Andreas von Bechtolsheim, known as Andy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, is ranked No. 90 on the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list, tied with Dan Gilbert and Lei Jun, with a net worth of $27.9 billion. He wrote one of the first cheques to Google.
Andreas Maria Maximilian Freiherr von Mauchenheim genannt Bechtolsheim was born on September 30, 1955, at Hängeberg am Ammersee in Bavaria, the second of four children. He experimented with electronics as a boy. At 16 he designed an industrial controller for a nearby company based on the Intel 8008, which he programmed in binary because he had no assembler, and the royalties paid for much of his education.
Net Worth and Rank
- Forbes 2026 list: No. 90 (tied with Dan Gilbert and Lei Jun), with $27.9 billion, listed as “Andreas von Bechtolsheim & family”
- Earlier estimate: Wikipedia cites an estimate of $28.9 billion in 2025
Education
He won the physics prize at the youth science contest Jugend forscht in 1974 and studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Munich. With a Fulbright scholarship he went to the United States in 1975 and earned a master’s degree in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1976. He then enrolled as a PhD student at Stanford University, where he left after five years.
Career
- 1982: he co-founded Sun Microsystems, whose name comes from the Stanford University Network workstation he designed at Stanford; he was its chief hardware designer
- September 1998: he and Stanford professor David Cheriton each invested $100,000 in Google; the company was not yet legally incorporated when he gave the cheque to Larry Page and Sergey Brin
- 1995–1996: he founded the Gigabit Ethernet start-up Granite Systems, which Cisco bought in 1996 for $220 million, with Bechtolsheim owning 60%
- 2001–2004: he founded the server company Kealia, which Sun acquired in 2004 in a stock swap
- 2005–2008: he and Cheriton launched Arastra, later renamed Arista Networks, and in October 2008 he left Sun to become Arista’s chairman and chief development officer
SEC Settlement
In 2024 Bechtolsheim settled insider trading allegations with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, agreeing to pay a civil penalty of nearly $1 million and accepting a five-year bar on serving as an officer or director of a public company.
Why It Matters
Bechtolsheim designed the early workstations that helped make Sun a leader in networked computing, and his early investments in Google and Arista are the basis of his fortune.
Net worth figures change daily with share prices. Rankings here follow the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list, with wealth measured on March 1, 2026.
Image: A Sun Microsystems SPARCstation 10 workstation, from the company Andy Bechtolsheim co-founded (file photo; he is not pictured). Photo: Adrian Cockcroft / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
