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YouTube may have started as a site to share home videos, but now it\u2019s one of the most powerful platforms in the world: From entertainment to advertising, it\u2019s spawned billion-dollar careers and birthed a global creator economy, turning individuals like MrBeast into household names.<\/p>\n
But when its founders sold the popular video platform to Google for $1.65 billion in fall 2006, not even they could have predicted just how massive it would become\u2014or how much more they could have made.<\/p>\n
At the time of sale, each cofounder\u2014Chad Hurley, Steven Chen, and Jawed Karim\u2014received millions of dollars worth of stock: Hurley, YouTube\u2019s CEO at the time, received shares worth some $345 million by the time the Securities and Exchange Commission documents were released a few months later, according to The New York Times<\/em>. Chen, its CTO, received some $326 million worth and Jawed Karim, who left the venture early to go back to school, got $64 million worth.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is great,\u201d Hurley said in a video posted when the sale was announced. \u201cTwo kings have gotten together. The king of search, the king of video have gotten together. We\u2019re going to have it our way.\u201d<\/p>\n YouTube\u2019s sale price to Google is just a fraction of its estimated $550 billion value today, according to a MoffettNathanson research note reported by Variety<\/em> in 2025. That\u2019s a 333x increase (unadjusted for inflation) from nearly two decades prior. While it\u2019s difficult to pinpoint exactly, had Hurley and Chen received the same percentage of the sale today as they did in 2006, each could have walked away with more than $100 billion each.<\/p>\n In 2024, YouTube brought in $54.2 billion in revenue, and in 2025, it topped $60 billion, Variety reported<\/em>\u2014making the platform bigger than the entirety of Netflix. YouTube\u2019s record-setting successes highlight how Google was able to overcome issues that the video platform\u2019s founders struggled with early on\u2014including operating losses and copyright lawsuits\u2014and its paid off dividends.<\/p>\n But YouTube\u2019s masterminds are far from the only business leaders that have seen their company soar after exchanging ownership.<\/p>\n During the first two weeks of Apple\u2019s existence, the company\u2019s lesser-known third cofounder Ronald Wayne checked out and sold his 10% stake\u2014netting him $800 at the time, plus $1,500 to forfeit any claim to the company for good. However, his 10% share could now be worth between $75 billion and $300 billion, thanks to the company\u2019s now $4.3 trillion market cap.<\/p>\n These stories also exist outside of tech. For example, the founder of iconic pasta brand Chef Boyardee sold the company in 1946 for $6 million. Over the decades, the company exponentially grew its operations, expanding to multiple lines of canned and microwavable goods. And in 2025, the brand, including its over 500-person strong factory, was sold to private equity for $600 million\u2014a 10,000% increase in value.<\/p>\n And in the case of Chef Boyardee and YouTube, it\u2019s unclear whether such massive growth would have been achieved without the backing of larger corporate owners. For the founders, it means weighing up selling early and leaving future billions on the table\u2014or holding on and risking the company never reaching its full potential.<\/p>\n A version of this story originally published on\u00a0<\/em>Fortune.com<\/em>\u00a0on July 25, 2025.<\/em><\/p>\n #YouTubes #founders #split #650M #sold #Google #worth #billion<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" YouTube may have started as a site to share home videos, but now it\u2019s one of the most powerful platforms in the world: From entertainment to advertising, it\u2019s spawned billion-dollar… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10437,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[12241,1056,307,512,283,2378,427,2379,744,4334,27,1022,1113,11336,91,2025,5213,433,4548,81,78,2676,12240],"class_list":["post-10436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-650m","tag-billion","tag-billionaire","tag-billionaires","tag-business","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-evergreen-refresh","tag-founders","tag-google","tag-millionaires","tag-money","tag-money-management","tag-sold","tag-split","tag-stock","tag-tech-industry","tag-tech-start-ups","tag-tech-workers","tag-video","tag-wealth","tag-worth","tag-youtube","tag-youtubes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10436\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Hindsight is 20\/20 when it comes to selling<\/h2>\n
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