Dustin Aaron Moskovitz
Age: 31
Home: San Francisco
Hometown: Ocala, Florida
Net worth: $7.7 billion,
according to Forbes
In March 2004, a story in
Stanford University’s student newspaper reported an alarming trend.
“Classes are being skipped.
Work is being ignored,” said the Stanford Daily. “Students are spending hours
in front of their computers in utter fascination,”
The cause? An addictive
new website called TheFacebook.com, created just a month earlier by Harvard
University sophomore Mark Zuckerberg. The site had quickly become an
obsession for many college students, the newspaper reported.
Way down in the 26th
paragraph, the story mentioned Zuckerberg’s roommate, Harvard
sophomore Dustin Moskovitz, was also working on the
website. Moskovitz, the story noted, “was vague
about what the duo hopes to achieve from the sites.”
 |
| Dustin Moskovitz |
As we
know now, things turned out pretty well for TheFacebook.com – it became
Facebook.com in 2005 – and for Zuckerberg. Moskovitz, while not as well known
as his former roommate, has done alright too – he is worth $7.7 billion today,
according to Forbes.
Moskovitz
grew up in Ocala, Florida, attending the public Vanguard High School and
fishing during his spare time. At Harvard, he only met Zuckerberg after they
were randomly paired as roommates. His involvement in Facebook was sheer
serendipity.
"I didn't
really pitch him,” Moskovitz told Mashable.com years later. “It was more like
he was working on this thing and I was sitting next to him, and he would say,
'Hey, can you help me with this?'"
Moskovitz
became Facebook’s third employee, its first chief technology officer and later
the vice president of engineering. But compared to Zuckerberg, he’s generally
kept a low profile. While 388 Los Angeles Times stories have mentioned
Zuckerberg, only 17 have mentioned Moskovitz.
Moskovitz
left Facebook in 2008, but kept enough stock in the company to become the
world’s youngest billionaire in 2010, according to Forbes. He is 8 days younger
than Zuckerberg.
One of
Moskovitz’s achievements at Facebook was devising software to help the
company’s employees collaborate in an efficient manner. Upon leaving the
company, Moskovitz teamed up with another Facebook alum, Justin Rosenstein, to
create a new company to bring collaborative software to other businesses. They
originally called the company Smiley Abstractions, but by the time their
product was released in 2011, it was called Asana. Asana, promoted with
the line “teamwork without email,” is Moskowitz’s primary focus today.
In 2011,
Moskovitz and his then-girlfriend, former Wall Street Journal reporter Cari
Tuna, launched a charitable foundation called Good Ventures. Over three years,
the foundation has awarded 52 grants, totaling $30.3 million, to a variety of
causes focusing on such things as global health, education reform, criminal
justice and immigrant labor. Moskovitz and Tuna, who married in 2013, continue
to lead Good Ventures. They have also signed the Giving Pledge, an effort led
by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to encourage the wealthy to give away half
their fortunes to charity.
“As a result of Facebook’s success, I’ve earned
financial capital beyond my wildest expectations,” Moskovitz said in a
letter to Giving Pledge. “Today, I
view that reward not as personal wealth, but as a tool with which I hope to
bring even more benefit to the world.”
Today,
Moskovitz and Tuna lives in a 1,700-square-foot three-bedroom, two-bath
condominium in San Francisco’s Mission District that he bought in 2010 for
$870,000. The condo is just six blocks from Asana headquarters. Moskovitz owns
46.5 million shares of Facebook – 2.1% of the company – which carry a total
value of $3.4 billion.
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