Author: JD

Jim Breyer   Midas Rank: 1 Net Worth: $1.1 Billion Jim Breyer takes the Midas crown again this year largely due to his firm’s early $12.7 million bet on Harvard drop-out Mark Zuckerberg. With an 11% stake at the IPO, Accel Partners was Facebook’s second largest shareholder after Zuck (Breyer is on Facebook’s board but recently announced he would be stepping down). To wit, he’s an investor in Legendary Pictures, the company behind “The Dark Knight,” as well as Spotify. Peter Thiel Midas Rank: 3 Net Worth: $1.6 Billion Peter Thiel was Facebook’s first institutional investor with a $500,000 check. In 2005 Thiel, with friends, opened his own venture firm Founders Fund and created hedge fund Clarium Capital to bet on Thiel’s thesis of a world being affected by dramatic technological change. Founders Fund maintains a website graced with questions that ask what is to become of the future. “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” one Web page reads. Reid Hoffman Midas Rank: 5 Net Worth: $3.3 Billion Reid Hoffman is so connected that he says he carries around five mobile devices every day “to test new designs and interfaces.” He cofounded LinkedIn and chairs the board of the Mountain View, Calif. talent database. He earned a handsome return on a 2004 $40,000 investment in Facebook and was also an early backer of Zynga. As a partner at Greylock, he has led the firm’s investments in Groupon and Airbnb. Michael Moritz Midas Rank: 13 Net Worth: $2.4 Billion Venture legend Michael Moritz announced last year he was stepping back from day-to-day management duties at Sequoia due to an undisclosed illness. But he still remains active with startups, looking for the next Google, Yahoo or PayPal (all of which he invested in). He added to his string of exits with Kayak (IPO 2012), which was acquired later in the year by Priceline for $1.8 billion. John Doerr Midas Rank: 26 Net Worth: $2.8 Billion John Doerr is still a towering figure in Silicon Valley and the most well-connected venture capitalist. Earned previous Midas crowns (2005, 2008, 2009) with timely investments in Amazon, Netscape, Sun Microsystems and Google, where he remains on the board. But after a sharp turn into green-tech, his firm jumped into Internet startups a bit late in the game. KPCB did get in early at game phenoms Zynga and Ngmoco (sold to DeNa for $400 million), but paid to get into Facebook at a $52 billion valuation, Groupon at a $4.75 billion valuation and Twitter at a $3.7 billion valuation. Doerr also led KPCB’s investment in hot payments company Square. Yuri Milner Midas Rank: 35 Net Worth: $1.1 Billion Yuri Milner broke onto the Billionaires List–and the cover of FORBES–in 2011 thanks to some timely investments in social media companies. Today, despite dropping a few places, he remains on the Midas List for those same investments, among them DST’s $200 million investment in Facebook in 2009 (up five-fold after the company’s 2012 IPO). Other investments include stakes in Twitter and Zynga as well as growing Chinese online retailers 360buy.com and Alibaba. DST has been quiet of late, but is raising capital for its third fund, DST Global III, about which Milner remained mum. Vinod Khosla Midas Rank: 68  Net Worth: $1.4 Billion Vinod Khosla is known for off-the-beaten-path clean-tech investments, including wood-based biofuel, new types of batteries, water purification, greener glass and clean cement. The veteran tech investor also invested in hot payments startup Square in 2009 and joined the board in 2011. He also invested in software defined networking company Contrail, which was acquired by Juniper in 2012.