Even though it is often said that money does not lead to happiness, it obviously must be a good thing to have more millions than you can shake a stick at. And as was recently reported on Kotaku, video game personality Gabe Newell is still amongst the world’s richest men, as the man behind Valve Corporation now has a fortune of more than $4 billion US dollars according to Forbes.
This puts him ahead of the president elect of the US, celebrities like Oprah Wingfield and Steven Spielberg, and also US entrepreneur Mark Cuban. But no matter how rich Newell is, he’s still lagging behind others like Star Wars creator George Lucas, visionary Ellon Musk (who recently revealed his top video game choices in an interview) and former Intel CEO Gordon Moore.
Newell is also behind other video game entrepreneurs like William Ding, president of Chinese company Netease who owns a fortune of more than $13 billion US dollars. And like many times in the past, former Microsoft head Bill Gates tops the list with a net worth of $81 billion US dollars.
But still, the fact that Newell’s fortune keeps growing (he had a net worth of $1.5 billion in an earlier Forbes list) is evidence that Valve’s business, and especially its digital distribution platform Steam, is still going strong, as Newell owns half the shares of Valve Corporation according to Forbes.
Also, the fact that one can end up as rich as Gabe Newell by working in the video game industry shows how big it has become over the years, and that video games are a mainstream pastime these days that is likely to keep growing in popularity in the future.