It’s May 15, and Israeli technology guru Yossi Vardi is moderating a session on the future of the Internet at a conference in Jerusalem.

On stage with the fatherly 65-year-old is a who’s who of tech and media bigwigs, including Google (GOOG) co-founder Sergey Brin, Yahoo ! (YHOO) President Susan Decker, and News Corp. (NWS) Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch.

Vardi (right in the above photo) isn’t the least bit cowed by their eminence. In his irrepressible manner, he calls out to the crowd : "How many Israeli entrepreneurs in the audience want to do business with Yahoo ?" He then tries to get Decker to give out her personal e-mail address. (She declines.) Vardi settles for announcing the e-mail of Yahoo’s head of European operations to the scores of entrepreneurs who have raised their hands.

Undoubtedly the most prominent and connected tech entrepreneur in Israel, Vardi makes no bones about his objectives. The point of moderating the tech panel, he says later with a laugh, was to "shamelessly promote Israel’s high-tech sector."

 

The same evening, he tries to convince Brin to do more business in Israel by dragging the Google co-founder and his parents to a dilapidated warehouse in the suburbs of Tel Aviv to introduce them to 300 Israeli "garage geeks" who tinker there.

Now this goodwill ambassador-long known for his connections in Silicon Valley-has been tapped by the Israeli government to help deepen ties with Europe. Vardi was recently named co-chairman-alongside Mathias Döpfner, the chief executive of German media company Axel Springer (SPRGN)-of a group called the EU-Israel Business Dialogue.

 

Its aim is to foster business relations between Israel and Europe through events such as the upcoming Israel Innovation Day in Germany on June 16.
 

Making Deals, Earning Respect
Although the panel’s work is just getting under way, Europe’s big tech companies have already been eyeing Israeli innovation for some time.

 

In March, a France Telecom (FTE) subsidiary spent $21.4 million for a startup called Orca Interactive, based in Ra’anana, near Tel Aviv, that develops Internet TV software and applications. Germany’s Deutsche Telekom (DT) has opened a research and development laboratory at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University focused on network security.

 

And Britain’s BT Group (BT) is,

Such deals are welcome news to Vardi, who founded his first technology startup in 1969 and has gone on to be involved in more than 60 Israeli tech ventures.

 

He has taken seven companies public and sold many others-the most famous of which was ICQ, the first Internet instant-messaging company, which was acquired by AOL (TWX) for more than $400 million.

But more than his financial success, what has turned the avuncular Vardi into Israel’s Mr.. Tech is relentless networking, his passionate belief in the cause, and generosity with his time and money. Known for his love of gadgets and mischievous sense of humor, Vardi has plowed his gains from ICQ and other successes back into startups, serving as angel investor and mentor to scores of young Israelis.

 

He now counts more than 40 companies in his investment portfolio, and spends much of his time traveling around the world to promote these and other Israeli companies at business events.

That commitment and kindness has earned Vardi legions of admirers, including Shimon Peres, the President of Israel, who calls him Israel’s "best ambassador" to the world of science and technology.

 

Vardi isn’t in it for the money, Peres insists.

"He is after the science itself. He really and sincerely wakes up in the morning, opens his eyes, and asks, ’God, what can I discover of your secrets today ?’ And once he has it, he will relate it to others."

Groundbreaking Generosity
There’s another motivation as well, says Vardi, who had a long civil service career in Israel : what he calls modern day Zionism.

"I belong to the generation that witnessed the creation of the state," Vardi says. "I still remember the dancing in the streets on the 29th of November, 1947, so for me, what I am doing, is a current manifestation of pioneering the building of the state of Israel."

At times, Vardi may be too much of a soft touch.

 

He says he hates to read business plans and instead goes with his gut-sometimes even committing to investments over the phone if he believes in the entrepreneur making the pitch.

"My wife, Thalma, who keeps me connected to the ground, tells me it doesn’t make sense that every kid with shining eyes walks away from a meeting with me with a check," says Vardi.

 

"But I tell her if I lose the money at least it goes to nice people and allows them to follow their dreams. Who wants to give money to jerks?"

Thanks in part to his involvement, high tech now represents a vibrant portion of Israel’s economy (BusinessWeek.com, 5/13/08).

 

But the domestic market is so small that Israeli tech companies have to grow their businesses quickly in the U.S. and Europe. Nobody can open doors abroad like Vardi, say entrepreneurs and executives.

"Yossi is a super-node," says BT’s Shainberg. "He connects people and companies from around the world to leverage the world-beating technology innovation in Israel."

With the help of Vardi and the Israeli Trade & Industry Assn., Shainberg is bringing a group of Israeli tech entrepreneurs to London on June 10-11 to meet with executives from the British phone company and its partners.
 

Forging Relationships
Indeed, Vardi’s web of connections spreads throughout the Continent.

 

He has, for instance, a long-standing relationship with German publishing company Hubert Burda Media, acting as an informal adviser on digital strategies.

 

A few years back, he helped the company set up a conference called Cool Companies in the Hot Desert that brought a group of German tech entrepreneurs to Israel.

"Yossi is a connector, a sharer, a giver, a storyteller," says Stephanie Czerny, Burda’s managing director in charge of R&D, marketing, and communication.

The success of the event led Vardi and Burda CEO Hubert Burda (left in the photo) to launch what has quickly become one of Europe’s most important technology conferences, known as Digital, Life, Design, or DLD.

 

The annual event now draws 1,000 attendees every January, and this year Vardi brought 150 Israeli Internet entrepreneurs along with him to the conference to introduce them to potential investors and business partners.

Vardi thrives on forging those sorts of links.

"Yossi has an amazing capability and will to connect people," says Tal Keinan, CEO of an Israeli startup called SemantiNet, one of the companies in Vardi’s portfolio. "This is priceless for a startup."

Keinan found that out firsthand when Vardi invited him to a private dinner in London in April.

 

Held in the BT Tower, the exclusive event included senior executives from Apple (AAPL), Yahoo, Hutchison Europe, and Google, as well as partners from investment firms such as Accel Partners and Hasso Plattner Ventures. As if that wasn’t enough, a few days later back in Israel, Vardi introduced Keinan to Dell (DELL) founder and CEO Michael Dell.

For all his brokering of deals and relationships, Vardi isn’t impressed by big names and isn’t in it just for the money.

"It is about building things, about having fun, about exploring new boundaries, and crossing boundaries," says Uri Admon, CEO of an Israeli startup called Dyuna, another company in Vardi’s portfolio. "He is an inspiration to us all."

Schenker is a BusinessWeek correspondent in Paris.
 

Other Jewish actors
In August 2007 the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit featured the forum "Social Networking 3.0". The composition of the panel at this forum was very illustrative:

Moderator Charlene Li was joined by:

:
Travis Katz, senior Vice President and General Manager of Myspace International

Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook

Richard Rosenblatt, CEO of Demand Media and former MySpace Executive

Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning

Karl Jacob, CEO of Wallop

The only non-Jew in this panel was Bianchini, the rest - Katz, Moskovitz, Rosenblatt and Karl Jacob - where are all from the tribe of the "chosen people", as they call themselves. This clearly illustrates the Jewish overrepresentation in this field.

We will here reproduce some Jewish articles on the subject of Jews and Internet.

The Jewish boast-page writes on the subject (note that the passage below that Google's Larry Page is a "non-Jew" is utter nonsense, as illustrated by quotes from Jewish sources in our section on Google):
 

Jews as High Technology Entrepreneurs and Managers
Jews have traditionally been seen as prominent in such industries as finance, merchandising, apparel, textiles, entertainment, media, and publishing.

 

And in most of them, Jews were true pioneers. They played leading roles as those industries emerged on the scene.

Their disproportionate importance to the contemporary world of 24/7 competitive high technology is less well known, but they have flourished there as well. It plays to their strengths. High technology demands a solid grounding in the underlying science or engineering and that typically calls for college, and sometimes a post graduate education.

 

Demographically, Jews are better educated than their peers. An earlier chapter pointed out the high levels of Jewish enrollment at leading public and private universities.

The National Jewish Population Survey 2000-01 goes further.

 

It points out that:

"More than half of all Jewish Adults (55%) received a college degree and a quarter (25%) earned a graduate degree." "The Comparable figures for the total U.S. population are 29% and 6%." As a result,

"More than 60% of all employed Jews are in one of the three highest status job categories: professional or technical (41%), management and executive (13%) and business and finance (7%)." "In contrast, 46% of all Americans work in these three high status areas, 29% in professional or technical jobs, 12% in management and executive positions and 5% in business and finance."

Jews also tend to be disproportionately entrepreneurial, working where they will succeed or fail based on their own efforts.

 

Andrew Grove's decision to stop writing, and instead to pursue science, illustrates the point. Judgments about writers are often subjective while those about science are much less so. Grove wanted to work in a field where he would be judged on his own performance. He chose chemistry and got his Ph.D. After several years working with the best and brightest at Fairchild Semiconductor, he left to become one of the three founders of Intel.

Technology is a high risk meritocracy. While even the most talented people sometimes fail, and fortune can obliterate the most brilliant of plans; technology is not political. Relationships and initial funding will carry a venture only so far. Ultimately it must succeed or fail on its own merits in a volatile, highly competitive arena.

 

Such risky opportunities can be pursued in hospitable climates, such as the United States, and in such environments, Jewish entrepreneurs have done well.

 

They:

And that is only the barest overview:

Michael Dell and Larry Ellison (of Oracle) share the distinction of being two of the most successful college dropouts in history. (Non-Jew Bill Gates is a third.)

 

Dell quit the University of Texas in 1985 when he was 19 years old to start Dell Computer Corporation with a $1,000 stake. His idea was to "cut out the middleman" by selling personal computers (PCs) directly to customers.

Dell's combination of custom built computers, excellent product quality, superb customer service, outstanding production efficiency, and low prices created the world's largest computer manufacturing company. In achieving that distinction, he took on IBM, Compaq, Hewlett Packard, Toshiba, and many other PC makers, most of them much bigger and better financed than Dell.

He is emblematic of the creative, determined nature of successful entrepreneurs. In the process, he made his company one of the most valuable in the world.

 

In 1992, Dell became the youngest CEO in history to earn a spot on the Fortune 500 when his Company had been in existence for only eight years. With fiscal year 2005 sales of $53 billion, Dell has humbled most competitors. Despite the challenges of rapid growth and competitive success, Dell and its founder are consistently counted as among America's most respected.

The success has earned 40 year old Dell a fortune, sufficient, till his most recent birthday, to consistently place him among Fortune's "40 under 40."

 

These are all young entrepreneurs, athletes and entertainers who have achieved stellar success before reaching age 40. With his wife, Dell has created the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, endowing it with more than $1 billion. Its focus is the health, education, safety, care and development of children.

 

Among its recent commitments was $130 million to help boost high school graduation and college attendance rates in Texas.
 

Sergy Brin is the son of Russian Jewish emigrants who left the Soviet Union in 1979 to escape persecution. Sergy was six at the time.

 

Mathematically inclined, he earned a computer science degree from University of Maryland before entering Stanford as a postgraduate student. There he met non-Jew, Larry Page, also studying for his doctorate. Together, they developed a search engine - called BackRub before they renamed it Google.

They dropped out of Stanford, rounded up $1 million from friends, family and angel venture investors and on September 7, 1998, launched Google. Less than ten years old, it is the most popular search engine on the Web with more than eighty-two million users each month accessing more than eight billion Web site pages (twice the comparable 2004 figure).

 

It employs more than 4,000 people and has had a spectacular run up in its stock price to a value of roughly $80 billion in mid 2005.
 

Steve Ballmer did not found Microsoft. Non-Jews Bill Gates and Paul Allen did.

 

They started the Company in 1976, five years after they began programming together while attending Lakeside High School in Seattle where they had access to the school's computer. Gates went off to Harvard where he and Ballmer became good friends.

 

Ballmer was a bright Jewish kid from Detroit who scored a perfect 800 on his math SATs and who took it upon himself to "socialize" Gates at Harvard - until Gates dropped out to start Microsoft. About the same time, Paul Allen dropped out of Washington State and together Gates and Allen launched the Company.

Gates tried to convince Ballmer to drop out as well, but instead, Ballmer stayed in school, going on to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard in 1977.

 

He worked for Proctor and Gamble for two years and then entered Stanford Business School. Perhaps just to "fit in," he then dropped out of Stanford Business School in 1980 after Gates had made yet one more appeal for him to join Microsoft. Ballmer was the Company's twenty-fourth employee.

Within three years Paul Allen was gone, the result of a bout with Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Ballmer served first as the Company's financial disciplinarian and later became the number two guy, holding down every senior job in the Company before being named President in 1998 and CEO in 2000.

 

Known for his determination and salesmanship, Ballmer has been vital to Microsoft's success.
 

Larry Ellison is a University of Chicago dropout.

 

He was one of the three (later four) partners who founded Oracle Corporation in 1977. Ellison, the leader, read an IBM article about a new kind of software termed a "relational database." Then commonly acknowledged as a revolutionary new way to build a database, no one, not even at IBM, thought it was commercially viable.

 

Ellison disagreed and with $2,000, the partners began developing the software, using cash generated from consulting projects to augment the $2,000.

Of the four founders, two later left the company and one died. But from the start, it was Ellison that was, and still is, the driving force behind Oracle. "Relentless," "determined," and "ruthless" are among terms commonly used to describe him. He has been schooled in Japanese approaches to business where anything less than 100 percent market share is not enough.

His strong ego is characterized by the titles of two books about him. The first is titled, "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison." It is the first line of an old Silicon Valley joke for which the punch line is "God does not think he is Larry Ellison." The second book is Everyone Else Must Fail, for which the preamble is "It is not good enough that I should succeed."

Ellison was born to an unmarried Jewish teenage mother and an Italian-American air force pilot father, but he grew up with an aunt, and an uncle who constantly put young Larry down saying he would never amount to anything. Harvard Business School's Entrepreneur of the Year in 1990, the 2004 Forbes' 400 lists Ellison as the world's ninth wealthiest person.

Ellison has devoted roughly half a billion dollars to charities, particularly a medical foundation focused mostly on infectious diseases in the third world and diseases of aging.

 

In mid 2005, he also pledged $115 million to Harvard University.
 

As noted in the Andrew Grove bio, Intel was formed in 1968 by non-Jews Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore who recruited Grove to be their co-founder and third employee.

 

Their established reputations and ability to raise the needed $2.5 million from venture capitalist Arthur Rock financed the Company, Noyce headed up sales and Marketing, Moore R&D, while Grove headed manufacturing and product development.

 

Grove disciplined the organization to set and reach goals and he made the critical decisions, such committing Intel to the microprocessors which made Intel the huge success it is.
 

Mitch Kapor did not invent the spreadsheet, but his software program, Lotus 123, was the first application to spawn huge demand for personal computers.

 

Visicalc, an earlier spreadsheet program created by Jew Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston in 1982, was available on several early computers including the Apple II a few years before Lotus 123 arrived. But Lotus 123 had many more features, was easier to use, and had far better graphics.

 

It provided the compelling reason for consumers to buy personal computers and demand was so strong, Lotus grossed $53 million in its first year and $156 million by 1984.

 

Kapor went on to create other major software programs including Lotus Agenda.
 

Jeff Skoll did not create eBay, non-Jew Pierre Omidyar did in 1993.

 

For Omidyar, born to French and Iranian parents, creating an on-line auction Web-site was a Labor Day weekend hobby project. For its first couple of years, it was simply a free Web-site Omidyar ran on his own home page along with several other of his Web page creations.

 

During the first few months, he tried to recruit Skoll, a Jewish French-Canadian he met through friends, to become his partner. Skoll turned him down, choosing to remain at Stanford Business School.

In early 1996, Omidyar's Internet service provider began charging him $250 a month to host the site.

 

Omidyar was forced to start charging a fee, which he passed along to the site's users based on the sale price of auction items. As the checks started rolling in Omidyar realized he needed help. Again, he approached Skoll. This time, after a few months of consulting for eBay, Skoll signed on as its first full time employee and President.

Skoll grew up in Canada and showed early signs of being a driven entrepreneur. At twelve, he was selling Amway products door-to-door.

 

After graduating from the University of Toronto with a 4.0 grade point average, he set up two high tech companies before moving to Palo Alto to enroll at Stanford Business School. Compensating for Omidyar's easy going ways and enjoyment of programming, Skoll was the driven leader who planned the business and made things happen. He hired key people, established much of the culture, and constantly pushed to build the business.

The result is the number one auction Web site in the world. It grossed $3.9 billion in 2004, netted $936 million and was worth $53 billion by mid 2005, all of which made both Omidyar and Skoll very wealthy.

 

Skoll has since left eBay and now devotes the bulk of his time to philanthropic activities, particularly his Skoll Foundation to which he has donated $250 million. The Foundation supports social entrepreneurs working to effect lasting positive social changes worldwide.

 

In 2003, Skoll won recognition from Business Week magazine as "one of the most innovative philanthropists of the past decade"
 

Barry Diller has made a career of corporate transformations.

 

He started in the mail room at the William Morris Agency in his early 20s, and at age 24, moved to ABC-TV. Within three years, he was Vice President of Feature Films and Program Development. In that job he inaugurated ABC's Movie of the Week, the most popular movie series in television history.

 

At ABC Diller pioneered highly profitable "made-for-television" films which focused on social issues such as homosexuality, the Vietnam War and drugs.

In 1974, following that success (and still only 32), he was named President of Paramount Pictures. At Paramount, he oversaw creation of the hit television series: Cheers, Taxi, and Laverne and Shirley, and hit movies including: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Saturday Night Fever and Grease.

 

Ten years later he moved to Twentieth Century-FOX where in 1985, after Rupert Murdoch took over, he launched Fox as the fourth television network. By 1990, Diller had Fox producing five nights of prime time television with such popular shows as: The Simpsons, Married With Children, Cops and America's Most Wanted.

Diller quit Fox to purchase a stake in QVC, the cable shopping network, and from there he launched an unsuccessful bid to take over Paramount. Sumner Redstone's Viacom beat him out. Shortly thereafter, in 1995, non-Jew John Malone recruited Diller to leave QVC, invest in and run Liberty Media's Silver King Communications, which was broadcasting the Home Shopping Network. Diller later merged Home Shopping into Silver King.

Through a blinding series of name changes, strategic redirections and $8 billion worth of mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures and investments in more than 45 companies, Diller created what is now called Interactive Corp (IAC), the fifth major Internet Company, (behind Google, Amazon, e-Bay, and Yahoo).

 

Little known to the general public, IAC controls such prominent Internet names as: Expedia, Hotels.com, Lending Tree, Hotwire.com, Evite, Citysearch and Ticketmaster.

Over the years, Diller has served as a director of Coca Cola and the Washington Post, Trustee of New York University, member of the Executive Board for Medical Sciences at UCLA, member of the Board of Councilors of USC's School of Cinema-Television and a member of the Board of the Museum of Television and Radio.
 

Terry Semel did not create Yahoo. Non-Jews Jerry Yang and David Filo did in 1994, as a hobby, while pursuing their electrical engineering PhD's at Stanford. In those halcyon, "early bubble" days, Yahoo went public within two years.

 

It was then, and still is today, regarded as one of the major Internet successes of all time, but along the way, it hit a bump in the road. In 2001, Yahoo lost $93 million on revenues of $717 million. The stock tanked and new talent was needed to avert a melt down.

That is when Terry Semel arrived. Semel had 24 years at Warner Brothers where he had been instrumental in building the Company from $1 billion to $11 billion in annual revenues. Semel quickly pushed Yahoo's marketing, consumers' services and acquisitions and by 2003, he had turned the company around.

 

In 2004, Yahoo made $1.6 billion under his leadership.
 

Irwin Jacobs is listed as one of seven Qualcomm founders, but by any measure, he has been the "essential man" from Qualcomm's 1985 inception till now.

Qualcomm created and controls Code-Division Multiple Access (CDMA), a major wireless telecommunications technology. It is the most widely used wireless calling technology in the United States, (47 percent market share) used by such carriers as Verizon, Cingular, and Sprint. Around the world, 212 million wireless phones already utilize Qualcomm technology and as 3G, the next generation of wireless, is deployed, Qualcomm is expected to become the international market leader as well.

Jacobs grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He was a mediocre musician, but an excellent student earning a bachelors degree from Cornell and a Masters and a Doctor of Science degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

 

He taught at MIT and the University of California San Diego (UCSD) from 1959 to 1972.

While teaching, he wrote a still used college text, Principles of Communications Engineering, and in 1969, co-founded LINKABIT, a company he describes as his initial move towards becoming an "academic dropout." That finally happened in 1972 when he became LINKABIT's full time President and Chairman.

 

The Company pioneered satellite TV receiver technology (VideoCipher) and was the first to commercially introduce Time Division Multiplex Access (TDMA), the predecessor technology to CDMA. Jacobs built LINKABIT to 1,400 employees, before merging it with M/A-COM and he served on that Board until 1985.

Initially, Qualcomm did research and development and some manufacturing for wireless companies while it built the largest satellite-based messaging service used by trucking companies to manage their fleets. That service was quickly overshadowed, however, by CDMA. By 2004, CDMA was generating over $5 billion in annual revenues.

All of this has made Jacobs (and his fellow founders) quite wealthy. Jacobs has responded with major philanthropy. He and his wife have given $110 million to the San Diego Symphony (hearkening back to his days as a mediocre musician), another $110 million went to the UCSD to "support the other faculty that are currently doing the teaching," $7 million went to the Salk Institute, and millions more has gone to support the San Diego Food Bank and historic New Bedford.

 

Both he, and fellow Qualcomm founder Andrew Viterbi now have schools of engineering named after them, Jacobs at UCSD and Viterbi and the University of Southern California.
 

Ron Glaser takes credit for creating the first technology to "stream" audio, video, and other digital content, such as music and games, to computers. He founded RealNetworks in 1994 to capitalize on the technology.

Fresh out of Yale with degrees in economics and computer sciences, Glaser joined Microsoft in 1983 where he rose, over his ten years there, to become Vice President of Multimedia and Consumer Systems.

 

He left Microsoft in 1994 and shortly thereafter, says he downloaded Mosaic, an early version of the Netscape Internet browser. He immediately saw the potential to augment the browser with "streaming." He founded RealNetworks and was soon able to take it public. It became a hot Internet stock and, for a time, Glaser was a billionaire.

Today, following the bursting of the Internet bubble and heightened competition with Microsoft's Media Player and Apple's Quicktime, RealNetworks continues to post operating losses and it is taking on Microsoft in court.

 

Like earlier Federal and state lawsuits against Microsoft, Glaser's company claims Microsoft competes unfairly by bundling its Mediaplayer into its software. Win or lose, RealNetworks has sufficient cash to finance itself for some time and thus remain a major Internet force, particularly as the downloading of music and games becomes ever more prolific.

 

If RealNetworks succeeds, Glaser will rejoin the ranks of billionaires who hit it big with their Internet technology innovations.
 

Mark Cuban grew up poor, the son of Russian Jewish emigrants in blue collar Pittsburgh.

 

He was a bright student who was also considered something of a hustler with his native selling ability (selling garbage bags, greeting cards and magazines, all door-to-door, from the time he was 12.) At the University of Indiana he started a chain letter and gave disco dancing lessons to pay for school.

After graduating in 1983 he started a computer consulting firm, MicroSolutions, though he neither owned, nor knew much about, computers. Self-taught by having to learn to perform on the promises he made to customers, he built the Company to revenues of $30 million a year before selling it to Compuserve. He made himself wealthy in the process.

He then "kicked back" for a few years, before returning in 1995, with partner Todd R. Wagner (not Jewish), to create Broadcast.com. It pioneered radio and television broadcasting over the Internet. Cuban and Wagner soon took it public and, in 1999, sold it to Yahoo for $5.7 billion. Cuban and Wagner were billionaires.

His attention then shifted to his ownership of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. Cuban is a brash, avid, courtside presence whose outbursts have cost him an estimated $1 million in fines. At the same time, his savvy marketing and recruiting of top talent has converted the Mavericks from a perennial loser to a contender.

Cuban also launched HDNet, a high definition television broadcast network available on satellite, cable, and selected over the air high definition broadcast stations.

 

He and Wagner also purchased Landmark theaters, a large U.S. chain of "art-house" movie theaters which will air the high definition movies he is producing and the films he has contracted six major studios to convert from film to digital.

Measures of entrepreneurial success
One measure of entrepreneurial success is provided by the Fortune "40 Under 40" annual list of the wealthiest young Americans, nearly all of them self made.

 

Though entrepreneurial success is not simply about wealth, it is one scorecard. The Fortune's 2004 list is included as Exhibit 16a. While it includes thirteen athletes and entertainers, the remaining twenty-seven are successful young entrepreneurs, mostly from high technology companies they started or led.

 

Of the twenty-seven, at least six are Jewish. Three of them are among the top five and five of them among the top ten. In order, the six include: #1 Michael Dell, #3 Jeff Skoll, #5 Sergey Brin, #9 Dan Snyder, #10, Marc Benioff, and #17 Jerry Greenberg.

 

Statistically, at two percent of the U.S. population, Jews would be lucky if even one of the twenty-seven was Jewish. At 22 percent, the result is ten times what one would expect.

The Forbes 400 corroborates the Fortune list. (Exhibit 16b) Of the year 2004 ranking, at least 25 percent of the "400" are Jewish. And like the Fortune "40 Under 40," many of them made their wealth as entrepreneurs who started successful businesses. Prominent among the first twenty-five are #9 Michael Dell, #10 Lawrence Ellison, and #11 Steven Balmer.

 

As with the Fortune 40, the performance defies expectations.

We would expect perhaps eight Jews among the 400, the actual figure (at least 102) is twelve times that.

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Yossi Vardi: Israel’s "Mr. Tech" (basecamp.com)

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Yossi Vardi: Israel’s “Mr. Tech” – Library of Rickandria