Ken Xie is a Chinese-born American businessman who has a net worth $3.5 billion. Ken earned his fortune as the co-founder of cybersecurity firm Fortinet. Ken owns 7.8% of Fortinet which is publicly traded under the ticker FTNT. He and co-founder/brother Michael (who owns 7%) became billionaires when the company went public in 2009. As of this writing FTNT has a market cap of $25 billion.
Ken Xie was born in Beijing, China in 1963. He graduated from Tsinghua University with a B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering. He then earned an M.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
In 1993 Ken founded the network security company Systems Integration Solutions (SIS). A few years later he built the world’s first ASIC-based firewall/VPN appliance. It was a revolutionary achievement. He built the app in his garage in Palo Alto, California. In 1996 he co-founded NetScreen Technologies. In 2004 NetScreen was acquired by Juniper Networks for $4 billion.
In 2000 Ken co-founded Fortinet with his brother Michael. They founded the company with the belief that security should be encrypted end-to-end, nearly 20 years before end-to-end encryption became standard with many communications platforms and apps. Their first product was a firewall called FortiGate. Today Fortinet is a market-leader in firewall, anti-virus and other cybersecurity software. In 2004 the brothers raised $90 million in private funding. They took the company public in 2009, raising $156 million in the process. As we mentioned previously, today FTNT is worth over $25 billion. Ken owns around 7.8% of the company’s shares, his brother Michael owns 7%. Fortinet generated $2.16 billion in revenue in 2019 and $110 million in operating income.
Personal Life: Ken and his wife have three children, two sons and a daughter. Their oldest child, daughter Jamie Xie, is a fashion influencer and reality television star who became widely-known in January 2021 as a cast member on the Netflix reality series “Bling Empire”.
| Net Worth: | $3.5 Billion |
| Place of Birth: | Beijing, China |