As one of the most talked-about figures, Jimmy Wales has built a significant fortune. Our team analyzed the latest data to provide a clear picture of their income.
What is Jimmy Wales' Net Worth and Salary?
Throughout his childhood, Wales loved reading and developed an interest in encyclopedias. He quickly realized that while encyclopedias were full of information, they also left out a great deal of relevant details. Education was highly valued in the Wales household, and after eighth grade, Wales attended Randolph School, a preparatory school that was expensive for the family. He was able to graduate at the age of 16 and then attended Auburn University, where he achieved a bachelor's degree in finance in 1986. He then began a Ph.D. program at the University of Alabama but transferred to Indiana University. While he did teach at both universities during his postgraduate studies, he never completed his dissertation.
Bomis was ultimately not successful, but it did provide Wales with the time to pursue another idea – an online encyclopedia. In 2000, along withLarry Sanger, Wales launched Nupedia, a peer-reviewed, open-content encyclopedia online. Wales intended for many experts to write articles on a volunteer basis that would then be reviewed by hundreds of other experts to ensure articles of a quality comparable to that of professional print encyclopedias.
Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, on August 7, 1966, to parents Jimmy Sr. and Doris Ann. His father was a grocery store manager, and his mother ran a private school called the House of Learning. Wales, along with his three siblings, received their early education at this school.
"It rarely crosses my mind. Reporters ask me all the time and expect me to say: 'I'm heartbroken. Where's my billion dollars?' There are care dealers in Ohio who have more money than I'll ever have, and their jobs are much, much less interesting than mine."
Wales began his career in 1994 at Chicago Options Associates, an options trading firm in Chicago. Wales had developed an interest in computer code while in school, as well as computer games and computer networks in general. This interest inspired him to leave his finance job and found Bomis, a web portal and "guy-oriented search engine," with two partners in 1996.
Jimmy Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur who has a net worth of $1.5 million. Jimmy Wales is an American-British Internet entrepreneur who co-founded the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the for-profit web-hosting company Wikia. He was named one of "The 100 Most Influential People in the World" by Time.
In a 2019 Tweet, Jimmy confirmed that in the entire history of the Wikimedia Foundation, he had made $0 in salary.
With a slight twist of fate/strategy, Jimmy, by any count, could have been a multi-billionaire. If Wikipedia was not a non-profit and instead accepted just basic banner ads, it could be worth, by some estimates, more than $10 billion. Instead, Jimmy wasn't even a millionaire when he gave an interview with the New York Times in 2013. In that interview, on the subject of lost billions, Jimmy explained:
In summary, the total wealth of Jimmy Wales reflects strategic moves.
Disclaimer: All net worth figures are estimates based on public data.
