What Is Anthony Levandowski’s Net Worth?
Anthony Levandowski is a French-American engineer and the co-founder and CEO of Pronto who has a net worth of $20 million. He’s one of the most influential engineers behind self-driving vehicles.
He was born on March 15, 1980, in Brussels, Belgium.
His father is an American businessman, while his mother is a French diplomat.
In the mid-1990s, Anthony relocated to California with his family.
Levandowski began creating a website for Tamalpais High School in Marin when he was 16.
He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.
During college, Levandowski programmed a toy robot to sort Monopoly money.
Ghostrider
@Getty
In 2004, he helped build Ghostrider – the world’s first autonomous motorcycle.
The development of GhostRider began in 2003 when Levandowski and his team (engineers at the University of California, Berkeley) began to create an autonomous motorcycle that could compete in the DARPA Grand Challenge.
The team engineered a variety of sensors and algorithms to enable the motorcycle to navigate its environment without any human input.
“It was basically a bunch of people putting stuff together and seeing what worked,” Anthony explained in an interview.
After months of hard work, Levandowski and his team got the bike ready to debut at the competition in 2004.
Ghostrider didn’t win the Grand Challenge. Later, the motorcycle was donated to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.
He told Wired that the race was “almost like the beginning” of the robotics adventure.
@Getty
In 2007, he started to work for Google, especially in developing Street View.
In 2009, Sebastian Thrun and Anthony launched Waymo under Google.
Otto
In 2016, Levandowski and Lior Ron founded Otto, an autonomous trucking company.
“In 30 years, every single new car will be autonomous,” he told The Guardian in 2016.
At the heart of Otto’s success is its cutting-edge technology. The company utilizes a combination of sensors, cameras, radar, and GPS to navigate its trucks safely on highways and other roads.
Later in 2016, the company was sold to Uber Technologies.
In 2017, Uber Technologies Inc. fired Levandowski after he was accused of stealing trade secrets from his former employer, Google. Initially, Levandowski repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment.
After months of legal wrangling, Uber eventually agreed to pay Alphabet $245 million in stock as part of a settlement agreement in February 2018.
In 2019, Levandowski was indicted by federal prosecutors on 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets from Google. Levandowski pleaded not guilty to the charges. According to the indictment, he allegedly downloaded over 14,000 confidential files containing source code and other proprietary information about Waymo’s self-driving car program before leaving the company in 2016.
Anthony Levandowski arrived to a court appearance – @Getty
In March 2020, he agreed to plead guilty to one count of trade secret theft in an agreement with federal prosecutors to drop the remaining 32 charges against him.
In August 2020, Anthony was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
In early 2021, Anthony Levandowski was granted a full pardon by President Donald Trump. The pardon was one of 73 issued. “My family and I are grateful for the opportunity to move forward,” Levandowski tweeted on January 20, 2022.
Pronto AI
In 2018, he launched Pronto AI, a commercial provider of autonomous driving systems.
Levandowski invested $8.5 million into Pronto AI.
Pollen Mobile
In February 2022, Anthony launched Pollen Mobile, a decentralized mobile network that provides access to mobile data securely without sacrificing privacy or control over your data usage habits.
It uses blockchain technology to protect user data from being accessed by third parties without permission from the users.
Wife/Girlfriend
Anthony Levandowski is not married.
Also, there is not much information about Anthony Levandowski’s romantic life. However, it is known that Levandowski was engaged when he filed for bankruptcy in March 2020.
Quotes
[talking about the lawsuit] “Once you’re in the middle of something and you’re like dedicated fully to it, it’s very difficult to get perspective and see like you think you’re there, but actually, you’re missing this other path that’s gonna block you completely, so I definitely would say that’s taking a step back and you know taking some time to reflect on my life, and you know things I could do better.”
“I’ve never done much homework.”
“A key thing for me is staying true to your roots and understanding what you’re good at and what you’re not good at and focus on the things that you are good at that that society values.”
“Some people like to work on hot rods, boats, or airplanes. I love robots.”
“I’m all about finding where the problem is and solving that, and right now, the problem is not better lasers the problem is perception, not prediction.”
@Getty
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Net Worth 2024
So, how much is Anthony Levandowski worth? Levandowski earned most of his wealth from working for Google, co-founding Otto and Pronto AI, and founding Pollen Mobile. Therefore, Anthony Levandowski has an estimated net worth of $20 million.
In 2017, he founded Way of the Future, an AI “church.” But, it was dissolved in 2020.
For his work on self-driving technology, he was paid tens of millions of dollars by Google.
In August 2016, Uber acquired Otto at an estimated valuation of $680 million, mostly in company equity.
In March 2020, he was ordered to pay $179 million to Google and several million in interest.
Later, Levandowski filed for bankruptcy. He stated his assets range from $50 million to $100 million in his bankruptcy filing. He also tried to shield from creditors $17.2 million in an individual retirement account (Roth IRA). In addition, he had over $400k in conventional retirement accounts.
In July 2020, Levandowski sued Uber for $4 billion. He and Uber reached a settlement agreement in 2022, and Uber agreed to pay Levandowski $2 million as well as a good portion (the exact figure was redacted in filings) of the $179 million debt to Google.
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I am Bulgarea Candin Stefan, and I founded FamousPeopleToday.com in 2018. I’m using my bachelor’s degree in economics and 9 years of experience in blogging to guide millions of people through the incredibly complex world of celebrity net worths.