Sean Parker is an American internet entrepreneur, business person and philanthropist. He was born on 3rd December 1979 in Herndon, Virginia, just outside Washington DC.
Parker is most famously known for co-founding the digital audio file-sharing service Napster with Shawn Fanning and playing a considerable part in the design and early investment of the social networking website Facebook. He also co-founded Plaxo, Causes, Airtime.com and Brigade, an online platform for civic engagement.
Sean Parker’s Net Worth
Sean Parker has an estimated net worth of $3 billion.
He has achieved a lot for a man of his age. Parker is famous for many things, including his philanthropic side, through his contributions to many different organisations and cancer research institutes. Parker has earned most of his wealth through the companies he has confounded.
Early Life
Sean attended Oakton High School; Chantilly High School. During his time at High school, Parker went out of his way to convince the school to count all the hours he spent in the library coding and record it as a foreign language class. He later convinced his parents to let him drop out of college and venture into his own business.
His father taught him how to do programming on the Atari 800 when Sean was in second grade. Building upon this knowledge, Sean soon gained skills in programming and hacking other websites. Sean once hacked into a Fortune 500 company, when his dad found out, he confiscated the keyboard, but before Sean was able to log out, this then enabled the FBI to track him through his ISP address. As Parker was still only a teenager, he was let off with just a community service sentence.
Early Career
Sean began to be successful at the very young age of nineteen when he confounded Napster in 1999.
Today Sean and his cofounder Shawn Fanning are credited with transforming the way music is downloaded. However, after several lawsuits by the music industry, Napster was shut down. Sean then created Plaxo, which was also shut down two years later.
When he was twenty-four years old, he had become the founding father of Facebook, which is now the world\’s biggest social network.
Parker is currently a Board member of both Spotify and Yamma. Sean is married to Alexandra Lenas and has two children, Winter Victoria Parker and Zephyr Emerson Parker.
Sean Parker’s Philanthropy and Charitable Causes
In July 2015, Parker announced that he would create a foundation, The Parker Foundation, with a $600 million contribution. Parker is a cancer research supporter, and in 2012, he pledged $5 million towards cancer and the cancer research institute.
Sean has donated a lot of money to many charitable causes and organisations such as;
- Stand up to cancer
- Malaria no more
- Clinton foundation
- Code for America
- Cancer research institute
- ONE
- Charity water campaign
Sean serves as a board member in several charity organisations like;
- Obama foundation
- Global citizen
- Parker foundation
- Museum of contemporary art, Los Angeles
- Parker Institute for cancer immunotherapy
You may also enjoy our Global Rich List feature.
Image Credit: JD Lasica
