Rich Barton Net Worth & Biography

As Chief Executive Officer of Zillow Group, Rich Barton, an American businessman and internet entrepreneur, leads the company’s work to evolve how people buy, sell, finance and rent homes.

Mr. Barton co-founded Zillow in 2005 and diligently served the company as its chief executive officer until 2010 when he assumed the role of the company’s executive chairman. He returned as the chief executive officer in early 2019 and has continued to play his part in the growth and development of the company. A Stanford University alumnus, Rich Barton first founded a company called Expedia in 1994. He started this company within Microsoft and eventually spun it out as a public company five years later. He was Expedia’s president, chief executive officer, and board director from 1999 until 2003. In addition, he also co-founded Glassdoor and served as the organization’s non-executive chairman from 2007 to 2018. To mention, as well, this successful entrepreneur serves as a venture partner at Benchmark for thirteen years starting from 2005 until 2018. He has served on the boards of many public companies in addition to the ones that has been mentioned in this paragraph and continues to be a board director for Zillow Group, Netflix, Qurate, and Artsy.

Early Life: Childhood, Family, Education

He was born Richard Barton on June 2, 1967, in the United States of America.

Rich was raised in New Canaan, Connecticut. He is the son of a mechanical engineer and teacher. He earned his B.Sc. from Stanford University in 1989 before going on to kick-start the next phase of his life.

Barton started working for Alliance Consulting Group and later advanced to go work for Microsoft as product manager for MS-DOS 5.0 1991.

His forefathers, John Barton and his son Horace were inductees of the South Dakota Tennis Hall of Fame.

He attended Stanford University, from which he earned a Bachelor of Science in General Engineering: Industrial Economics.

Professional Life: Entrepreneurial Career

Rich Barton was a staff of Microsoft when he started his own company, Expedia, in 1994. In 1994, Microsoft was scheduling to build a travel guidebook on a CD-ROM. Rich, who was acquainted with text-based internet services at that time, had come across an online service that was hosted on Prodigy designed for travel agents that worked from home. He pitched the idea of an internet travel booking service to Steve Ballmer, Nathan Myhrvold, and Bill Gates. Ballmer, Myhrvold, and Gates gave him permission to proceed with the project, which debuted on the internet as Expedia in 1996.

Barton served as chief executive through Expedia’s IPO in 1999, and maintained the position until 2003 when the company was sold for $3.6 billion.

After a break in Italy that lasted a year so as to stay away from the business community, Rich Barton returned to the United States in 2004 and settled in Seattle where he began working toward the launch of Zillow with another Expedia and Microsoft alumnus named Lloyd Frink. The two did not reveal much about their new venture prior to its launch.

Today, Rich Barton is the chief executive officer of Zillow Group. He leads the company’s mission to transform how people buy, sell, finance, and rent homes. The company was founded in 2005 and has now grown to become known as one of the best in its sector. In February 2020, Rich Barton joined the billionaire according to Forbes Magazine, after posting strong earnings at Zillow.

Achievements: Awards & Honors

For his innovative inclusions to tech, Barton, over the years, has not only won the respect and admiration of millions of people who benefit from his services, but has also received several awards and honorable mentions from reputed organizations.

In 2003, the MIT Technology Review named him one of its top 10 innovators under 30. Former United States President Barack Obama named him to his Ambassadors for Continental Entrepreneurship in 2012.

He currently serves on the board of directors for a list of companies that include Netflix and Artsy.

Rich Barton Net Worth: Salary, Income Sources, Assets

Although this brilliant internet entrepreneur has never talked about his earnings in public, there are strong indications that he makes a lot of money from his trade annually as the chief executive officer of the successful American real estate company Zillow Group.

CEO Rich Barton’s net worth is estimated at $2 billion today. He is also the founder of Expedia and Glassdoor, and the success and sales of these business ventures were some of the factors that handed him his first massive fortune. Furthermore, Barton was the man that founded the online travel photo-sharing website Trover which has since been acquired by Expedia. Moreover, it has been revealed that his 15.8 million shares at Zillow makes him the company’s largest individual stockholders as of this writing.