You won’t be able to guess how much Gabe Newell is worth according to Forbes


Valve’s owner Gabe Newell is surely worth a lot of money, enough to make anyone jealous, but is he worth enough to enter America’s top 400 richest people list? It seems so, according to the latest list released by Forbes.

“It was another record year for the wealthiest people in America, as the price of admission to the country’s most exclusive club jumped nearly 18%,” Forbes wrote. “The minimum net worth to make The Forbes 400 list of richest Americans is now a record $2 billion, up from $1.7 billion a year ago.”

Newell or Gaben as the Steam community fondly calls him, didn’t really struggle to enter the coveted list. Infact, he surpassed it by a huge margin with an estimated net worth of 5.5 billion.

Although Valve isn’t a publicly listed company, Forbes estimated Newell owns just over half of it, and took that into account for calculating his net worth.

Although Valve found early success by releasing games such as Half Life and Portal, what really changed its fortunes was the launch of Steam – the world’s most successful digital gaming platform.

“Some liken it to the iTunes of videogames. Steam sells game licenses to 125 million users of its own and other developers’ titles and collects a percentage of the sales.”

Gabe Newell sits on position number 97 on Forbes list of 100 Wealthiest Amercians. He is the only guy from the videogame industry to do so. Well, we surely hope this won’t deter him from releasing Half Life 3.