David Cheriton Net Worth 2025

What is David Cheriton net worth?

Net Worth	$9.4 billion
Occupation	computer scientist, mathematician, billionaire businessman, philanthropist, and venture capitalist
Date of Birth	March 29, 1951
Nationality	Canadian
Children	4

David Cheriton net worth and Biography

David Cheriton net worth 2025: David Ross Cheriton is a Canadian computer scientist, mathematician, billionaire businessman, philanthropist, and venture capitalist who has a net worth of $9.4 billion. He is one of the richest people in Canada.

Education

Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Cheriton attended public schools in the Highlands neighborhood of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

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He briefly attended the University of Alberta where he had applied for both mathematics and music. He was rejected by the music program, and then went on to study mathematics and received his Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree from the University of British Columbia in 1973.

Cheriton received his Master of Science (M.S.) and Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degrees in computer science from the University of Waterloo in 1974 and 1978, respectively. He spent three years as an assistant professor at his Alma mater, the University of British Columbia, before moving to Stanford.

Research

Cheriton founded and led the Distributed Systems Group at Stanford University, which developed a microkernel operating system named V.

He has published profusely in the areas of distributed computing and computer networking. He won the prestigious SIGCOMM award in 2003, in recognition for his lifetime contribution to the field of telecommunications networks.

Cheriton was the mentor and advisor of students such as: Sergey Brin and Larry Page (founders of Google), Kenneth Duda (founder of Arista Networks), Hugh Holbrook (VP Software Engineering at Arista Networks), Sandeep Singhal (was GM at Microsoft, now at Google), and Kieran Harty (CTO and founder of Tintri).

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In 2016, Cheriton worked with Stanford students on transactional memory, making memory systems that are resilient to failures.

David Cheriton Net Worth

As of 2025, David Cheriton net worth is $9.4 billion according to Forbes. He is a computer science professor at Stanford University, where he founded and leads the Distributed Systems Group.

He has made contributions to education, with a $25 million donation to support graduate studies and research in the School of Computer Science subsequently renamed David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, a $7.5 million donation to the University of British Columbia, and a $12 million endowment in 2016 to Stanford University to support Computer Science faculty, graduate fellowships, and undergraduate scholarships.

He cofounded Granite Systems with Andy Bechtolsheim. The company developed gigabit Ethernet products. It was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1996.

Cheriton was also an early investor in compute virtualization leader VMware, which was later acquired for $625M by EMC in 2004. VMware had a successful public offering in 2007.

n 2001 Cheriton and Bechtolsheim founded another start-up company, Palo Alto based Kealia. Kealia designed a high-capacity streaming video server; Galaxy, a range of servers based on AMD’s Opteron microprocessor; and Thumper, an enterprise-grade network attached storage system. Kealia was bought by Sun Microsystems in 2004, with Thumper becoming the Sun Fire X4500.

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In 2004, Cheriton cofounded (again with Bechtolsheim) and was chief scientist of Arista Networks, where he worked on the foundations of the Extensible Operating System (EOS). Arista had a successful public offering in 2014.

Cheriton is an investor in and advisory board member for frontline data warehouse company Aster Data Systems, which was acquired by Teradata in 2011 for $263M.

According to the public records, Cheriton made a total of over $5,000 donations to the presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2019.

David Cheriton Net Worth

As of 2025, David Cheriton net worth is $9.4 billion according to Forbes. He is a computer science professor at Stanford University, where he founded and leads the Distributed Systems Group.