Kevin Systrom Net Worth 2024: From Founding Instagram to Over $2 Billion

Kevin Systrom may not be a household name but it should be because he created one of the most popular apps in the world, Instagram. The app made him a billionaire after he sold the company to Facebook.

Kevin Systrom’s net worth is estimated at around $2 billion in 2024.

In this article, we will discover the Instagram owner net worth, a brilliant computer programmer and entrepreneur who built a world-changing app and made $2 billion.

Kevin Systrom’s Net Worth Breakdown

Since Systrom’s wealth is held privately and not through a publicly traded company, calculating his exact net worth is impossible.

However, we were able to collect plenty of public information surrounding his various sources of income, investments, assets, and business ventures to build a holistic estimate of his riches.

With an estimated net worth of $2 billion, Systrom is among the most successful tech industry entrepreneurs worldwide.

Here is a breakdown of his net worth.

5 Fun Facts About Kevin Systrom

1. Systrom created pranks with AOL Instant Messenger in high school.
2. He interned at Odeo, which later became Twitter.
3. Instagram’s first photo was of a foot and a dog.
4. Systrom met his Instagram co-founder at a party in Silicon Valley.
5. He has invested in numerous startups, including Monzo and Scale AI.

Latest News & Controversies

Most recently, Systrom co-founded the news aggregation app Artifact with fellow Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger.

Artifact used artificial intelligence to curate news tailored to users’ interests. Despite gaining a loyal following, Systrom and Krieger announced that they would wind down the app in January 2024 due to the small market opportunity. However, in a surprise move, Artifact was acquired by Yahoo in March 2024. While the app itself will no longer exist, Yahoo plans to integrate its technology into Yahoo News.

Systrom and Krieger will remain involved in an advisory capacity during this transition.

Beyond Artifact, Systrom has made various investments in startups and maintains an active role in the tech ecosystem. His entrepreneurial journey, from building Instagram to exploring AI-powered solutions with Artifact, showcases his ongoing influence in the tech industry.

Early Life of a Social Media Godfather

Kevin Systrom was born on December 30, 1983, in Holliston, Massachusetts. His father, Douglas Systrom, was the Vice President of Human Resources at TJX Companies, while his mother, Diane, was a marketing executive at Zipcar.

Systrom was introduced to computer programming while attending the Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts. While still a teenager, Systrom used to create programs to prank his friends by appearing to hack their AOL Instant Messenger Accounts.

He attended Stanford University and graduated in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in engineering and management science. At Stanford, he was a member of the Sigma Nu fraternity and built web programs in his free time.

Among others, he built a photo site for his fraternity brothers so that they could share pictures internally.

Systrom chose to go to Italy for the winter term of his junior year where a professor introduced Systrom to Holga, a special medium format film camera. It was a cheap camera with a wide appeal because of its retro-style photos.

According to Systrom, photos taken with Holga cameras inspired Instagram.

“I think the best products are usually built based on personal experience from your past and you never know exactly what parts of your past will come together to form that puzzle and be a product that you want to build for the world, but inevitably something from your past triggers a memory and you say, ‘You know what, people might just like that,” said Systrom.

Kevin Systrom Net Worth: Starting Strong at Google

While Systrom interned at Odeo, which later gave rise to Twitter, he began his career at Google, where he worked as an Associate Product Marketing Manager between July 2006 and March 2008.

For the next 11 months, Systrom worked as a Corporate Development Associate at Google.

During his over two-and-a-half-year stint at Google, he worked on multiple major products including Gmail, Google Calendar, Docs, and Spreadsheets. Systrom resigned from the company as he was reportedly not considered for the Associate Product Manager program.

After leaving Google, Systrom joined Nextstop.com as a Product Manager in January 2009.

The company was a location recommendation startup founded by former Google employees. While working at Nextstop, Systrom learned coding during weekends and nights.

Inspired by the popularity of location-based apps, Systrom developed Burbn, a platform that allowed users to post check-ins along with photos. The name was inspired by Systrom’s love of whiskies and bourbons.

Burbn would turn out to be the first building block for one of the most successful apps of all time, Instagram.

In March 2010, while attending a party for Silicon Valley-based startup Hunch, Systrom met two venture capitalists from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz and showed them a prototype of his app.

With the VCs now on his side, Systrom landed a $500,000 seed funding round and quickly started expanding the company. One of his first moves was to onboard Mike Krieger, a fellow Stanford graduate with experience working for social media platform Meebo.

Instagram was eventually born at a beach in Mexico’s Baja California beach, where Systrom was on vacation with his girlfriend Nicole Schuetz.

She was dissatisfied with the photos taken with her iPhone 4 and the couple decided that photo filters would help solve the problem. That very day, Systrom created the X-Pro II filter and posted an image of Schuetz’s foot and a dog on an early version of Instagram. According to Systrom, “That first picture became everything and more than we wanted it to be.”

Systrom, who was scouting for ideas to improve his app, sensed an opportunity and said,

“Back then, there was no way of showing what was going on in your life, as it happened. Facebook was still primarily desktop, Flickr was about uploading from your SLR camera, and Twitter barely had any photo support. That left this opportunity wide open to share what was happening in your life visually.”

Instagram was officially launched on the Apple App Store on October 6, 2010, and was an instant hit reaching 25,000 users on the very first day. The app hit 1 million users within three months which was a remarkable achievement for the photo-sharing app.

As its user base grew, Instagram raised $7 million in a Series A funding round in February 2011, which valued the company at around $25 million.

Instagram Owner Net Worth: Selling Instagram to Become a Billionaire

As Instagram’s popularity grew, Twitter (Now X) and Facebook (now Meta Platforms) entered a bidding war to acquire the startup.

Notably, it was Twitter, whose then CEO Jack Dorsey was among the early investors in Instagram, which made the first offer for Instagram. However, Systrom eventually struck a deal with Mark Zuckerberg that valued the company at a mammoth $1 billion.

Kevin Systrom reportedly earned $400 million from the sale and if he had kept his new Facebook shares for a few more years he would be much richer for it.

While large companies paying a fat sum to acquire smaller companies that fit their business model is not an exception, the valuation that Instagram received was eye-popping even by those standards.

For context, when Facebook acquired Instagram, the company wasn’t making any revenue, though it boasted 30 million users.

The transaction happened before Facebook’s mega IPO in 2012 and involved both cash and Facebook stock. Thanks to the rally in Facebook stock after the IPO, the worth of Facebook shares that Systrom and Mike Krieger received also swelled.

Leading Instagram Into the Future

Even after Facebook acquired the company, Systrom continued to lead Instagram.

Under his leadership, Instagram developed all kinds of key features. Among these was IGTV, a standalone app for videos that could be integrated into Instagram.

The new feature enabled vastly better video support and helped Instagram compete with YouTube. However, IGTV – which was launched just months before Systrom left Facebook – was shuttered in 2022 as Meta Platforms prioritized Reels.

Systrom resigned from Instagram in September 2018. Speaking at the Wired 25th anniversary summit in San Francisco in October, he gave a cryptic reply on quitting the company and said, “No one ever leaves a job because everything’s awesome.”

He, however, added, “In this case, there are no hard feelings at all. I’m excited to do something new. I think Instagram’s in a really, really good place.”

Systrom was totally correct. Instagram remains the world’s largest photo-sharing company and is among the most popular social media platforms worldwide. Instagram is now a key driver of Meta Platforms‘ growth along with WhatsApp.

While Meta does not provide the breakdown of Instagram’s revenues, the platform generated around $60 billion in revenue in 2023 which is around 44% of the total revenues that Meta reported that year.

Back-of-the-envelope calculations would show that Instagram today could be separately valued at around $550 billion, considering Meta’s market cap of $1.25 trillion.

For calculation’s sake, Systrom’s paper net worth would have been around $220 billion if he still held a 40% stake in Instagram. However, these are simplistic assumptions, and Instagram grew so large because of Facebook’s funding and stewardship for the most part.

Systrom reportedly does not regret selling Instagram to Facebook and told the Wall Street Journal, “I think for where we were, we made an awesome decision.”

Kevin Systrom Net Worth: Life After Instagram

Even after leaving Instagram, Systrom continued his entrepreneurial journey.

In 2020, he founded rt.live, a site that tracked the spread of coronavirus. In 2023, he co-founded a mobile news aggregation app dubbed Artifact with Mike Krieger. The company used artificial intelligence to create a personalized news reading experience for readers.

The platform aimed to bring forward the best content to users which might not be quite popular online. It sought to help relatively unknown writers whose work might otherwise not rank high on Google, given the search engine’s opaque algorithm.

Though it seemed promising for a while, the app was shut down in January 2024. “We have built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way,” said Systrom in a post on Medium.

Kevin Systrom Net Worth: Other Investments & Philanthropy

According to Crunchbase, Kevin Systrom has made at least 13 investments including Cazoo, Scale AI, Captions, Loom, Pitch, and Cedar. In 2017, he also invested in U.K. neo-bank Monzo through his Kevin Systrom Revocable Trust.

He also joined Walmart’s board in September 2014 and, as part of the compensation, was awarded some shares of the the retail giant. Apart from these, there is not much in the public domain on Systrom’s investments in stocks and bonds. He hasn’t expressed his views about digital assets and cryptocurrencies either.

As for real estate, we know that he owns a personal estate in Lake Tahoe, but he hasn’t revealed any other properties publicly yet.

Kevin Systrom is an influential philanthropist as well as a successful entrepreneur. He and his wife founded the Kevin and Nicole Systrom Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit charity that had $21.6 million in assets in 2022.

Systrom’s best-known charitable act was a massive giveaway where he partnered with Ray Dalio and others to distribute 20,000 gift cards worth $50 each to various charities.

This year I've worked with @RayDalio and others to give away 20,000 $50 charity gift cards. Grab one and direct the gift to a charity of your choice. This holiday, instead of giving more stuff, let's focus on giving to those most in need. Get your 🎁 here: https://t.co/rbF7ltdOm5

— Kevin Systrom (@kevin) December 15, 2023

Kevin Systrom’s Personal Life

In October 2015. Kevin Systron married Nicole Systrom in Napa, California. Nicole is the founder and CEO of clean-energy investment firm Sutro Energy Group, which partners with others to invest in climate and clean technology solutions.

The couple have a daughter named Freya Systrom, who was born in 2018.

All said, despite having co-founded Instagram, Kevin Systrom is not as active on social media as one would expect, and his last Twitter post was in December 2023.

What Can We Learn from Kevin Systrom’s Life

Kevin Systrom’s life is full of important teachable moments and lessons.

First of all, Systrom showed that pursuing your passion in a unique way can be both extremely rewarding mentally and ludicrously profitable with enough hard work and luck.

He found a way to use his passion for photography to build one of the most successful apps of all time.

In the same vein, Systrom’s thoughts on the “work/life balance” are fascinating. In an interview with Forbes, he said,

“I do, however, think ‘work/life balance’ in a startup is a myth. Inherent in the term is an assumption that work and life are diametrically opposed. I actually think some of my best moments in life have been while I was with people from Instagram – whether it’s super late nights getting a release out or being able to travel to places I’d never visited and meeting some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met.”

He added that ideally, a startup should be woven into the fabric of one’s life, and it should be more about the company’s mission than worrying about the monthly paycheck or stock awards.

Systrom also advises us to be focused and says, “It’s about doing less, but doing that smaller bit better than anyone else in the world.” In the same interview, he had the following advice for aspiring entrepreneurs looking to build a successful startup:

• Stay focused
• Fix real problems
• Hire great people

With the startup world witnessing intense competition both for funding as well as ideas, Systrom’s advice could help budding entrepreneurs build a successful company and a happy life alongside it.