The first jobs of 14 of the biggest tech executives
- Some of the biggest figures in the tech world had very relatable first jobs.
- Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos got his start flipping burgers at McDonald's, while Apple CEO Tim Cook delivered newspapers.
- Read on to learn about the first jobs of 14 of the biggest names in tech today.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, may be the world's richest man, but he may just have the most relatable first job.
He flipped burgers for McDonald's.
For other tech executives, like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, electronics played a large part in their lives from early on, making their role in some of the most prominent companies a little, well, obvious.
Either way, first jobs tend to always make an impression, good or bad - one that sticks with you as you age, an experience to take along wherever you end up. For example, Bill Gates remembers working 18 hours a day at his first gig as a programmer when he was 16. His coworkers even tried to convince him to "skip undergraduate and go straight to graduate school." As we know now, Gates ended up dropping out just two years into college to start Microsoft and go on to make billions.
For some tech execs, the billions came quickly, but for others, notoriety took some time.
Here are the first jobs held by some of today's biggest names in tech.
Like millions of other Americans, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos got his start flipping burgers at McDonald's.
It may come as a surprise to know today's richest man in the world, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, earned his first dollar flipping burgers at McDonald's as a teenager in the '80s. During his first week, Bezos told author Cody Teets, "A five-gallon, wall-mounted ketchup dispenser [...] dumped a prodigious quantity of ketchup into every hard-to-reach kitchen crevice. Since I was the new guy, they handed me the cleaning solution."
The salary for a fry cook at McDonald's back in 1980 was $2.69. His first job in the professional world after graduating from Princeton with a computer science degree was at an international trade startup called Fitel. Bezos currently has a net worth of $131 billion.
Sources: Business Insider, CNBC, Forbes, Business Insider
As a teenager, Mark Zuckerberg designed a music recommendation app and turned down $1 million for it.
Bezos may have been the man on the grill for his first gig, but Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, was the man on campus: Before even coming to Harvard, Zuckerberg was offered $1 million for "music recommendation" software called Synapse he invented before he turned 18, somewhat like that of Pandora or Spotify. He didn't take the cash, instead making it free for people to use.
Today, Zuckerberg has a net worth of $76 billion, thanks mainly to Facebook (also free to use), and other various investments.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella started out as a software engineer, and when he was interviewing for the job, got a question he wasn't prepared for.
Before becoming CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella was a software engineer, which, according to CNBC, is one of the most common first jobs of current CEOs. He first interviewed for a job at Microsoft in 1992. He remembered the interview as tedious, with one question completely catching him off guard — because it had nothing to do with the line of code he was writing on the whiteboard.
The interviewer asked him what he would do if he saw a baby fall.
"I thought about it for a while. This was a computer science question I had not prepped for. So, I said I'd run to the closest phone booth and call 911," he told Chicago Booth Magazine. He later said the interviewer was looking to see if Nadella had empathy. Today, Nadella makes over $25 million a year, 154 times more than the median pay of his employees.
Sources: Chicago Booth Magazine, CNBC
Elon Musk earned $500 writing code for a video game when he was 12 years old.
Like Zuckerberg, Tesla Founder Elon Musk had an early fascination with technology. His obsession with writing code earned him $500 at the age of 12, where he contributed lines for a space-themed video game in 1983.
Musk's involvement with space didn't stop then either: He is also the founder of Space X, an aerospace manufacturing company. His net worth is nearly $20 billion — 40 million times more than his first ever paycheck.
Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey got his start as a software engineer.
Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Twitter, hacked his way into his first gig. According to Venture Beat, Dorsey "really wanted to go into the dispatch industry" — so he found a hole in one of the largest dispatch company's website, told the chairman about it, and landed his first job in New York as a software engineer in 1991.
Dorsey later went on to found Twitter and Square, bringing his current net worth to $5.8 billion, though he doesn't take a traditional paycheck.
Sources: Venture Beat, CNBC, Forbes
Evan Spiegel was a marketing intern for Red Bull before eventually cofounding Snapchat.
CEO and co-founder of Snapchat Evan Spiegel scored a marketing internship with Red Bull while living in Santa Monica and going to an ultra-exclusive high school. Working for Red Bull meant promoting the energy drink at parties and clubs. According to Biography, this unpaid internship helped Spiegel gain necessary business skills he'd take with him to Stanford, and ultimately, Snapchat.
Spiegel notoriously turned down Zuckerberg's $3 million offer to buy Snapchat. Today, his net worth is $3.5 billion, making him one of the youngest billionaires in the world at 29. Spiegel is also married to model and entrepreneur Miranda Kerr, and the couple welcomed their first child — a baby boy named Hart — in 2018.
Sources: Business Insider, Biography, Forbes
In his teenage years, Uber founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick sold Cutco knives as a door-to-door salesman.
Uber's trouble-making founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick was once a door-to-door salesman, selling knives for Cutco as a teenager in the '90s. By 18, he had already started his first company: an SAT-prep course called New Way Academy. Kalanick's serial entrepreneurial spirit was evident even as a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he dropped out to start a search engine. Ten years after leaving UCLA, he launched Uber.
Kalanick may have left Uber in 2017 after a slew of scandals, but his net worth still hangs around $5.3 billion, from various investments.
Sources: Business Insider, Forbes
Steve Jobs' first job was developing video games for Atari.
Steve Jobs had a passion for technology from an early age. His father would show him how to take apart electronics in the garage of their Mountain View home. So naturally, after dropping out of college, his first job was as a video game developer at Atari. In 1976, at the age of 21, he and Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computers — the company that would ultimately define his life.
Jobs is largely credited with introducing a new era at Apple, with the introduction of Macintosh, iPod, and iPhone. He died from a unique form of pancreatic cancer in Oct. 2011. Today, Apple's market cap is close to $675 billion and is one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Source: Business Insider, Biography
Apple CEO Tim Cook delivered newspapers in his Alabama hometown.
Apple's current CEO Tim Cook delivered newspapers in his Alabama hometown for his first buck. He also worked at a paper mill in Alabama and an aluminum plant in Virginia before getting into the tech space, when he worked for IBM 12 years before coming to Apple in 1998.
Cook is one of the more notoriously private tech CEOs. He lives in a modest home in Palo Alto and takes in over $3 million a year — considerably more than he made slinging newspapers from a bike as a kid.
Source: Business Insider
After college, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg worked on health projects in India with World Bank.
After graduating from Harvard, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was hired by one of her college advisers to work at World Bank in 1991. A colleague of Sandberg's remembered her as And before her time Facebook, Sandberg spent a stint at Google, and even the White House as the chief of staff of the Treasury Department during the Clinton Administration.
Sandberg said Harvard is what inspired her "lifelong passion for gender equality." Today, Sandberg, behind Zuckerberg, is one of the most prominent figures behind Facebook — a company recently rocked with its own set of security and data scandals — and has a net worth of $1.7 billion.
Sources: Business Insider, Harvard Alumni
Bill Gates' first job was as a computer programmer for a Michigan automotive company.
There seems to be a trend among tech execs: if you like technology, even from an early age, you tend to stick with it. This goes for Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, too. His first gig at 16 was as a computer programmer for TRW, an automotive company based in Michigan, when he was in high school.
In The Atlantic, Gates remembered his first job fondly: "I was sort of infamous as a boy wonder of a certain type of programming[...] I was willing to work 18 hours a day and do hard stuff."
Today, Gates has since taken himself out of the programming side of tech, but is instead has dedicated the rest of his life to philanthropy with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — a family foundation created to help people live "healthy, productive lives." The foundation is the largest private foundation in the world, and Gates has a net worth of $100 billion.
Source: Business Insider, The Atlantic
Google cofounder Sergey Brin was an intern at a computer technology company.
Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google, interned at Wolfram Research in the summer of 1993, and according to an early version of his resume, he "developed a code analysis and extraction" tool for the company. Brin met Larry Page when they both attended Stanford. Soon after meeting, they both dropped out to develop what is known as Google today in 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki's garage.
Today, Brin is the president of Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. His net worth is $51.6 billion, but only takes $1 a year for a salary.
Sources: Business Insider, Forbes
Larry Page got his start at a company called Advanced Management Systems.
Larry Page came from a family of technology-obsessed parents. His dad was a professor of computer science at Michigan State University. But Page himself didn't get his first job until after he graduated with an undergraduate degree. According to Huff Post, Page worked at Advanced Management Systems in Washington, DC, shortly after finishing college.
Page met Brin when he was attending Stanford for graduate school. They both wanted to catalog "every link on the internet," which is now the world's most-used search engine, Google. Page was Google's first CEO, now he oversees Alphabet's healthcare division Calico, smart home appliance division Nest. His net worth is $52.7 billion.
And Google CEO Sundar Pichai started out as an engineer for Applied Materials.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, is one tech exec who stuck with the passion and skills he learned in college. Shortly after he received a MS from Stanford and obtained an MBA from Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, he went on to work at Applied Materials as an engineer. It wouldn't be until 2004 when he'd join Google as a vice president of product.
Pichai's work ethic was noticed by Twitter and Microsoft, both attempted to recruit him. He was then named CEO in 2015, after Larry Page stepped down. In 2016, he was the highest paid CEO, receiving nearly 275,000 shares of Google, totalling $650 million.
Sources: Business Insider, The Guardian