How Brian built the fortune
Brian Chesky's fortune is tied almost entirely to Airbnb, the company he started with two friends and still runs. The idea came out of a rent problem. In 2007 Chesky and his roommate Joe Gebbia could not afford their San Francisco apartment, so during a design conference that filled the city's hotels they put air mattresses on the floor and charged guests for a place to sleep and breakfast. The experiment worked well enough that they recruited Nathan Blecharczyk, a programmer, to build a proper website.
The early company struggled. To keep going, the founders sold novelty cereal boxes themed on the 2008 presidential election, raising enough money to survive until they were accepted into the Y Combinator startup program in early 2009. From there the platform grew quickly, expanding from shared rooms to entire homes, then to cities around the world. Venture investors piled in during the following years, and Airbnb became one of the most valuable private technology companies.
Airbnb listed on the Nasdaq in December 2020, after surviving a collapse in bookings at the start of the pandemic. Chesky's large founding stake, held since the beginning, is the source of his wealth.
The business model is light on physical assets. Airbnb does not own the homes on its platform; it provides the marketplace, payments, reviews and customer support, and takes a percentage of each booking. That structure allowed the company to grow across hundreds of thousands of cities without building hotels, and it means that much of the value created flows to the shareholders of the platform itself, of which Chesky remains one of the largest.
Companies and holdings
Chesky is co-founder, chief executive and chairman of Airbnb, and he holds a large block of its shares, including high-vote shares that give the founders significant control over the company. Airbnb operates a marketplace where hosts list homes, rooms and experiences, and it earns service fees from guests and hosts.
In 2020, as travel stopped, Chesky cut about a quarter of the workforce and refocused the company on its core home rental business, a move that preceded a strong rebound in travel demand. He also helped create Airbnb.org, a nonprofit that arranges free temporary housing for people displaced by disasters and conflicts. Outside Airbnb, his investments are relatively modest and he is not known for running other companies.
Under his leadership the company has also experimented with new categories, including longer stays for remote workers, hosted experiences, and services such as chefs and photographers bookable through the app. Chesky has described these efforts as an attempt to broaden Airbnb from a lodging site into a wider travel and services platform.
Early life and career
Chesky was born in 1981 and grew up in Niskayuna, a suburb of Schenectady in upstate New York. Both of his parents were social workers. As a child he was drawn to drawing and design, and he went on to study industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 2004. It was there that he met Gebbia.
After college he worked as an industrial designer in Los Angeles before moving to San Francisco in 2007 to join Gebbia. His design training shaped how Airbnb developed: the founders paid close attention to photography, trust signals such as reviews and profiles, and the details of how hosts and guests experienced the service.
Philanthropy and public life
Chesky signed the Giving Pledge in 2016, committing to give away the majority of his wealth during his lifetime or in his will. He has spoken about wanting his giving to focus on helping people in need of shelter, which connects to Airbnb.org's work housing refugees, evacuees and relief workers. He has also made donations to his alma mater and to community causes in San Francisco.
As one of the most visible technology founders of his generation, Chesky is a frequent speaker on leadership and company culture. He has been open about changing how he runs Airbnb, including taking a more direct role in product design. Airbnb has also faced public debate in many cities over short-term rentals and housing supply, and Chesky regularly addresses those concerns in interviews.