The Twitter IPO - Gazillionaires, Billionaires and Plain Old Millionaires

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In our earlier article today focused on the overall issues surrounding the Twitter IPO - based on last night’s release of Twitter's formal S1 SEC document detailing the company's financials - we declined to provide a list of the folks and companies that stand to make a great deal of money from it. But we've gotten requests to provide such a list, so we've gone back to the S1 and pulled out the relevant details.

As it turns out there won't be any gazillionaires in the bunch (by which we mean anyone standing to deliver a Zuckerberg-like 25 billion dollars net worth). There will be one likely billionaire, and a collection of others that will make money in the half billion dollar range. It turns out that there are also two Twitter founders who will make no money what so ever from the IPO.


Image via Shutterstock

Below is our list of individuals as pulled from the S1 and re-ordered by total shares owned. For our estimated value calculation we've used $29 per share as the likely IPO price. Whatever it ends up being, this will do for a solid approximation of value.

  • Evan Williams: 56,909,847 shares (12 percent), estimated value - $1.65 billion
  • Peter Fenton: 31,568,740 shares (6.7 percent), estimated value - $915 million
  • Jack Dorsey: 23,411,350 shares (4.9 percent), estimated value - $679 million
  • Richard Costolo: 7,589,608 shares (1.6 percent), estimated value - $220 million

Below is our list of invested companies as pulled from the S1. Note that each company is listed as a "5 percent Stockholder" in the S1. We'll round off these shares at 24 million each, so each company (and collectivity the "entities affiliated with" various companies) will end up with an estimated value of $696 million.

  • Benchmark Capital Partners
  • Entities affiliated with Rizvi Traverse
  • Entities affiliated with Spark Capital
  • Entities affiliated with Union Square Ventures
  • Entities affiliated with DST Global

There are other individuals who are likely to be worth in the paltry range of $50 million, but we'll leave it to interested parties to find them in the S1 (they're listed on page 144). There are also folks with restricted stock units that have a current value of zero but should be worth plenty down the road. They are listed in the S1 as well.

And what of Twitter founders who will make zero dollars? These would be Biz Stone and Noah Glass, founders without a single share of Twitter in their portfolio - "oh what fools these mortals be" - what else is there to say?

It is, finally, worth noting that founder Jack Dorsey is the Executive Chairman of Twitter but in fact spends most of his days as the CEO and founder of Square. Two significant successes in parallel - now that's a winner!




Edited by Alisen Downey
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TechZone360 Senior Editor

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