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The ‘anti-Jeff Bezos’? Meet German billionaire Tobi Lütke, CEO of Amazon rival Shopify, a school dropout and crypto king even admired by Tesla’s Elon Musk
STORYKate Berbano
- Trained as a programmer by Siemens, he founded snowboard retailer Snowdevil which segued into Shopify, and says he’s ‘arming the rebels’ against Amazon’s empire
- Recently he joined Coinbase’s board of directors but he prefers his bike to his Tesla and donated a million and one trees to #TeamTrees – one more than Musk
Tobias “Tobi” Lütke is not your average CEO. Not met yet? He’s the guy who co-founded the Canadian start-up Shopify, then built it into an e-commerce giant that helps companies set up and run online stores in over 175 countries.
In 2014, Canada’s The Globe and Mail newspaper recognised him as their “CEO of the year”, while he has been branded the “anti-Bezos” for the ways in which Lütke sets himself apart from other tech billionaires. When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos – North America, and the world’s, second-richest person – was still CEO, he even considered Shopify a competitor.
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Let’s get to know this 41-year-old programmer-turned-entrepreneur, whose net worth is now estimated to be over US$6 billion.
He learned to code by age 12
Born in Koblenz, Germany, in 1981, Lütke received his first computer at age six and says he started rewriting the code of the games he played when he was around 11 or 12 years old.
“I got so fascinated with my computer; it was more interesting than anything else and it was certainly more interesting than school,” Lütke told the Financial Post.
Like several other billionaires, the Shopify CEO never went to university. He dropped out of school at 16 to enter a computer programming apprenticeship with Siemens.
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