Google This Billionaire
A Silicon Valley legend makes his dumbest trade ever
“We have witnessed the most educated, successful, and monied professionals in the country put their companies - not to mention their own liberty - at risk by engaging in flagrant and foolhardy illegal conduct.”
– Preet Bharara, former U.S. Attorney, in 2012.
Sun Microsystems co-founder Andreas Bechtolsheim wrote Sergy Brin a $100,000 check in 1998, becoming the first investor in Google.
He barely looked at the deal – giving it about as much thought as buying a latte on the way to the office – but it famously netted him about $1 billion when Google went public in 2004.
These days, Bechtolsheim, 68, is making headlines for an equally impulsive bet. This one didn’t turn out as well.
He allegedly bagged $415,726 in illegal insider stock trades. Without admitting wrongdoing, he agreed last month to pay a fine of $923,740 and to not serve as an officer or director of a public company for five years.
This is pocket change for an entrepreneur worth more than $15 billion. After Sun Microsystems sold to Oracle in 2008 for $7.4 billion, the German-born engineer went on to co-found Arista Networks, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based cloud networking services provider worth about $78 billion.
The real damage is to Bechtolsheim’s otherwise unblemished reputation – not to mention the example he’s set for his 4,000 employees after allegedly violating his company’s code of conduct.
Oh, and maybe the idea of bootstrapping an internet search engine isn’t aging well. Anyone who wants to know all about Bechtolsheim’s blunder can simply Google him.
There’s more to the story, but the rest is for paid subscribers.Please help make the business world a more honest, less reckless, less authoritarian place by:
Liking and commenting on posts, which boosts the Substack algorithm.
Sharing this newsletter with friends and associates.
Subscribing. Free or paid, I’m so glad you’re here.
And don’t miss these blunders.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Business Blunders to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.