The tech CEO who quietly built a bigger fortune than Tim Cook
- Former Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman has achieved vast wealth as a nonfounding tech exec.
- Bloomberg pegs his net worth at $3.7 billion — higher than both Tim Cook's and Satya Nadella's.
The wildly successful and outspoken tech executive who just stepped down as CEO of Snowflake may not be as well known as Apple's Tim Cook or Microsoft's Satya Nadella — but he's wealthier than both.
Frank Slootman, who retired as the cloud-based data-warehousing company's top exec last week, is worth an estimated $3.7 billion — a sum that puts him ahead of Cook (who is worth about $2 billion) and Nadella (who is not yet a billionaire), Bloomberg reported.
A Snowflake spokesperson declined to comment.
Bloomberg reported that Slootman achieved his wealth as the head of three companies: Snowflake, ServiceNow, and Data Domain. He led Snowflake to a public offering that marked one of the biggest tech initial public offerings of 2020, raising $3.4 billion at a $33.3 billion valuation.
Slootman, who was born in the Netherlands and immigrated to the US in his 20s, has been described as a militant CEO who's part of Silicon Valley's conservative wing, alongside Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Palmer Luckey, Business Insider's Katie Warren reported in 2021. He has eschewed tenants such as diversity and political correctness in favor of a profit-driven ethos.
In 2021, Slootman apologized after saying in an interview that he didn't want diversity to override merit when hiring and promoting. He said in a subsequent statement that diversity and merit weren't mutually exclusive, added that Snowflake was committed to more diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and apologized to anyone hurt by his comments.
Slootman will remain as Snowflake's chair of the board but has been succeeded as CEO by Sridhar Ramaswamy, a former Google ad exec who joined Snowflake in May and has been leading its artificial-intelligence strategy.