Moore co-founded Intel, the largest U.S. chipmaker. The Santa Clara, California-based company manufactures Pentium, Atom and Itanium brand microprocessors, and had revenue of $72 billion in 2019. The billionaire is the author of Moore's Law, which predicted that computing power would double every year.
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The majority of Moore's wealth is derived from his stake in Intel, the company he co-founded in 1968 with Robert Noyce. Moore owned 172.9 million shares of the chip manufacturer, according to the company's 2006 proxy statement, the last time his name appears in Intel regulatory filings. In the years leading up to that, the billionaire rarely sold stock. He donated about 1 million shares a year between 1999 and 2006. Bloomberg's analysis calculates that Moore has maintained a similar pace of divestiture since then, and credits him with about 159 million shares as of Dec. 31, 2019. Intel is the largest U.S. chipmaker, according to a Bloomberg News report in January 2020.
Moore has collected more than $2 billion in dividends since Intel's initial public offering in 1971 based on an analysis of Bloomberg data.
His main charitable vehicle, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which isn't included in his net worth calculation, had an endowment of $6.4 billion as of Dec. 31, 2018, according to its website.
Gordon Earle Moore was born in San Francisco in 1929. He graduated with degrees in chemistry and physics from the University of California at Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology, and began working for Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, one of the first companies to make transistors for computers. The founder of the company, William Shockley, was a Noble-prize winner who helped invent the transistor.
Discontent at the company led to a falling out between Shockley and the eight young scientists he hired to help run the company. The group, which came to be known as the "traitorous eight," left Shockley in 1957 and started their own company, Fairchild Semiconductor. The business became an incubator for much of the talent that would sprout in Silicon Valley.
Moore left Fairchild in 1968 to found Intel with Robert Noyce, another former employee of Shockley. Intel would grow into one of the largest computer-chip manufacturers in the world.
The billionaire is best known for his observation in 1965 that predicted the number of transistors that could fit on a circuit would double every two years. Moore's Law, as it became known, mostly held true in the four decades after it was published.
Moore conducts much of his philanthropy through the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Among his many gifts was a $600 million donation to the California Institute of Technology, the largest ever to an academic institution. He committed to donate more than half his wealth to philanthropy in 2012.