How Chris built the fortune
Chris Larsen is a serial founder whose companies have tried to make financial services cheaper by moving them online. His largest fortune came from the third of those ventures, Ripple, which he started in 2012 with the programmer Jed McCaleb under the name OpenCoin.
The company was built around the XRP Ledger, a blockchain network designed to settle payments quickly and at low cost. At launch, a fixed supply of XRP tokens was created, and a large share was allocated to the company while the founders also received substantial amounts. Larsen's wealth therefore rests on two pillars: his equity in Ripple as a private company and his personal XRP holdings, whose value moves with the crypto market.
Ripple's business has been to sell payment and liquidity services to banks and money transfer firms, some of which use XRP as a bridge currency between national currencies, as well as to provide crypto custody and, more recently, a dollar backed stablecoin. The value of XRP rose sharply during crypto booms in 2017, 2021 and 2024 to 2025, and each cycle increased the paper value of Larsen's stake.
Companies and holdings
Larsen's main business interests are:
- Ripple, where he served as chief executive until 2016 and has since been executive chairman, with Brad Garlinghouse as chief executive.
- XRP tokens held personally.
- Earlier companies: E-Loan, an online mortgage lender he co-founded in 1996, and Prosper Marketplace, a peer to peer lending platform launched in 2005.
He has also invested in other financial technology startups and has backed technology projects focused on public safety and energy efficiency in the San Francisco Bay Area. Because Ripple remains private, the value of his equity is based on funding rounds and share buybacks rather than a public market price.
Early life and career
Chris Larsen grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He earned a bachelor's degree in international business from San Francisco State University and an MBA from Stanford University. Early in his career he worked in finance, gaining experience in lending at a time when getting a mortgage still required stacks of paper and in person visits.
In 1996 he co-founded E-Loan with Janina Pawlowski, one of the first companies to let consumers compare and apply for mortgages entirely online. E-Loan went public during the dot com boom and was later acquired by Popular, a Puerto Rican bank. Larsen next started Prosper, which let individuals lend directly to other individuals through an online marketplace. Prosper faced regulatory scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2008, which led it to register its loan notes as securities, an early encounter with financial regulators that would repeat at Ripple.
Philanthropy and public life
Larsen has made several large donations in digital assets. He gave a major gift of XRP to his alma mater, San Francisco State University, to support its business school, and he has funded a network of privately owned security cameras offered to San Francisco neighborhoods to help police investigate property crime. He has also financed advocacy urging the Bitcoin network to move away from energy intensive mining.
His most significant public fight was the lawsuit brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission in December 2020 against Ripple, Larsen and Garlinghouse, which alleged that sales of XRP were unregistered securities offerings. In July 2023 a federal judge ruled that programmatic sales of XRP on exchanges were not securities transactions, while institutional sales were. The SEC dropped its claims against Larsen and Garlinghouse personally later that year, and the remaining case was resolved in 2025.
He has been an active political donor, giving to candidates and committees across both major parties at different times and supporting groups that promote clearer rules for cryptocurrency. His public statements tend to focus on payments efficiency, financial privacy and regulatory clarity.
Across three companies, Larsen's career shows a consistent theme: using software to remove intermediaries from lending and payments. Each venture drew skepticism from incumbents and attention from regulators, and each helped shape the debate on how new financial technology should be supervised.