In a male-dominated tech industry, not so surprisingly, a few women have managed to break the glass ceiling and make their way to the top. Some of these women started from ordinary roles and have climbed up the ladder and scaled new heights to become powerful businesswomen and CEOs running billion-dollar corporations.
Here, Nairametrics has compiled a list of the richest women in tech, based on their net worths.
Gwynne Shotwell President and COO of SpaceX, $460 million
Gwynne Shotwell is the president and COO of SpaceX. She is worth $460 million and manages the operations of the commercial space exploration company founded by Elon Musk. She joined the company in 2002 as the 11th employee of SpaceX. Shotwell was promoted to company president following her role in the successful negotiation of the first Commercial Resupply Services contract with NASA in December 2008.
She was responsible for leading the effort on building the Falcon Vehicle Manifest to over 50 launches, generating $5 billion in revenue. She has served on the California Space Authority Board of Directors. In May 2020, the company sent astronauts to the International Space Station for the first time as part of a contract with NASA.
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Alyssa Henry, executive vice president at Square, $555 million
Alyssa Henry is an executive vice president at Square. She heads the “Seller” business unit, the company’s biggest branch. Alyssa previously worked for Amazon where she ran all of AWS’s file storage businesses, including its core S3 product.
In 2020, the Seller unit processed more than two billion card payments and generated $1.5 billion in gross profits for Square. She has worked at Microsoft and also serves on the boards of Intel and software firm Unity Technologies.
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Marissa Mayer, co-founder of Sunshine Contact, $800 million
Marissa Mayer is the co-founder of Sunshine Contact that focuses on artificial intelligence and consumer media.
She formerly served as the president and chief executive officer of Yahoo! a position she held from July 2012 until 2017 when she resigned.
Mayer was also Google’s first female engineer and 20th employee taking up different roles including director of consumer web products. After Yahoo, Mayer founded tech incubator Lumi Labs, which was renamed Sunshine in November 2020. She also serves on the board of Walmart, which she joined in 2012.
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Michelle Zatlyn, COO and president of Cloudflare, $980 million
Michelle Zatlyn is COO and president of Cloudflare, the web infrastructure and security company she co-founded in 2009. Cloudflare protects the websites of more than 4 million customers from cybersecurity threats such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, in which web servers are flooded with malicious traffic that makes them inaccessible
The company went public in 2019 and reached annual revenues of more than $400 million in 2020 up from $287 million in 2019. Michelle owns a 5% stake in Cloudflare.
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Anne Wojcicki co-founder and CEO of 23andMe, $1.1 billion
Anne Wojcicki is the co-founder and CEO of 23andMe, a pioneering direct-to-consumer DNA testing firm. Anne founded the company in 2006 with Linda Avey and Paul Cusenza with the goal of solving the pain point that a majority of people do not have access to their genetic information, which could provide information on cures for diseases or treatments.
23andMe received backing from Google, GlaxoSmithKline, Sequoia Capital, Johnson & Johnson, and others. The company has raised over $873 million in funding. In June 2021, 23andMe went public in a SPAC sponsored by U.K. billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. The company’s personal genome test kit was named “Invention of the Year” by Time magazine in 2008.
Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder of Bumble dating app, $1.2 billion
Whitney Wolfe Herd is the CEO and co-founder of the dating app, Bumble. She became a self-made billionaire after taking her company public on NASDAQ. She founded the dating app in 2014 after leaving Tinder with help from an early investor, the Russian billionaire Andrey Andreev, who also has a stake in Badoo. She owns a 21% stake in Bumble. She also heads Badoo. The two apps operate in 150 countries with 2.8 million paying users as of March 2021.
Jenny Just, co-founder of PEAK6 Investment, $1.5 billion
Jenny Just and her co-founder started PEAK6 Investments in 1997 with $1.5 million in seed capital as a proprietary options trading firm. Today, it’s a multibillion-dollar financial service and technology firm with an average annual return of 57%.
Her star investment, Apex Fintech Solutions, handles the back-end trading and technology for fintechs such as SoFi, Ally, eToro, and WeBull. Apex Fintech Solutions is slated to go public via a SPAC merger that values the company at $4.7 billion.
Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook, $1.9 billion
Sheryl Sandberg, worth $1.8 billion, is an American business executive and philanthropist. She has served as the chief operating officer at Facebook since 2008, helping to dramatically increase the social media firm’s revenue. She is one of the most powerful women in technology. Prior to Facebook, Sheryl was vice president of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google.
She has worked as the chief of staff for the United States Treasury Department under President Clinton, a management consultant with McKinsey & Company, and an economist with the World Bank. Sandberg serves on the boards of Facebook, ONE, and SurveyMonkey.
Thai Lee, President, and CEO of SHI International, $4.1 billion
Thai Lee is the CEO of SHI International, an IT provider that offers program assistance, reporting and tracking, configuration, software licensing, and information technology asset management services. SHI international which has 20,000-plus customers serves customers worldwide. including Boeing and AT&T.
When she co-founded SHI in 1989, it was a $1 million software reseller. Today, it is the US’ largest minority/woman-owned business enterprise with 2020 revenues surpassing $11 billion for the first time.
Meg Whitman, former eBay chief executive, $6.1 billion
Meg Whitman, worth $6.1 billion, is a veteran in Silicon Valley. She is most recognized for growing eBay from $5.7 million to $8 billion in sales as CEO from 1998 to 2008. She left eBay as a billionaire.
She has served as Chief Executive Officer for various billion-dollar Tech companies. She was CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 2011 to 2015, where she oversaw its split into HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. She also serves as a board member of Procter & Gamble and General Motors.
