Imagine you have 20 billion USD in your hand, what would you do? Buy an island, a private jet or live in a castle? Owning a fortune of nearly 20 billion USD from Google, but still cutting his own hair, driving an old car to work and thinking that enjoying material things is "meaningless", a university professor has chosen to live in a unique way, different from conventional thinking, but making many people admire. He is David Cheriton, billionaire, the richest university professor in human history.
The Nod That Changed History: The $100,000 Check and the 10 Fateful Minutes That Made Google
David Ross Cheriton – a professor of computer science at Stanford University – is not a prominent name in the investment world like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, but he was one of the first people to bet on the future of Google.
In 1998, Cheriton and colleague Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 check to two graduate students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, to help them start their then-unknown search engine.
It was a fateful meeting. In 1998, two students - Brin and Page - came to Cheriton's office to convince him to fund their startup project - an Internet search engine with the strange name "Googol", representing the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Coincidentally, Andy Bechtolsheim - co-founder of Sun Microsystems and also Cheriton's investment partner - was also present in the office that day.
After just 10 minutes of listening to the presentation, both Cheriton and Bechtolsheim realized the potential of the young men’s idea. Bechtolsheim even did some mental math: “If they get a million hits a day, at 5 cents a click, they’ll make $50,000. At least enough to survive!”
Without hesitation, the two immediately wrote a check for $100,000 and handed it over on the spot – kick-starting the journey to form Google.
“I saw that they had something very special, and their ideas were really smart,” he recalled in an interview with Business Insider.
Google has become a technology giant with a market capitalization of more than 1,700 billion USD. Larry Page and Sergey Brin respectively hold assets of more than 110 billion USD, ranking among the richest people in the world . David Cheriton, the teacher who dared to put his trust in them when the whole world was skeptical, also owns billions of USD from his initial shares. As of 2025, he owns assets of about 19.8 billion USD and is ranked by Forbes as the 163rd richest person in the world, becoming one of the richest university professors in human history.
That $100,000 check that year, if calculated based on the current value of Alphabet stock, would have returned tens of thousands of times, making it one of the most successful investments of all time.
Missed the guitar appointment, ended up with a billion dollar technology empire
David Ross Cheriton was born in 1951 in Vancouver, Canada, the third of six children. Both his parents were engineers, but rather than imposing a career path on him, they gave him the freedom to explore his own path. “He always went his own way,” his father once said. “We never forced him.”
From an early age, Cheriton showed an unusually independent personality. Not interested in group games, he chose to build a wooden hut in the backyard to stay away from the neighborhood kids. With his outstanding intelligence, he soon became frustrated with the slow pace of school, to the point that he wanted to drop out in the middle of the 11th grade because he thought the program was “too slow”.
Although born into a family of engineers, Cheriton had dreams of becoming an artist. He loved music, participated in musicals in high school and in the local community, and applied to the University of Alberta’s classical guitar department. However, his artistic application was rejected.
Undaunted, Cheriton decided to change direction. At the age of 22, he left his hometown to study mathematics at the University of British Columbia. There, amid the dry numbers, he stumbled upon a completely new field at the time: computer science, opening the way for him to become one of the richest university professors in the world.
Cheriton is not just a scientist. He co-founded many famous technology companies such as: Granite Systems (sold to Cisco in 1996), Kealia (acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2004), Arista Networks (IPO in 2014, now a networking company worth tens of billions of dollars).
He is also the man behind Apstra, BrainofT and Caspar. However, Cheriton always refuses to be called an entrepreneur. "I just want to solve big technology problems, and sometimes that leads to a company, not the other way around," he shared.
Philosophy of 20 billion dollar billionaire: "I don't understand why people spend money on meaningless things"
Despite his billionaire status, Cheriton doesn’t own a mansion or a supercar. He still lives in the same house in Palo Alto, drives a Honda Accord to work, cuts his own hair, wears faded jeans, and often wears flip-flops to school.
“I don’t understand why people spend money on things that don’t make sense,” he said. Cheriton is so famous that he has been ranked alongside Warren Buffett as one of the “most frugal billionaires in the world.”
Despite his modest lifestyle, Cheriton is generous with his education. “Education is the most sustainable investment in the future,” he said. He donated $25 million to the University of Waterloo, where he earned his PhD, which led to the renaming of the computer science department as the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science; $7.5 million to the University of British Columbia; and $12 million to Stanford University to support faculty and scholarships.
Nearly $20 billion couldn’t keep him from the podium. David Cheriton still chose to stick with his greatest passion in life: teaching. Every day, the professor still works 10-12 hours in the same simple office at Stanford – where more than two decades ago, he signed the fateful check that gave birth to the Google empire.
David Cheriton exemplifies a kind of unpretentious success. He never dropped out of college despite being a billionaire. He invests without getting caught up in the glitz and glamour of Silicon Valley. He is wealthy, yet remains a dedicated teacher, a dogged researcher, and a responsible citizen of the intellectual world.
Source: https://khoahocdoisong.vn/giao-su-giau-nhat-the-gioi-ty-phu-di-nhat-silicon-post1553080.html
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