Daniel Ek is a Swedish billionaire entrepreneur and technologist. He is the co-founder and CEO of music streaming service Spotify. Ek started making websites for clients from his home at age 13. He charged the first client $100 and the second $200. Eventually, he started charging $5,000 per website. To help expand the business, Ek recruited students from his class to work on the websites from the school computer lab by bribing them with video games.
His earnings eventually reached $50,000 per month. By age 18, he was managing a team of 25. Ek later served in a senior role at Nordic auction company Tradera which was acquired by eBay in 2006. Ek also served as the CTO of the browser-based game and fashion community Stardoll. Ek later started another company Advertigo, an online advertising company. Advertigo was sold to TradeDoubler in 2006.
After selling Advertigo, Ek briefly became the CEO of μTorrent. This ended when μTorrent was sold to BitTorrent on December 7, 2006. The sale of Advertigo as well as his previous work made Ek wealthy enough that he decided to retire. However, after a few months, he realized he wanted a new project, leading to his founding Spotify. Ek incorporated Spotify AB with Martin Lorentzon in Stockholm, Sweden in 2006.
In October 2008, the company launched its legal music streaming service Spotify. Initially, Spotify ran on a peer-to-peer distribution model, similar to μTorrent, but switched to a server-client model in 2014. In October 2015, Spotify co-founder Martin Lorentzon announced he would be stepping down as chairman and Ek would be taking over alongside his current role as CEO.
Daniel Ek has an estimated net worth of $2.2 billion.
| Net Worth: | $2.2 Billion |
| Date of birth: | February 21, 1983 |
| Country: | Sweden |
| Source of wealth: | Co-founder and CEO of Spotify |
