Tony Xu

Xu owns a stake of about 5% of the company he co-founded as a Stanford undergraduate with a handful of classmates in 2013, according to the company’s recent public filings. At a valuation of more than $30 billion for DoorDash after the IPO, Xu’s stake would be worth roughly $1.6 billion. Billionaire status would cap a meteoric rise to tech success and stardom for Xu, who is the son of Chinese immigrants who moved to the U.S. from Nanjing in 1989, when Xu was just 5 years old. Xu’s family settled in Champaign, a small city in central Illinois, after moving to a new country with “only a few hundred dollars in our pockets,” according to Xu. There, Xu’s parents took jobs working in a local restaurant despite the fact that Xu’s mother had been a doctor in China (the U.S. did not recognize her medical license) and his father was also a graduate student studying aeronautical engineering and applied math at the University of Illinois. In order to better fit in with his new American classmates, he even changed his name from Xu Xun, instead adopting the first name of the main character of his favorite American television show: Tony of “Who’s the Boss,” played by the actor Tony Danza. Xu’s parents always “made education a priority,” he’s said, so they also saved enough money for him to attain a degree in industrial engineering from the University of California, Berkeley and an MBA from Stanford University. He and three classmates at the business school — co-founders Stanley Tang, Andy Fang and Evan Moore — started the business that would eventually become DoorDash. Xu made a $300,000 base salary in 2019, according to SEC filings, and he’s now on the verge of billionaire status, thanks to the company’s impending IPO.