What Is Patrick Collison's Net Worth?
Patrick Collison is an Irish American businessman and entrepreneur who has a net worth of $5 billion. Patrick Collison is best known for co-founding and being the CEO of the company Stripe with his brother John Collison. The Collison brothers founded Shuppa in Limerick, Ireland, and the company later merged with Auctomatic. The brothers moved to Silicon Valley, and Auctomatic was sold to Live Current Media for $5 million in March 2008 when Patrick was 19 and John was 17.
John and Patrick founded the online payment company Stripe in 2010. In October 2015, the company was valued at $5 billion and was used throughout the world. The two brothers studied coding as kids, and in 2005, 16-year-old Patrick won the 41st Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition. In 2020, Collison and Tyler Cowen co-founded Fast Grants, which is dedicated to giving funding to scientists working on COVID-19 related projects.
Early Life
Patrick Collison was born on September 9, 1988, in Dromineer, County Tipperary, Ireland. He is the son of electronic engineer Denis Collison and microbiologist Lily Collison, and he has two younger brothers, John and Tommy. When Patrick was 8 years old, he took a computer course at the University of Limerick, and at the age of 10, he started learning computer programming. Collison attended Gaelscoil Aonach Urmhumhan, Nenagh, then he enrolled at Castletroy College. He later attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but he dropped out in 2009.
Career
Patrick entered the 2004 Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, and his artificial intelligence project (which he nicknamed "Isaac" in honor of Isaac Newton) earned him the individual runner-up spot in the competition. He re-entered in 2005, winning with a project that involved the creation of the programming language Croma. Collison's prize was a €3,000 cheque and a Waterford Crystal trophy, and Irish President Mary McAleese presented the prize to him. In 2007, Patrick and his brother John launched the software company Shuppa in Limerick, but Enterprise Ireland declined to allocate funding to the business. After Y Combinator in Silicon Valley expressed interest in Shuppa, the brothers moved to California, and they merged with Oxford graduates Kulveer and Harjeet Taggar to become Auctomatic. In March 2008, Patrick and John sold Auctomatic to a Canadian company called Live Current Media, making them millionaires before the age of 20. In May 2008, Patrick became Live Current Media's director of engineering at its base in Vancouver.
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In 2010, Patrick and John co-founded Stripe, and the following year the company received a $2 million investment from PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and the venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and SV Angel. In November 2016, "Forbes" reported, "Brothers Patrick Collison and John Collison are now worth at least $1.1 billion each after San Francisco-based Stripe raised $150 million from CapitalG, an investment division of Google parent company Alphabet, and General Catalyst Partners. With the latest investment, the startup's valuation almost doubled." This investment made the Collison brothers the youngest self-made billionaires in the world. In 2017, Patrick and John were each worth at least $3.2 billion after Stripe raised another $150 million from CapitalG. In 2018, Stripe donated $1 million to California YIMBY, whose mission is "to make California an affordable place to live, work, and raise a family." In September 2019, "Bloomberg" reported that the Collison brothers had become the "richest self-made Irish billionaires" after Stripe raised another $250 million at a $35 billion valuation. Patrick and John hold a controlling interest in the company, and they'll be able to retain control if Stripe ever goes public.
In 2018, Collison and Michael Nielsen wrote an article for "The Atlantic" titled "Science is Getting Less Bang for its Buck," and in 2019, the magazine published an opinion piece by Patrick and Tyler Cowen entitled "We Need a New Science of Progress." In June 2020, Collison tweeted criticism of the Chinese government's treatment of Uighurs, writing, "As a US business (and tech) community, I think we should be significantly clearer about our horror at, and opposition to, the atrocities being committed by the Chinese government against its own people."
Personal Life
Patrick married Silvana Konermann, a Swiss-American biochemist, in April 2022. The couple met at the EU Young Scientist competition in 2004, and she beat him out for the top science prize. The couple co-founded the Arc Institute, a "nonprofit research organization founded on the belief that many important scientific programs can be enabled by new organizational models." Collison is an avid reader, and he is interested in subjects such as art, history, philosophy, and technology.
Awards
In 2005, Collison won the Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, and he was named BT Young Scientist of the Year.
Real Estate
In 2022, Patrick and John paid €400,000 for the Victorian Millbrook House in Co Laois, Ireland. Built in 1885, the derelict mansion measures 9,000 square feet, and any potential buyer had to "invest in completely restoring the building." The estate sits next to a home that John purchased for €11.5 million in 2021.
