Formerly Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, Nathan Myhrvold has an estimated net worth of $650 million. He is the co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, a patent portfolio holding company. Usually with co-inventors, he holds 17 US patents assigned to Microsoft and has applied for more than 500 patents. They also hold 115 US patents assigned mostly to The Invention Science Fund I, LLC.

Born Nathan Paul Myhrvold on August 3, 1959 in Seattle, Washington, he attended Mirman School. At the age of 14, he already began college and studied mathematics, geophysics, and space physics for his BS and MS at University of California, Los Angeles. He was awarded a Hertz Foundation Fellowship for graduate study and went to Princeton University where he earned a master’s degree in mathematical economics and completed a PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics. He also attended Santa Monica College. He held a postdoctoral fellowship for one year at the University of Cambridge while working under Stephen Hawking along with a number of other students. The two studied cosmology, quantum field theory in curved space time and quantum theories of gravitation.

Nathan Myhrvold left Cambridge and co-founded a computer startup in Oakland, California. Dynamical Systems Research Inc. sought to produce Mondrian, a clone of IBM’s TopView multitasking environment for DOS. In 1986, it was purchased by Microsoft for $1.5 million. For 13 years, he has worked for Microsoft and founded the Microsoft Research in 1991.