"Tiger Woods has his small stake. So do Shaquille O'Neal, Henry A. Kissinger and Arnold Schwarzenegger. All can be counted among that small club of people lucky enough to own a sliver of Google, one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley and what could be the hottest deal on Wall Street this year," according to The New York Times.
"A list of the others who stand to be enriched should Google go public seems to prove that the rich get richer. It reads like a Who's Who of Silicon Valley insiders, including Frank P. Quattrone, the former investment banker now on trial in Manhattan on charges of obstruction of justice and witness tampering. It includes some of Silicon Valley's greatest entrepreneurial successes, including Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape; Pierre M. Omidyar, a founder of eBay; Shawn Fanning, the creator of Napster; and Bill Joy, the software innovator who recently left Sun Microsystems.
Stanford University will also make a bit. "The university owns the technology," said Katharine Ku, the director of Stanford's Office of Technology Licensing. "We license it to Google, which back then was just these two kids. They pay Stanford royalties annually. We also took a bit of stock in the deal."
