Linus Benedict Torvalds is a Finnish-American software engineer, businessman, computer scientist, author, and blogger who has an estimated net worth of $150 million.
He is the creator and main developer of the Linux kernel used by the Linux distribution that runs a vast portion of the internet, including Google, Facebook, and Amazon, and also powers billions of mobile phones via Android.
He has also written several best-selling books and won numerous prizes and accolades for his contributions to the IT sector.
Linus Torvalds journey to creating Linux
Linus Torvalds was born on December 28, 1969, in Helsinki, Finland. In a family of authors and poets, Linus was raised by two journalists and spoke Swedish at home. His interest in computers began in 1981 when he was eleven.
By the 90s, he was capable of writing his own video games. He started writing programs in BASIC and assembly languages on his maternal grandfather’s personal computer, a Commodore VIC20. In 1988, he enrolled at the University of Helsinki and later graduated with a computer science major where he earned a master’s degree in computer science from the NODES research group in 1996.
He enlisted in the Finnish Navy in 1998 and attained the rank of the second lieutenant as a result of Finland’s requirement for compulsory military service. He enrolled in a UNIX course at the university in the fall of 1990, however, the university took a long time to purchase the UNIX due to its high cost.
As a result, he started developing Linus’s MINIX, also known as “Linux”, and that’s how, in 1991, the first Linux prototype was publicly released.
Linus Torvalds’ hard work pays off
Impressed by his programming skills, the creator of Apple wanted Torvalds to work on OS X, but he persisted with his Linux project instead. In September 1991, he announced Linux and encouraged his colleagues to use the source code for wider distribution.
The adaptation of Linux grew rapidly, and by 1997, Linux was running on more than 3 million devices. In 1999, Red Hat and VA Linux went public, and all his efforts paid off.
Torvalds reportedly got $20 million worth of shares. Before it went public, Red Hat paid Linus Torvalds $1 million in stock.
In 2012, Red Hat became the first $1 billion open-source company. Torvalds receives an annual salary of $10 million from the Linux Foundation.
For his contribution to the world of technology, He has been also presented with many awards and prizes, including the Millennium Technology Prize and IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award, and many more. He also has a lot of praise and media recognition all over the world. Torvalds also has written many books.
Summing Up
Linus Benedict Torvalds is a Finnish-American software engineer, entrepreneur, computer scientist, author, and blogger who has an estimated net worth of $150 million. He earned a master’s degree in computer science in 1996. Impressed by his programming skills, many big companies wanted to work with him including the creator of Apple, who wanted Torvalds to work on OS X, but he persisted with his Linux project instead.
In September 1991, he announced Linux and encouraged his colleagues to use the source code for wider distribution. Torvalds receives an annual salary of $10 million from the Linux Foundation. For his contributions to the world of technology, he has also been presented with many awards and prizes, including the Millennium Technology Prize, the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award, and many more.
