrolled at the University of Chicago as a physics and math major, but left after two quarters for the University of California, Berkeley, planning to wing it. He worked as a technician for Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company and Wells Fargo, and then as a programmer at Ampex Corporation. In 1977, he founded Oracle, a database software company, with Robert Miner, his former supervisor at Ampex.

From 1981 to 1988, Oracle’s sales doubled every year. But in 1990 the company posted its first losses, and its market capitalization fell by 80 percent. On the verge of bankruptcy, Ellison laid off 10 percent of Oracle’s workforce. The company bounced back, and in 2000—when Oracle’s net profits increased by 76 percent in a single quarter—Ellison was the richest man in the world.

In 2007, Oracle experienced its fastest growth rate in nearly a decade, with total revenue climbing 28 percent to $5.3 billion. Ellison is frequently in the headlines for his flamboyant spending and his many passions. He is the leader and principal financer of BMW Oracle Racing, which competed for the 2007 America’s Cup sailing trophy in Valencia, Spain, losing in the semifinal. He also loves mountain biking, body surfing, and practicing aerobatics in his private jet. (He is well known for his run-ins with the Mineta San Jose International Airport over his curfew-violating takeoffs and landings. He was granted a personal waiver from curfew laws in 2001.)

Other expenditures include the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, the Ellison Medical Foundation, which supports biomedical research on aging, and, almost, Harvard University—in 2006 he withdrew a promised donation of $115 million to the university after being put off by the contentious ouster of President Lawrence Summers.

Sergey Brin
NET WORTH: $18.5 BILLION
Home: Palo Alto
Title: Co-founder and President of Technology, Google
Age: 34
Status: Married

Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, Russia, and came to the United States with his family when he was 6 to escape religious persecution. When he was 9, his father, Mikhail, a mathematician who teaches at the University of Maryland, College Park, bought him his first computer, a Commodore 64. Inspired, Brin pursued a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science from Stanford University.

During his days as a Stanford Ph.D. candidate in computer science, he and fellow student Larry Page retrieved relevant information from large data sets and developed a new kind of Internet search engine— first called BackRub—that listed results by popularity. The pair changed the name to Google, suspended their Ph.D. studies indefinitely, and, pulling together $1 million from friends, family, and other investors, launched Google from a friend’s Menlo Park garage in 1998. A year later they secured $25 million from venture capitalist firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital, and in 2001 recruited the experienced Eric Schmidt to run the company.

Since Google went public in August 2004, its stock has increased seven-fold from its initial offering. Google now has a market value of almost $205 billion, more than long-established technology bellwethers such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM. Brin has sold more than $2 billion worth of shares in the past two years, boosting his net worth by 130 percent. Brin and Page recently bought a Boeing 767 airliner for business and personal needs and agreed to pay NASA $1.3 million for the right to land at Moffett Airfield, which normally bars civilian aircraft.

Brin is a regularly featured speaker at technology and business forums, wherein he attributes much of Google’s success to luck. He’s also busy with Google.org, a charitable organization he established in 2004 that focuses on poverty, disease, and the environment. Brin’s future plans include developing a hybrid car that gets at least 100 miles per gallon. For now, he makes do with a Toyota Prius, which achieves an estimated 60 mpg.

Larry Page
NET WORTH: $18.5 BILLIONHome: San Francisco
Title: Co-founder and President of Products, Google
Age: 34
Status: Married

Larry Page was born in Lansing, Michigan. His father taught computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State University, where his mother taught computer programming. His family home was filled with personal computers and scientific magazines, which sparked his early interest in technology. He completed a Bachelor of Science in computer engineering at the University of Michigan and then undertook graduate studies in computer science at Stanford University. It was there he first met Sergey Brin, whom he recruited to help devise his web-search technology. Working out of Page’s dorm room, they created a prototype of their search engine called BackRub. In 1997, they registered the domain name Google.com. In 1998, they relocated their servers to a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, and a year later they were already leasing a complex of buildings in Mountain View. Google’s initial public offering in 2004 raised $1.67 billion, giving the company a market capitalization of $23 billion. Page and Brin were billionaires overnight. They continue to share day-to-day operations with CEO Eric Schmidt, but have reduced their salaries to $1 a year and refuse bonuses.

In 2006, Google acquired the online video-sharing site YouTube for $1.65 billion, and, last November, it announced the mobile platform called Android. The first Android-based phones are expected to hit the market later this year. Also in 2007, Google reached an agreement with the city of Mountain View to expand its campus by 310,000 square feet, and it was ranked the No.1 company in the world to work for by Forbes magazine.

Indeed, 2007 was a fruitful year for Page—both in business and his personal life. The longtime bachelor wed Lucy Southworth, a 27-year-old doctoral student in biomedical informatics at Stanford University, in December.

Eric Schmidt
NET WORTH: $6.5 BILLION
Home: Atherton
Title: Chairman of the Board and CEO, Google
Age: 52
Status: Married; two children

Eric Schmidt grew up in Blacksburg, Virginia, the son of a Virginia Tech economics professor. He earned a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from Princeton University and a Master of Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He worked at Bell Laboratories, at Zilog, and on the research staff of the computer science lab at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center before joining Sun Microsystems as a software manager. At Sun, he led the development of Java and rose to CEO and chief technology officer. He served next as Novell’s chairman and CEO, but left after Novell acquired Cambridge Technology Partners. In 2001, pressured by venture capitalists L. John Doerr and Michael Moritz, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin recruited Schmidt to run Google. Today, Schmidt focuses on management of the vice presidents and the sales team.

In 2006, Schmidt donated $2 million to Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering. (He had already established the Wilson E. Schmidt Endowed Professorship in Economics at Virginia Tech in honor of his late father.) Eight years ago, he hosted a $10,000-a-plate fundraiser for Al Gore, as well as a fête at his home for President Bill Clinton. Schmidt sits on the Princeton University Board of Trustees, and was elected to Apple’s board of directors in August of 2006. He also teaches the popular Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital course at Stanford Graduate School of Business and is an avid pilot.

Charles Johnson
NET WORTH: $6 BILLION
Home: San Mateo
Title: Chairman of the Board, Franklin Resources
Age: 74
Status: Married; six children

Charles Johnson earned a Bachelor of Arts in economics and political science from Yale University in 1954. He next served as an Army lieutenant from 1955 to 1957. With his half brother, Rupert Johnson Jr., he took over his father’s New York mutual fund company, Franklin Distributors, in 1969. The brothers expanded it into Franklin Resources, and in 1986, moved its headquarters to San Mateo.

In 1992, they added Templeton Funds and, four years later, bought Heine Securities from value investor Michael Price for $610 million. They next added Fiduciary Trust. In 2004, the company paid fines to the State of California, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to settle questionable practices such as market timing and “shelf-space” payments.

Today, the company manages $540 billion in assets and offers more than 200 investment products including the BRIC fund, which invests in Brazilian, Russian, Indian, and Chinese companies. Rupert Jr. now serves as vice chairman; Johnson’s son Greg is president and CEO; and his daughter Jennifer Bolt is the executive vice president of operations and technology.

Johnson’s philanthropic efforts include establishing the Charles B. and Ann L. Johnson Center for Pregnancy and Newborn Services at Stanford University, as well as a Stanford School of Medicine professorship that recognizes outstanding achievement in neonatology or maternal-fetal medicine. (His wife, Ann, is a Stanford School of Medicine alumna who specializes in psychiatry and neurology.) Franklin Resources also sponsors the Franklin Templeton Classic, a tennis tournament.

Steve Jobs
NET WORTH: $5.7 BILLION
Home: Palo Alto
Title: Co-founder and CEO, Apple, Inc.; Member of the Board, The Walt Disney Company
Age: 52
Status: Married; three children

Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco to an American woman and a Syrian man, both graduate students. He was adopted a week later by Paul and Clara Jobs, a machinist and an accountant, respectively, and raised in Mountain View. While attending Homestead High School in Cupertino, he sat in on lectures at Hewlett-Packard after school and began working there alongside Steve Wozniak as a summer employee. He attended Reed College in Portland, but dropped out after one semester, unable to pay tuition. He took a job as a technician at Atari, and briefly went into business with Wozniak building “blue boxes” that allowed free long distance calls. He then backpacked around India in search of philosophical enlightenment and returned in Indian garb with a shaved head. At age 21, Jobs cofounded Apple in his parents’ garage, eager to market a computer that Wozniak had designed for personal use—this would be the start of their successful mission to popularize the personal computer.

Over time, Jobs developed a reputation as a demanding, tempestuous boss and was fired after a power struggle with Apple CEO John Sculley in 1985. He went on to found NeXT, a platform development company aimed at the scientific and academic fields. In 1986, he co-founded Pixar, which animated such blockbusters as Toy Story and Finding Nemo. Jobs remained Pixar’s chairman and CEO until Disney purchased the company for $7.4 billion in 2006; he is now on Disney’s board of directors and is Disney’s largest shareholder, with a stake worth $4 billion.

Ironically, Jobs returned to Apple in 1996, when Apple bought NeXT. In 2001, he shone yet again by creating the iPod—since its debut, more than 100 million have been sold. In June 2007, Apple launched the iPhone, selling one million in 74 days. Jobs is also known for his showmanship and power to sell, especially evident at his high-profile keynote speeches at Macworld Expos. In the last several years, he has made headlines by attempting to demolish his 17,000-square-foot Spanish Colonial mansion in Woodside; for his absence on philanthropic lists; and for his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, from which he is said to be in full recovery.

Some of what he considers most influential in his life: LSD trips in the 1970s; the Whole Earth Catalog (especially its suggestion to “stay hungry, stay foolish”); and his cancer diagnosis, which led to advice he gave during a Stanford University commencement address in 2005: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life…don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice…have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

Charles Schwab
NET WORTH: $5.5 BILLION
Home: Atherton
Title: Founder, Chairman, and CEO of The Charles Schwab Corporation
Age: 70
Status: Married; five children

While growing up in Sacramento, Charles Schwab made extra money by selling walnuts, chickens, and eggs. He suffered from undiagnosed dyslexia, but he says his “up personality,” as well as comic books, helped him through his struggles with reading and writing. He excelled in math and science, however, and earned a Bachelor of Arts in economics from Stanford University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In 1974, thanks to a loan from his uncle, he founded his eponymous firm with the goal of inviting average people into the stock market. The firm, the first-ever discount brokerage house, also became a pioneer in the world of online investing, and accounts skyrocketed during the Internet boom. Schwab left his CEO post in 2003, but took it back a year later when profits sagged.

Schwab, who has no intention of retiring, has written several bestsellers, including Charles Schwab’s Guide to Financial Independence and, most recently, You’re Fifty—Now What? He’s also an active philanthropist, founding the Charles & Helen Schwab Foundation, which supports children with learning disabilities and low-income families. He also chairs the All Kinds of Minds Institute, a nonprofit that researches differences in learning.

Rupert H. Johnson Jr.
NET WORTH: $5.2 BILLION
Home: San Mateo
Title: Vice Chairman of the Board, Franklin Resources
Age: 66
Status: Married

Rupert H. Johnson Jr. earned a Bachelor of Arts / Science from Washington and Lee University, and thenserved as a Marine. He next took over his father’s business with his half brother, Charles. Johnson is on the board of trustees at Santa Clara University, and has made charitable contributions to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and the Delaware Art Museum.

Gordon Moore
NET WORTH: $4.5 BILLION
Home: Woodside
Title: Retired Co-founder and Former Chairman, Intel
Age: 78
Status: Married; two children

Gordon Moore was born in San Francisco and grew up in Pescadero and Redwood City. After graduating from Sequoia High School, he became the first member of his family to attend college by spending two years at San Jose State University (where he met his future wife, Betty). He then transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a Bachelor of Science.

Although he planned on an academic career, teaching jobs were scarce, so Moore earned a Ph.D. in chemistry and physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and went to work for Johns Hopkins University’s applied physics lab as a researcher. He moved on to the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory division of Beckman Instruments, and, in 1957, became one of the “Traitorous Eight” who left to found Fairchild Semiconductor, which created the integrated circuit. In 1965, he coined his famous “Moore’s Law,” which predicted that the number of transistors the industry could place on a computer would double every year (he later revised this to every 18 months).

With partner Robert Noyce, he founded the chipmaker Intel Corp. in 1968; three years later, Intel introduced the first microprocessor. He served as Intel’s chief executive from 1975 to 1987 and was chairman until 1997.

Moore donated half of his Intel shares to the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, created by thecouple in 2000 to supporthigher education, scientificresearch, and the environment, with a particular focuson the Bay Area. In 2001, Moore and his wife donated $600 million to Caltech (the largest gift ever made to an institution of higher education), hoping to keep Caltech a leader in research and technology. In 2006, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation granted $4.3 million for new technology and a nursing program at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center.

In 1990, President George Bush awarded Moore the National Medal of Technology. In 2003, Moore was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has a library at the University of Cambridge Centre for Mathematical Sciences named after him, as well as a lab building at Caltech.

Moore is known as an avid outdoorsman and has a pygmy owl named after him. He also enjoys fishing and golfing in Hawaii.

George Lucas
NET WORTH: $3.9 BILLION
Home: Marin County
Title: Chairman, Lucasfilm
Age: 63
Status: Divorced; three children

George Lucas was raised in Modesto, where his parents sold office supplies and owned a walnut ranch. He attended the University of Southern California (USC) film school, where he discovered his passion for film and honed his movie-making skills. He created several short films—including THS-1138, which won first prize in the 1967-68 National Student Film Festival—and earned a scholarship from Warner Brothers that enabled him to observe the making of Finian’s Rainbow and to meet its director, Francis Ford Coppola. The two struck up a friendship and formed a company called American Zoetrope in 1969. When Coppola focused on making The Godfather, Lucas established his own company, Lucasfilm, Ltd. in 1973. His first release was American Graffiti, a low-budget movie set in Modesto that was slightly autobiographical and showcased Lucas’ love of cars. The movie cost only $780,000 to make but grossed $50 million at the box office, won a Golden Globe, and garnered five Academy Award nominations.

With this success, Lucas started writing the screenplay for Star Wars. He established Industrial Light & Magic in 1975 to produce the movie’s visual effects and Sprocket Systems (later renamed Skywalker Sound) to edit and mix the movie. After other film studios refused to touch it, Star Warswas released by 20th Century Fox in 1977, grossing more than $513 million during its original release. Lucas, who had given up a portion of his director’s salary in exchange for 40 percent of the film’s box-office revenues and all merchandising rights, suddenly found himself a very rich man.

Lucas then produced The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 and Return of the Jedi in 1983, and he co-wrote and executive produced the Indiana Jones movies. In 1987, he partnered with The Walt Disney Company to launch the theme-park attraction Star Tours, based on the Star Wars films. Today, Lucas’ empire, housed on a Marin County ranch, includes Industrial Light & Magic, which creates special effects for Lucas and much of Hollywood (including films such as Jurassic Park, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, andWar of the Worlds); Skywalker Sound; and Lucas Arts, his fastgrowing video game company. He is chairman of the board of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, which recently donated $175 million to USC, the largest gift in the school’s history. Lucas is currently producing—with Steven Spielberg directing—the fourth installment of Indiana Jones, to be released this May.

Riley Bechtel
NET WORTH: $3.5 BILLION
Home: San Francisco
Title: Chairman, CEO, and Director, Bechtel Group, Inc.
Age: 55
Status: Married; three children

Riley Bechtel’s great-grandfather Warren Bechtel left Oklahoma in the 1890s for California with only a team of mules. He graded railroad beds, expanded into general construction, and in the 1930s, his company was one of six firms hired to build the Hoover Dam.

The young Bechtel joined Bechtel Group in 1966, working summers during high school and while studying psychology and political science at the University of California, Davis. He received a combined law degree and an MBA from Stanford University’s School of Law and Graduate School of Business. After a brief stint with a San Francisco law firm, he rejoined Bechtel as a low-level contract coordinator in 1981, but rose through the ranks and became executive vice president in 1987. He was elected president and chief operating officer in 1989 and CEO in 1996.

Under Bechtel’s leadership, the company had revenues of $20.5 billion in 2006 and projected revenues of $24.7 billion in 2007. Its 40,000 employees work in more than 40 offices worldwide. Some of Bechtel’s biggest contracts have been with the United States government, which in 2004, awarded Bechtel Group a contract worth $2.3 billion to help rebuild Iraq.

Given its international presence, Bechtel Group created a global foundation in 1954. In 2006, the foundation granted $1.82 million to 190 non-profit organizations in 13 countries. Personally, Bechtel is a major donor to Stanford University, where two buildings bear his name—the Bechtel International Center and Bechtel Conference Center. He counts golf among his hobbies, and is a member of the elite Augusta National Golf Club and also a regular at Pebble Beach.

Stephen Bechtel Jr.
NET WORTH: $3.5 BILLION
Home: San Francisco
Title: Retired Chairman, Bechtel Group, Inc.
Age: 82
Status: Married; five children

Stephen Bechtel Jr. earned a Bachelor of Science in civil engineering from Purdue University in 1946 and an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business in 1948. He did a variety of jobs for a subsidiary of Bechtel Group, starting in 1941. After his father, Stephen Sr., retired, Bechtel was elected president of Bechtel Group in 1960 and chairman in 1973.

Bechtel secured construction projects on all seven continents (to date, the company has worked on
22,000 projects in 140 countries). He also embraced complex and unique projects. During his tenure, Bechtel Group was a project manager on the BART system and later took a major role building the Washington Rapid Transit—both projects were forerunners of modern-day rail systems. Bechtel also managed one of the world’s largest engineering projects:
the Jubail Industrial City in Saudi Arabia, a complete city with a population of nearly 100,000.

Bechtel’s 30-year career as president is often referred to as the “Golden Era.” He served under Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford in six federal appointments, and, in 1991, President George H.W. Bush presented him with the National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor for technical achievement.

Although he stepped down in 1990, Bechtel still takes an active role as chairman emeritus of Bechtel Group and Fremont Group, a separate, affiliated private investment and securities management company. Bechtel also oversees the S.D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation, a family fund he created in 1957. In 2006, he donated a $1 million grant—renewable for up to four years—to Purdue’s Department of Engineering Education to foster an interest in science and engineering in elementary and high schools. He spends his free time hunting with his bird dogs.

John Sobrato & Family
NET WORTH: $3 BILLION
Home: Atherton
Title: Founder, Principal, and Chairman, Sobrato Development Companies
Age: 68
Status: Married; three children

When he was 21, and still in college at Santa Clara University, John Sobrato began selling homes in Palo Alto (especially those built by Joseph Eichler). He was following in the footprints of his mother, Ann, who had invested in the bucolic Atherton, so as to grow produce for the family restaurant in San Francisco during World War II rationing. Sobrato paired with his mother in the early 1960s to develop real estate for the emerging electronics industry, and, in the mid-1970s founded Sobrato Development Companies. Clients included Apple and Yahoo!.

Today, the Cupertino-based firm specializes in commercial real estate for high tech and R&D companies as well as residential real estate, especially upscale West Coast apartments. It manages all its properties and maintains a single tenant policy for commercial properties. Sobrato’s son, John M., manages the firm’s day-to-day operations as CEO.

Sobrato serves on the boards of numerous nonprofits throughout Silicon Valley, including Parents Helping Parents and the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center. With his family he created the Sobrato Family Foundation in 1996; in 2001, to address the affordable housing crisis in Silicon Valley, the family founded the Sobrato Family Affordable Housing Fund, a revolving loan fund. He is also a trustee of both Santa Clara University and Bellarmine College Preparatory and vice chairman of the National Hispanic University. In 2000, he and his wife, Susan, gave Santa Clara University $4.4 million, which went toward oncampus apartments for 240 juniors and seniors.

Regarded as a family man, Sobrato believes that raising children well involves “letting them know that you are always available to discuss any problems they might encounter, having dinner together, giving them responsibilities such as part-time work at an early age, and engaging in all their school functions.”

Sobrato also enjoys skiing, playing tennis, water skiing, scuba diving, and jogging.

James Coulter
NET WORTH: $2.8 BILLION
Home: San Francisco
Title: Co-founder, Texas Pacific Group
Age: 47
Status: Married; three children

James Coulter graduated with a bachelor’s degree in engineering science from Dartmouth College and earned an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business in 1986. For the next two years, he worked with SPO Partners, an investment firm that focuses on public market and private minority investments. He has also worked with Keystone, Inc., The Robert M. Bass Group, Inc., and Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb. He co-founded Texas Pacific Group in 1993, with offices in Forth Worth, Texas, and San Francisco. The firm’s first clients were the struggling Continental Airlines and America West. He and co-founder David Bonderman brought both airlines from the brink of bankruptcy to profitability. Today, Texas Pacific Group manages holdings worth more than $10 billion, including Neiman Marcus, Ducati, Lenovo, and Seagate Technology. Coulter serves on the boards of directors of J. Crew Group, Inc., Lenovo Group Limited, Seagate Technology, and Zhone Technologies, Inc.

Ray Dolby
NET WORTH: $2.7 BILLION
Home: San Francisco
Title: Founder and Chairman, Dolby Laboratories
Age: 74
Status: Married; two children

Ray Dolby started playing the piano when he was 10 and soon after, learned the clarinet, becoming fascinated by the vibration of the reed. His childhood curiosity took a serious turn when he started working on audio and instrumentation projects at Ampex Corporation while still a high school student in Redwood City. He continued to work part-time for Ampex while attending Stanford University and was integral in helping the company develop the first consumer VCR. He earned a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from Stanford in 1957 and completed a Ph.D. in physics at Cambridge University in 1961. In 1963, while working as a United Nations adviser in India, he came up with his anti-hiss recording technology while doing some calculations one night.

Dolby began Dolby Laboratories, Inc., in London in 1965 with a staff of four and $25,000, which came from his savings and from friends. Dolby kept the London office but in 1976 based the company in San Francisco, where he continued to innovate and lead sound technology. He created Dolby Stereo, the first multichannel surround sound format for the cinema that attained widespread recognition with the release of Star Wars in 1977. The system was then refined for home use in 1982.

In its history, more than 500 million Dolby-licensed products have been sold worldwide, and the company’s total revenue for fiscal year 2007 was $482 million. Dolby Laboratories was first publicly traded in 2005. At that time, Dolby assumed the role of chairman. Dolby spends his free time skiing, sailing, and flying airplanes (he is a commercially rated pilot). In keeping with his longtime interest in music, he serves on the boards of the San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Symphony. He is also a strong supporter of stem-cell research and, with his wife, Dagmar, gave $16 million to the University of California, San Francisco, in 2006 to help start a stemcell center. In 2005, he donated $5 million to the
state’s stem-cell research agency to keep it afloat while it fought legal battles.

Daniel Pritzker
NET WORTH: $2.7 BILLION
Home: Marin County
Title: Grandchild of Founder of Hyatt Hotel Chain
Age: 48
Status: Married; five children Daniel Pritzker is the son of Jay Pritzker and grandson of A.N. Pritzker, founders of the Hyatt hotel chain. Although not directly involved with the family business, Pritzker is one of 11 beneficiaries of the family’s $15 billion financial empire. Drama has ensued among the recipients, and the matter remains unresolved to this day. Pritzker graduated in 1981 from Tufts University, where he met his wife, Karen. He earned a law degree from Northwestern University in 1986 (his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all practiced law).

In 1990, Pritzker, a guitarist and songwriter, founded a rock-soul band in Chicago called Sonia Dada. The band released its first album, which sold 100,000 copies in 2002, and has since released five more albums. Philanthropically, Pritzker and his wife manage the Jay Pritzker Foundation, a fund he named after his father (who died in 1999), and through which he established the Jay Pritzker Scholarship Challenge Grant at Tufts in 2004. The grant matches any donations for minority student financial aid at the university up to $5 million.

John Pritzker
NET WORTH: $2.6 BILLION
Home: San Francisco
Title: Partner, Geolo Capital
Age: 54
Status: Married; three children

Grandson of A.N. Pritzker, co-creator of the Hyatt hotel chain, John Pritzker grew up in the Chicago neighborhood of Glencoe. The young Pritzker jumped into the family business, vacuuming floors at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago during summers. He attended Menlo College and the University of Denver’s College of Hotel and Restaurant Management. He returned to the Hyatt Corporation and climbed the corporate ladder, landing several executive level positions. In his Hyatt career, Pritzker traveled around the country until he landed in San Francisco in 1984.

Pritzker left the Hyatt Corporation after 22 years to pursue his own business interests in the hospitality industry, including Red Sail Sports, Inc. (a firm that specializes in watersport and scuba diving adventure travel), Mandara Spa, and Odyssey Country Club. He helped found Ticketmaster and Chamdex Corporation and now runs Geolo Capital, a private equity fund that invests in entertainment, hospitality, and retailing.

Pritzker devotes much of his energy to philanthropy. Through the Lisa and John Pritzker Family Fund, he and his wife donated $25 million to a new child and adolescent mental health center at the University of California, San Francisco (Lisa volunteers at San Francisco General in child and adolescent psychiatric services). He is a director with The Bernard Osher Foundation board and president of the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation.

Gordon Getty
NET WORTH: $2.4 BILLION
Home: San Francisco
Title: Son of Oil Tycoon J. Paul Getty
Age: 73
Status: Married; seven children

Gordon Getty is the fourth son of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, who was known for his penny-pinching habits, five divorces, and difficult relationships with each of his sons. Getty was his father’s favorite and inherited the bulk of the family fortune after his father died in 1976.

Getty graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of San Francisco, and did a brief stint in the Army before working for Getty Oil. He sold the family business to Texaco, the third-largest oil company in the United States, in 1986 for $10.1 billion. Since then, he has invested in 10 of his family friend San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s business ventures—including the PlumpJack group of wine, restaurant, resort, and real estate ventures—and founded ReFlow, a company dealing with mutual funds.

Getty’s other pursuits include composing and performing classical music. In the early 1960s, he studied music theory at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and sang with the Marin Opera Company. Since then, he has authored more
than a dozen major pieces of music and performed concerts at venues across the United States and internationally. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts honored Getty as an Outstanding American Composer in 1986. He also gives millions away to charity. “If you have more money than you need, you have to give it away. It’s a duty,” Getty once said. “I get to choose whom to sponsor, and I like to give to the areas that I know something about.” Aptly, he is a patronof the arts, including the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Symphony. He and his wife established The Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation as their primary charitable organization and regularly open their Pacific Heights mansion for lavish fundraisers.

Getty made headlines when he admitted to a 14-year affair with a Los Angeles woman, with whom he sired three daughters. In 1999, she sued for her children to be part of the Getty inheritance.

Omid Kordestani
NET WORTH: $2.2 BILLION
Home: Atherton
Title: Senior Vice President, Global Sales and Business Development, Google
Age: 43
Status: Married; two children

Omid Kordestani moved from Iran to San Jose when he was 14 after his father’s death. He earned a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from San Jose State University and went to work at Hewlett-Packard as an engineer; he then earned an MBA from Stanford University. Kordestani worked in marketing, product management, and business development with 3DO, Go Corporation, and then Netscape, where he increased Netscape’s online revenue 127 percent in 18 months. He joined Google in 1999 (a year after it was established) as the 12th employee and “first guy with a suit” and developed and implemented the company’s initial business model. He brought Google to profitability in enviable time with his international sales effort and the idea of selling paid listings rather than sullying Google’s site with pop-up ads and flash banners. In 2005, he orchestrated an alliance with Time Warner’s AOL.

Around the Google office Kordestani is known for his love of instant messaging. He personally reviews each hire with the thought, “If I’m stuck in an airport with one of these employees, I want to enjoy my time and have an intelligent conversation.”

He recently told a group of first-year students at Stanford Graduate School of Business, “I completely believe in following your own instincts and passions. Don’t focus on money. There is something about weekends that is magical. Do not miss weekends with your family.”

William Randolph Hearst III
NET WORTH: $2.1 BILLION
Home: San Francisco
Title: Director, Hearst Corporation and Hearst-Argyle Television; Affiliated Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Age: 58
Status: Married; three children

William Randolph Hearst III, grandson of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, grew up on the family ranch in San Simeon with a view of the castle. He graduated from Harvard University with a degree in mathematics in 1972 and worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, owned by his family’s The Hearst Corporation, before taking leave to be managing editor of Outside magazine in 1976. He returned to the paper in 1980 and became editor and publisher from 1984 to 1995, but stepped down to be CEO of high-speed cable Internet provider @Home Network from 1996 to 2002. In 1995, he joined Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and continues on as a limited partner. He sits on several boards of directors of companies in which the firm has investments, including Hearst-Argyle Television and Juniper Networks.

Hearst has served on The Hearst Corporation’s board of directors since 1979. The company now has holdings in newspapers, television and radio stations, cable networks, magazines, and real estate. In 2003, he was named president of The William Randolph Hearst Foundation, known for two prominent programs: the Hearst Journalism Awards Program and the United States Senate Youth Program. Hearst is a trustee of the California Academy of Sciences, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, San Francisco Film Society, and Grace Cathedral of San Francisco.

Phoebe Hearst Cooke
NET WORTH: $2.1 BILLION
Home: San Francisco
Title: Granddaughter of Hearst Corporation Publisher, William Randolph Hearst
Age: 80
Status: Married; one child

Phoebe Hearst Cooke is the grandchild of publishing legend William Randolph Hearst. Her husband, Jack, has held executive level positions with The Hearst Corporation since 1964. The couple have been avid equestrians all their lives. Jack is an inductee into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, and Hearst Cooke was named Horseperson-Citizen of the Year by the Mounted Patrol of San Mateo County in 1997 in honor of her role in founding the National Center for Equine Facilitated Therapy in 1971. Located in Woodside, the center provides equine-assisted therapy and programs to children and adults with special needs. She donated $250,000 to The Horse Park at Woodside in 2003 and $20,000 in support of a 1998 ballot measure prohibiting the slaughter of horses. She also contributed $100,000 to California Gov. Gray Davis’ gubernatorial campaign in 2002.

John Morgridge
NET WORTH: $2.1 BILLION
Home: Portola Valley
Title: Chairman Emeritus, Cisco
Age: 74
Status: Married; three children (one deceased)

While growing up in Wisconsin, John Morgridge embraced the Midwest’s work ethic by obtaining a job as soon as he was of legal age; he worked in construction, at a cannery, and at a brewery. He met his wife, Tashia, during high school in
Wauwatosa. He earned a bachelor’s of business administration from the University of Wisconsin- Madison; married Tashia (who earned a degree from the university’s School of Education); and earned an MBA from Stanford University, where in between classes he managed the Graduate School of Management’s coffee shop. He next joined the Air Force, hoping to be a fighter pilot; but when fewer pilots were needed, he instead oversaw computer operations.

He spent 20 years in management at Honeywell Information Systems, moved on to Stratus Computer and GRiD Systems, and became chief of networking company Cisco in 1988. Under his leadership Cisco went from $5 million to more than $1 billion in sales, and from 34 to more than 2,250 employees. He took the company public in 1990 and became chairman five years later. Morgridge is recognized as having established Cisco’s corporate culture of giving back, in keeping with his own generosity. In April 2006, he and Tashia gave $40 million to the University of Wisconsin to fund bioscience research. The couple also supports a range of education, conservation, and human services causes.

Morgridge serves on the boards of Business Executives for National Security, CARE, and the Nature Conservancy, among others. He also speaks often about philanthropy, entrepreneurism, management, and how education and technology lead to economic development around the world. He teaches management at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and is an avid cyclist and hiker.

David Filo
NET WORTH: $2 BILLION
Home: Palo Alto
Title: Co-founder and Chief Yahoo!, Yahoo!
Age: 41
Status: Married

David Filo grew up in Moss Bluff, Louisiana, and earned a Bachelor of Science in computer engineering from Tulane University and a Master of Science in electrical engineering from Stanford University. After entering Stanford’s electrical engineering Ph.D. program, he and classmate Jerry Yang discovered they both loved keeping lists of their favorite websites. In early 1994, they consolidated the lists, sorted the sites, and posted their index on the Web for curious friends. Soon nearly 100,000 visitors used the service. Recognizing that the Web was heating up, they dropped out of Stanford in 1994 to turn their hobby into an Internet navigation business. They easily acquired venture capital and, in 1995, hired fellow engineering graduate and Intermec Technologies Corp. president Tim Koogle to ensure Yahoo!’s profitability. The company went public in 1996. Quarterly revenues at press time were $1.7 billion. Today, Filo oversees daily operations and Yahoo!’s 11,400 full-time employees. In 2005, Filo donated $30 million to Tulane University. He is said to wear sneakers and fly coach.

Thomas Siebel
NET WORTH: $1.9 BILLION
Home: Woodside
Title: Chairman, First Virtual Group; Former Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Siebel Systems
Age: 54
Status: Married; four children

Thomas Siebel was raised in a middle-class Chicago suburb and attended military school. He received three degrees from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: a Bachelor of Arts in history, an MBA, and a master’s in computer science. (In 2006, the university awarded him an honorary Ph.D. in engineering.) He worked as an Oracle salesman from 1984 to 1990, and quit angrily, he says, when Larry Ellison couldn’t see the potential in selling software for automated customer call centers. From 1990 to 1992, he served as CEO of Gain Technology, a multimedia software company. He oversaw the sale of the company in 1993, and used the resulting windfall to found Siebel Systems, maker of the customer-management software he had hoped to launch at Oracle.

At Siebel he served as chairman and CEO and stressed customer satisfaction. Charles Schwab was one of his first customers. Siebel was also known around the office for his lack of pretension; he frequently ate in the cafeteria with the engineers, for instance. Despite his feud with Ellison, he sold Siebel Systems to Oracle for $5.8 billion in 2005, personally gaining some $500 million. Currently, he serves as chairman of First Virtual Group, a diversified holding company whose interests include commercial real estate, agribusiness, global investment management, and philanthropy.

His philanthropic efforts include the Siebel Scholars Program (established in 1999), which provides grants to computer science graduate students. Through the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation, he supports education, wildlife habitat preservation, environmental conservation, and relief for the homeless. He is also chairman of the controversial Montana Meth Project, known for its graphic advertising campaign featuring strung-out methamphetamine addicts.

Siebel also serves on the board of advisers for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Engineering, to which he donated $32 million to build the Siebel Center for Computer Science; on the board of the Illinois Foundation; and on the board of overseers for the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A licensed pilot, he flies his own jet from his 30-acre home in Woodside to Montana, where he owns and operates two working cattle ranches. He is a ski and golf enthusiast, and a major donor to the Republican Party.

Jerry Yang
NET WORTH: $1.9 BILLION
Home: Los Altos
Title: CEO and Chief Yahoo!, Yahoo!
Age: 38
Status: Married; one child

Jerry Yang was born in Taipei, Taiwan, and moved to San Jose when he was 10 with his widowed mother, Lily, and younger brother, Ken. (Yang’s father died when he was 2.) After graduatingfrom San Jose’s Piedmont Hills High School, he earned a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
He met David Filo as a Stanford graduate student, and, in 1994, the two turned a personal website directory— developed as a way to procrastinate from “tedious thesis work”—into “Jerry’s Guide to the

World Wide Web.” In 1995, the two co-founded web portal Yahoo! Inc., and a year later they took it public. Yang replaced Terry Semel as CEO in 2007, in an attempt to help Yahoo! regain ground on its top competitor Google. Yang was elected to the Stanford University Board of Trustees in 2005, and he and his wife, Akiko Yamazaki (also a Stanford alumnus) donated $75 million to the university in 2007 for the new Environment and Energy Building. He also holds board seats at Alibaba (a Hong Kong-based e-commerce company), the Asian Pacific American Community Fund, Cisco, and Yahoo! Japan. His favorite pastime, he says, is “sleeping.”

L. John Doerr
NET WORTH: $1.8 BILLION
Home: Woodside
Title: Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Age: 56
Status: Married; two children

L. John Doerr was born in St. Louis, Missouri, as one of five children. He earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Rice University, followed by an MBA from Harvard. He moved to Silicon Valley in 1974, and
joined Intel Corporation as an engineer and marketing manager; soon he was one of Intel’s most successful salespersons. In 1980, he joined venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and backed Sun Microsystems, Intuit, Amazon, and Google.

Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers has described Doerr as “the single best venture capitalist in the world.” Alluding to his famously high energy level, Sun’s Scott McNealy once characterized him as “the Energizer Bunny on steroids hard-wired to the Hoover Dam.” Doerr is also one of the highest- profile supporters of the Democratic Party in Silicon Valley and a big believer in green technology. He also wants to help in preventing pandemic avian flu and global infectious disease, advocates women as leaders, seeks to improve public education, and pairs with U2’s Bono to fight poverty and AIDS in Africa.

Kenneth L. Fisher
NET WORTH: $1.8 BILLION
Home: Woodside
Title: Founder, CEO, and Chief Investment Officer, Fisher Investments
Age: 56
Status: Married; three children

Kenneth Fisher was raised in San Mateo—the son of the late Philip Fisher, a legendary investor and author of Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings. After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Humboldt State University, Fisher worked at his father’s investment management practice in San Francisco for a year and then struck out on his own. Fisher Investments currently manages $32 billion in assets. Fisher is also known as the father of the price/sales ratio (PSR)—now part of core financial curricula—and as a prolific writer. His books include Super Stocks and The Only Three Questions That Count: Investing by Knowing What Others Don’t. He has been a Forbes columnist for 22 years and based on the predictions in his column, he was ranked the most accurate market forecaster by CXO Advisory Group in 2006. With Meir Statman, a finance professor at the Leavy School of Business at Santa Clara University, he has written scholarly papers on the new field of behavioral finance, which examines the interaction of behavioral psychology with freely traded financial markets and their participants.

His pastimes include acquiring real estate—he owns more than $70 million worth in California— and exploring the history of his home turf, Kings Mountain, and the 19th century redwood lumbering industry. Nurturing this passion, he has located and excavated more than 35 pre-1920s steamera lumber mill sites, and established the Kenneth Fisher Chair in redwood forest ecology at his alma mater. He also created the Kenneth and Sherrilyn Fisher Journalism Center in the San Mateo library.

Kavitark Ram Shriram
NET WORTH: $1.8 BILLION
Home: Mountain View
Title: Founder and Managing Partner, Sherpalo Ventures
Age: 51
Status: Married; two children

Kavitark Shriram was born and raised in Chennai, India, and graduated from Chennai University. In 1996, he co-founded comparisonshopping site Junglee.com and sold it to Amazon.com in 1998. He worked for Amazon.com and Netscape before launching venture capital firm Sherpalo in 2000.

He was an early investor in Google, and advised Sergey Brin and Larry Page to hire only “A” people, since they will in turn hire “A” people. “A” people, according to Shriram, are those with good mothers. “If [prospective employees] are raised well, they are more likely to make good citizens, employees, and entrepreneurs,” Shriram said recently. Since Google’s public offering in 2004, he has sold off more than half of his shares. He is currently on Google’s board of directors and serves on the advisory board of Naukri.com, a leading classified advertising site in India. Shriram’s other investments include Zazzle (custom-designed T-shirts, mugs, and stamps); PodShow (online radio); and 247customer.com (India call centers).

Richard Peery
NET WORTH: $1.6 BILLION
Home: Palo Alto
Title: Real Estate Investor
Age: 67
Status: Married; four children

In the 1960s, Richard Peery, along with business partner John Arrillaga, bought up farmland using little leverage and converted it into pricey office space. He and Arrillaga sold the majority of their holdings—some of which housed Seagate Technology, Synopsis, and Samsung—for $1.1 billion in 2006, in the largest office transaction in Silicon Valley history.

John Arrillaga
NET WORTH: $1.5 BILLION
Home: Palo Alto
Title: Real Estate Investor
Age: 70
Status: Widowed, Married; two children

John Arrillaga’s parents emigrated from Spain to Southern California, where his father made a modest living as a grocery wholesaler. To put himself through college, Arrillaga worked odd jobs and obtained an athletic scholarship to Stanford University. He was a standout on the basketball team and became a member of the Stanford Athletic Hall of Fame. Not long after he graduated with a degree in geography in 1960, Arrillaga went to work as a broker at the industrial real estate firm Renault & Handley in Palo Alto. He eventually formed a partnership with Richard Peery. Together, they bought up cheap land and turned it into expensive office space. Since 2005, he has sold the bulk of his real estate holdings, bringing his net worth to at least $1.5 billion. Arrillaga has generously contributed to his alma mater. In 2006, he donated $100 million to Stanford, the largest single gift ever from an individual to the university. He has also overseen the construction of several campus buildings—the Arrillaga Family Sports Center, the Arrillaga Family Recreation Center, and the Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center, named for his late wife.

Carl Berg
NET WORTH: $1.5 BILLION
Home: Atherton
Title: Chairman, CEO, and Director, Mission West Properties
Age: 70
Status: Married; one child

Carl Berg earned a bachelor’s degree in corporate finance from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and then worked as a vending machine repairman, loan processor, and mortgage broker who took warrants and stock in lieu of rent from tech startups. He developed Silicon Valley commercial real estate in the 1960s and later founded Mission West Properties, which specializes in research and development facilities. Today, Mission West’s 7.9-million-square-foot portfolio includes Microsoft, NEC, and Fujitsu. Last July, Berg announced he intended to sell Mission West Properties. However, after no buyers presented an offer that he considered acceptable, talks of a merger ended in December. The deal, if done, would have been the largest commercial property sale in Silicon Valley history.

Berg is also a private venture capital investor (through Berg & Berg). Past investments include Integrated Device Technology and Sun Microsystems. He owns a large chunk of Stratus Properties and also stakes in more than 100 companies around the world, including Valence Technology (rechargeable batteries) and IT consultants International Network Services (INS), which he bought from Lucent Technologies in 2002.

Berg serves as director of Valence Technology, Monolithic System Technology, Focus Enhancements, and Systems Integrated Research. He is also on the board of LynuxWorks.

John Fisher
NET WORTH: $1.5 BILLION
Home: San Francisco
Title: Son of Gap Founder; Owner, Oakland A’s
Age: 46
Status: Married; four children

John Fisher, the youngest son of Gap founders Donald and Doris Fisher, graduated with a degree in politics from Princeton University in 1983. He briefly worked in the mailroom at the Republican National Committee before becoming advance man for President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush. After he obtained an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Fisher took a job with a real estate company that did business with Gap. But when the real estate business folded, his father persuaded him to manage the family’s investments. In this role, Fisher became president of Pisces, Inc., the family’s investment firm.

Although he prefers to keep a low profile, Fisher recently came under attack from environmentalists over timberland he purchased through Sansome—a subsidiary of Pisces, Inc.—in Mendocino and Sonoma counties in 1998. Critics feared that Fisher and Sansome were clearing too many trees and not safeguarding the forest for the future.

Fisher teamed up with developer Lewis Wolff in 1998 to buy a 50 percent interest in several Fairmont hotels, including the landmark property in San Francisco. He and Wolff again joined efforts in 2005 to purchase the Oakland A’s. Although Wolff has a smaller share of ownership, he has become the frontman, while Fisher quietly stays behind the scenes.

Fisher lives in San Francisco’s Presidio Heights with his wife, Laura. He sits on the board of KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Schools for the underprivileged, City Fields Foundation, the Boys and Girls Club of San Francisco, San Francisco Day School, and the Alliance for School Choice.

Vinod Khosla
NET WORTH: $1.5 BILLION
Home: Menlo Park
Title: Former General Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Co-founder, Sun Microsystems
Age: 52
Status: Married; four children

Vinod Khosla caught the “entrepreneurial bug” at age 16, when he read about the starting of Intel. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. His first business venture was a soymilk company to service the many people in India without refrigerators. When that failed, he moved to the United States and earned a master’s in biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. But the draw of the Valley proved difficult to resist, and, after repeated attempts, he gained acceptance into Stanford University (the admissions department demanded that he obtain work experience, which he did in Pittsburgh, and then he applied again but still had to work his way up the waiting list). He graduated with an MBA from Stanford in 1980, and one year later, founded Daisy Systems in Mountain View. Although the computer software and hardware company went on to post significant revenues, Khosla left to serve as founding CEO of Sun Microsystems in 1982. There, he befriended influential venture capitalist John Doerr. In 1986, Khosla became a partner in Doerr’s firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

In 2004, while still maintaining ties to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Khosla founded his own firm, Khosla Ventures, which advises entrepreneurs and invests in his latest passion—clean technologies, such as solar power and ethanol as a fuel substitute. For his efforts, Fortune recently named Khosla one the nation’s most influential ethanol advocates. He is also interested in microfinance and supports many microfinance organizations in India and Africa, such as Share Microfin, Ltd., which gives small loans to impoverished women in India to start their own home-grown businesses.

Scott Cook
NET WORTH: $1.4 BILLION
Home: Woodside
Title: Founder and Chairman of the Executive Committee, Intuit, Inc.
Age: 54
Status: Married; three children

Scott Cook earned a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics and economics from the University of Southern California and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He spent four years at Procter & Gamble in various marketing positions, including product manager, and then managed consulting assignments in banking and technology for Bain & Company. After watching his wife do their finances by hand—and noting the growing accessibility of personal computers—he developed Quicken personal finance software. Inspired by its success, he then co-founded Intuit, the world leader in software for personal and small business finance, with Tom Proulx in 1983. The pair took Intuit public 10 years later. Today, Intuit’s products include TurboTax, Property Manager, QuickBooks, and Medical Expense Manager, all designed for ease of use.

Cook currently funds a business school program at the University of Wisconsin, his wife’s alma mater. His Intuit Tax Freedom Project donates free tax preparation to any American with an adjusted gross income of $25,000 or less—about 45 percent of the population. He is also on the board of directors at eBay, Procter & Gamble, and the Asia Foundation, among others.

Robert Fisher
NET WORTH: $1.4 BILLION
Home: San Francisco
Title: Member of Board of Directors and Former Interim CEO, Gap, Inc.
Age: 54
Status: Married; three children

Eldest son of the clothing retailer Gap founders, Robert Fisher graduated from Princeton University in 1976 and earned an MBA from Stanford University. He joined the family business starting as a store manager at the Gap store in Sunnyvale in 1980. In 1985, he was named executive vice president for merchandising at Banana Republic—then an 11-store unit of Gap, Inc. Fisher was named president of Banana Republic in 1989, and three years later, he became president of Gap, Inc. He served as chief financial officer and chief operating officer until being named president of the Gap brand in 1997, overseeing the adult, babyGap, and GapKids businesses. He quit abruptly in 1999, citing personal reasons, but stayed on the board of directors. In January 2007, he stepped in as interim CEO during the company’s six-month search for a new CEO.

In his spare time, Fisher fly-fishes for trout. Passionate about conserving the environment, he serves on the boards of several environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, Golden Gate National Park Conservancy, and Conservation International.

William Fisher
NET WORTH: $1.4 BILLION
Home: San Francisco
Title: Son of Gap Founders
Age: 50
Status: Married; three children

William Fisher graduated from Princeton University in 1979 and earned an MBA from Stanford University. He joined the family company, Gap, Inc., in the 1980s, working his way up to managing Gap’s international division. He left the business in 1998 and is now a managing partner of Manzanita Capital, a private equity investment firm. Fisher is a trustee on the City Fields Foundation, a nonprofit he and his brothers, Robert and John, founded in 2005 to provide more athletic playing fields in San Francisco. The brothers also gave a sizable gift to their alma mater Princeton in 2006 for a new dormitory within Whitman College.

Robert Naify
NET WORTH: $1.4 BILLION
Home: San Francisco
Title: Former Part-owner, United Artists
Age: 85
Status: Widowed; six children

Robert Naify is the son of a Lebanese immigrant who opened an Atlantic City movie theater in 1912, founded California Theaters in the 1920s, and then purchased 50 percent of United Artists Theater Circuit. Naify and his brother, Marshall, later gained control, and then sold out to Telecommunications, Inc. in 1986.

Margaret Whitman
NET WORTH: $1.4 BILLION
Home: Atherton
Title: President and CEO, eBay
Age: 51
Status: Married; two children

Meg Whitman grew up in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in an affluent family; both sides trace back to Boston Brahmins. She excelled in sports, including swimming, basketball, lacrosse, and tennis, but was a strong student, too, earning a Bachelor of Arts in economics in 1977 from Princeton University, followed by an MBA from Harvard Business School. Her first job was at Procter & Gamble in brand management. After two years, she moved to the consulting firm Bain & Company, rising to vice president and staying eight years. She then took management posts at The Walt Disney Company, Stride Rite, FTD, and Hasbro’s Preschool Division before becoming president and CEO of eBay in 1998. She took the company from 30 employees to more than 13,000, expanding abroad and past auctions—eBay currently owns comparison-pricing site Shopping.com; Skype, a proprietary peer-to-peer VoIP network (price tag: $2.6 billion); and a stake in the online classifieds business Craigslist.

Whitman donated approximately $30 million to her alma mater Princeton for Whitman College, the university’s sixth residential college, which is scheduled to open this fall. She has also made numerousbipartisan political donations, and has been especially generous to Republicans Orrin Hatch, Charles Pickering, and George Allen. She also supports Massachusetts’ Republican governor Mitt Romney’s bid for the presidency in 2008.

She is on the board of directors of Procter & Gamble and DreamWorks Animation SKG. Her hobbies include fly-fishing, skiing, tennis, and hiking up Windy Hill in Portola Valley with her husband, Dr. Griffith R. Hash IV, a neurosurgeon at Stanford University School of Medicine. She also claims to shop on eBay, citing a recent purchase of two flatpanel TVs, and also to post clothes and toys her sons have outgrown, now that they’re both in college. “There are times I put up 10 or 15 items on a weekend,” Whitman says.

Michael Moritz
NET WORTH: $1.3 BILLION
Home: San Francisco
Title: Venture Capitalist, Sequoia Capital
Age: 52
Status: Married; two children

Welsh-born Michael Moritz graduated with a Master of Arts in history from Oxford University in 1976. He moved to the United States—“not ever expecting to be in America more than 30 years later”—and earned an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. He wrote for TIME Magazine and authored the 1984 book The Little Kingdom: the Private Story of Apple Computer.

In 1986, Moritz joined the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital in Menlo Park. One of his early investments was Yahoo! in 1995. For less than $2 million, the firm received nearly a third of Yahoo!, which became worth $57.6 million a year later. Moritz continued to lead investments in successful tech startups, such as PayPal, Network Appliance, nVidia, and Google. His latest triumph is YouTube, which earned Sequoia Capital an estimated $480 million in less than one year. Although known for his uncanny ability to pick hot items—Forbesranked him No. 1 on its “Midas List” of venture capitalists in 2006 and 2007—Moritz has bet on a few failures; the biggest mistakes were Webvan and eToys. Moritz sat on Google’s board of directors from 1999 to 2007, as well as the boards of Flextronics and Yahoo!.

Walter H. Shorenstein and Family
NET WORTH: $1.3 BILLION
Home: San Francisco
Title: Founder, Shorenstein Properties
Age: 91
Status: Widowed; three children (one deceased)

Walter Shorenstein dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania and fought during World War II as a major in the U.S. Air Force. After his discharge from the military in 1946, he started to deal in commercial real estate with the San Francisco brokerage firm Milton Meyer & Company. In 1951, he became a partner, and, by 1960, he took over as president and sole owner, renaming the firm Shorenstein Properties. Soon Shorenstein was the city’s largest owner and operator of commercial real estate.

Among his properties was the second-tallest skyscraper in San Francisco—the Bank of America building— that he purchased in 1985 (he relinquished ownership in 2005).

By 1990, Shorenstein was worth an estimated $300 million, but with the dot-com craze and rapid rise in real estate prices, his fortune has more than quadrupled to an estimated $1.3 billion. Shorenstein Company owns 25 percent of the commercial property in San Francisco—amounting to more than 6.5 million square feet.

His son, Douglas, has taken over day-to-day operations of the business, which has freed Shorenstein to focus on his philanthropic efforts. He has been a longtime supporter of the Democratic Party, giving millions to Democrats inthe 1990s and hosting lavish fundraising dinners. In 1997, he received the Democratic National Committee’s Lifetime Achievement Award. After his daughter, Joan Shorenstein Barone, a journalist, died in 1985, he gave Harvard $10 million to create the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. He has also given $1 million gifts both to the University of California, Berkeley, for programs at the school’s Institute of East Asian Studies, and Stanford University, where the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center is named after him. After the Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989, he contributed $100,000 for Red Cross relief efforts.

Shorenstein is said to live in a modest house, as billionaire’s mansions go, and he drives his own car.

David Duffield
NET WORTH: $1.2 BILLION
Home: Danville
Title: Former Founder, Chairman, and CEO, PeopleSoft; Co-founder, CEO, and Chief Customer
Advocate, Workday
Age: 66
Status: Married; nine children

David Duffield grew up in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, in a family of modest means. When he was a junior at Cornell University, his father died, and his mother returned to work to help pay for his schooling because she was too proud to allow her son to ask for financial aid. Duffield finished his undergraduate education in electrical engineering and then pursued an MBA at Cornell University. After graduating in 1964, he took a job as a marketing representative and systems engineer at IBM. In 1969, he cofounded the software company Information Associates, and, in 1972, he established a second software company, Integral. He served as chairman of Integral until he co-founded the software company PeopleSoft in 1987 and served as its CEO and chairman. As Duffield’s big break, PeopleSoft grew into the world’s second-largest application software company and went public in 1992. Fortune named PeopleSoft one of the fastest-growing companies in America in 1994, 1995, 1996, and 1997. In 1999, Duffield stepped down as CEO but continued to serve as chairman until much larger rival Oracle’s hostile takeover of PeopleSoft in January 2005. Duffield fought the takeover but eventually sold the company for $11 billion, making himself $600 million richer. Generously, he established a $10 million fund to support employees who lost their jobs and were struggling to find new employment.

The software mogul then decided to spend a chunk of his newfound wealth on a 72,000-squarefoot estate in Alamo. However, neighbors objected to the gigantic home—Bill Gates’ mansion is only 48,000 square feet—and Duffield scaled his plans back to 17,000 square feet. The home will be near his newest software-business venture in Walnut Creek called Workday, which he co-founded in 2005 and where he serves as CEO.

Duffield never tires of giving back. BusinessWeek estimated his lifetime giving as of 2007 at $331 million or 28 percent of his net worth. In 1998, he donated $20 million to his alma mater for a nanotechnology research building named Duffield Hall (in honor of his father) and another $15 million to support the building’s maintenance and operations six years later. After Maddie, his pet schnauzer, died, he and his wife, Cheryl, set up Maddie’s Fund in 1999 in Alameda to give grants to groups that promote the wellbeing of cats, dogs, and other animals.

Marc Benioff
NET WORTH: $1 BILLION
Home: San Francisco
Title: Chairman and CEO, Salesforce.com
Age: 42
Status: Married

Marc Benioff founded an entertainment software company when he was 15. After graduating from Burlingame High School in 1982, he attended the University of Southern California and received a Bachelor of Science in business administration in 1986. His first job out of college was at Oracle Corporation, where he reported to CEO Larry Ellison. In 1999, Benioff left Oracle to found Salesforce.com, with a vision to supply software as a service through the Internet—rather than through traditional CD-ROMs. In 2000, Benioff launched the Salesforce.com Foundation, the company’s non-profit arm that contributes 1 percent of the company’s equity and 1 percent of employees’ hours to philanthropic causes. He has authored Compassionate Capitalism, a best-practices guide for corporate philanthropy, and The Business of Changing the World, which is filled with advice from business leaders on corporate giving. Benioff became CEO in 2001 and, three years later, took Salesforce.com public. He owns a 31 percent share in the company. His old mentor Ellison owns a 4 percent stake. Although Benioff ousted Ellison from the board of directors in 2000 after Oracle created a competing technology, the two are said to be still friendly.

Salesforce.com now provides services on demand to more than 35,000 companies in more than 100 countries and has 1,000 employees. Last fiscal year, Salesforce.com earned $497.1 million in revenues, and those numbers were expected to exceed $800 million last month.

Benioff has taken the company’s rapid rise in stride. He relaxes by working out regularly and doing yoga three times a week. Reportedly, he wears Hawaiian shirts and brings his dog to work.

Arthur Rock
NET WORTH: $1 BILLION
Home: San Francisco
Title: Venture Capitalist
Age: 80
Status: Married

Arthur Rock is the son of a Rochester, New York, candy-store owner. He was drafted into the Army. When World War II ended before he could be sent overseas, Rock used the GI Bill to attend Syracuse University. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in political science and finance in 1948 and an MBA from Harvard University in 1951. After graduating, he joined the Wall Street firm of Hayden Stone & Co. In 1956, he met the “Traitorous Eight,” the group of scientists that left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to be the first to mass produce silicon transistors. Rock convinced businessman Sherman Fairchild to invest $1.5 million in the new company, and, on October 1, 1957, Fairchild Semiconductor was born—as was Rock’s career in venture capital.

Rock moved to San Francisco to be closer to his high-tech dealings and co-founded the venturecapital partnership Davis & Rock in 1961. He founded Arthur Rock & Co. in 1968, and, soon after, he helped raise the money to found another successful startup: Intel. In 1978, he invested in Apple, purchasing 640,000 shares of Apple for approximately $57,000. When the company went public three years later, his shares were worth $14 million. In 1984, he was the first and only venture capitalist ever to be featured on the cover of TIME Magazine.

Today, Rock works from a quiet office in San Francisco, serving on the boards of Echelon Corporation and Nasdaq Stock Market, Inc. He is also president of the BASIC Fund, a nonprofit that provides scholarships for inner-city children to attend private schools. At his alma mater, he recently gave a $25 million gift to launch the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. Previously, he co-founded the school’s first professorship in entrepreneurship. Rock, who lives in San Francisco with his wife, Toni Rembe, follows his longtime interest—the San Francisco Giants. He also supports San Francisco’s opera, ballet, and Museum of Modern Art.