Jan Koum Net Worth

Net Worth:	$12 billion
Date of Birth:	February 24, 1976 (48 years old)
Gender:	Male
Profession:	Businessperson
Nationality:	United State Of America

What is Jan Koum’s net worth? How does Jan Koum make his money? Below is the current net worth of Jan Koum and how Jan Koum makes his money.

What is Jan Koum’s Net Worth?

Jan Koum is a Ukrainian-born computer technologist and business magnate who has a net worth of $12 billion. He co-founded and served as the Chief exec of WhatsApp, a well-known messenger app. WhatsApp was leased to Facebook in February 2014 by Koum and his co-founder Brian Acton for a total of $19 billion in cash and equity.

Childhood

In Kyiv, Ukraine, while a portion of the Soviet Union, Koum was born on February 24th, 1976. He was born a Jew and raised in the city of Fastiv, which is close to Kyiv. With his mother and grandmother, Jan moved to Mountain View, California in 1992 when he was 16 years old.

A small, two-bedroom apartment was made available to the family thanks to a supportive social program. Koum’s father had planned to join the family later, but he ended up staying in Ukraine his entire life. Food coupons from a nearby welfare agency were all Jan and his mother had to survive.

Koum was enthralled with computing by the time he was eighteen. He enrolled at San Jose State University before beginning employment as a security tester at Ernst & Young, where he first met Brian Acton. Jan also became a member of a hacking collective called w00w00, where he got to know the Napster creators.

Career

Koum joined Yahoo! as an operational engineer in late 1997. He soon stopped attending school to focus on his career. Brian Acton, who also worked for Yahoo!, and Jan grew close. The two spent annually exploring South America after serving the corporation for nine years.

They both received rejections after submitting joint applications to work at Facebook. After purchasing an iPhone in 2009, Koum became aware that the App Store was about to usher in a brand-new app market. Jan visited his friend Alex Fishman because he had an app idea, and the two of them talked for hours about Koum’s concept.

Since “what’s up” and “What’s Up” share similarities, he gave the program the moniker WhatsApp. Jan incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California a month later. Whatsapp was first disliked. But after Apple enabled push alerts for apps in 2006, they started to be utilized more regularly.

Soon after Koum started “pinging” WhatsApp users when they were sent a message, his acquaintances in the neighborhood started switching from SMS to the program. As Jan’s app grew in popularity, he persuaded his friend Acton to invest in the company. Acton received co-founder status from Koum after raising $250,000 in initial money.

Jan authorized Facebook to purchase WhatsApp for $19 billion in February 2014. Notably, Jan went to the same welfare agency that he and his mother had to use when he was a child with the notarized paperwork. Jan signed the purchasing paperwork and put her final act of tenacity on the welfare office door.

Koum sold shares of Facebook for more than $2.4 billion during the first half of 2016. Jan left WhatsApp and the board of directors of Facebook in 2018. It was eventually discovered that Koum was still legally an employee of Facebook and receiving $450 million in stock, despite initial speculation that he had lost a $1 billion stock when he left the company.

Relationship

Koum is Jewish. He previously tweeted, “Next person to call me an entrepreneur is getting smacked in the face by my security,” indicating how much he detests the label. Since he has stated that he simply wants to create beneficial items, he believes that he is not an entrepreneur because entrepreneurs are motivated by the motivation to make money.

The state court in San Jose, California, issued a restraining order against Koum in February 1996. Koum allegedly intimidated a former lover verbally and physically, according to the ex-account girlfriends of the events. Koum stated in October 2014 on the restraining order, “I am sorry for the way I acted and ashamed that my behavior caused her to seek legal action.”

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