CrowdStrike CEO's Net Worth Has Dropped By About $600 Million Since The Global Outage

Last Friday, a major tech outage rocked the world, affecting millions of people and leaving them stranded in airports or, even worse, unable to complete their scheduled operations. The outage could cost over $1 billion, but the question of who will foot the bill remains unanswered.

This crisis has also severely damaged George Kurtz’s fortune. Kurtz is the CEO of CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company behind the faulty software update that triggered the outage.

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Before the incident, Kurtz’s net worth was more than $3.2 billion, according to Forbes. However, because of the outage, CrowdStrike’s stock price plummeted by more than 21% by Wednesday the 24th, dropping Kurtz’s fortune by about $600 million since Thursday evening, the day before the debacle. At the time of writing, his net worth is around $2.6 billion.

Despite this setback, which happened because most of his wealth is tied up in CrowdStrike stock, George Kurtz remains quite wealthy. As Forbes reports, besides his current CrowdStrike stock, worth about $2.6 billion, he has sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shares over the past few years. Kurtz, who lives in Paradise Valley, Arizona, with his wife and two kids, is also an accomplished race car driver, having won a prestigious Le Mans race in 2019.

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Kurtz was born in Parsippany, New Jersey, and wasn’t raised in wealth. He pursued his education in accounting at Seton Hall University, a choice that would lay the foundation for his future in cybersecurity. After graduating, he spent nearly a decade working at Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) and Ernst & Young, where he found his niche in cybersecurity-related roles.

In 1999, he launched a security consulting firm, Foundstone, with his former colleagues from Ernst & Young. In 2004, McAfee bought the company for $90 million.

After the acquisition, Kurtz joined McAfee as a senior vice president. His talent quickly propelled him to chief technology officer by 2009. In 2010, he played a key role during a huge incident when McAfee released an update that mistakenly deleted a crucial Windows XP file, causing systems to enter a reboot loop and requiring manual repairs, just like last week with CrowdStrike.

With CrowdStrike, the problem started when they sent out a software update for their Falcon Sensor product early Friday morning. This update had a faulty file that ended up crippling millions of Microsoft computers around the world. As a result, devices running Windows were rendered useless, and CrowdStrike had to work quickly to resolve the issue.

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