How George built the fortune
Kurtz's wealth comes mainly from his stake in CrowdStrike, which he cofounded in 2011 and has run as chief executive since the start. The company's central bet was that security software should live in the cloud rather than on each customer's own servers. Its Falcon platform uses a lightweight agent installed on laptops, servers and other devices, sends data back to a central system, and applies analytics and threat intelligence to detect attacks as they happen. Customers pay subscriptions, which gives the business recurring revenue that grows as clients add more modules.
CrowdStrike gained public attention through its work investigating high profile breaches, and its incident response teams helped build its reputation with large companies and government agencies. It listed on the Nasdaq in June 2019, and the shares rose strongly in the following years as demand for cybersecurity grew. In 2024 the company joined the S&P 500 index.
The same year brought the most serious test of Kurtz's leadership. In July 2024 a faulty content update to the Falcon software crashed millions of Windows computers worldwide, grounding flights and disrupting banks and hospitals. Kurtz apologized publicly, testified before Congress and the company offered customers incentives to stay. Most clients remained, and the business continued to grow.
Kurtz holds a meaningful percentage of CrowdStrike's shares, and he also receives stock based compensation as chief executive. Because almost all of his fortune is tied to one listed company, his wealth rises and falls with investor sentiment toward CrowdStrike and toward the cybersecurity sector as a whole. He has sold shares periodically under prearranged trading plans, a common practice for founders of public companies.
Companies and holdings
CrowdStrike is the main source of Kurtz's fortune. The company has expanded from endpoint protection into a broader set of products:
- Endpoint security, the original Falcon product for protecting individual devices
- Cloud security, covering workloads running on public cloud platforms
- Identity protection, aimed at stopping attacks that use stolen credentials
- Threat intelligence and incident response, including investigative services after breaches
- Security data and log management, partly built through acquisitions
Before CrowdStrike, Kurtz founded Foundstone, a security consulting and software firm, which McAfee bought in 2004. The sale gave him his first significant capital and led to a senior role at McAfee.
Early life and career
Kurtz was born in 1970 and grew up in New Jersey. He studied accounting at Seton Hall University and began his career at Price Waterhouse, where he moved from auditing into the firm's emerging computer security practice. That work introduced him to penetration testing, the practice of breaking into systems with permission to find weaknesses.
In 1999 he coauthored Hacking Exposed, a book that explained how attackers operate and became one of the best selling titles on computer security. The same year he founded Foundstone. After its sale to McAfee he rose to become worldwide chief technology officer of the company, a period that convinced him that traditional antivirus tools were falling behind. He left in 2011 and started CrowdStrike with Dmitri Alperovitch and Gregg Marston.
His experience at both a consulting firm and a large software vendor shaped the way CrowdStrike was built. From Foundstone he took the habit of studying attackers directly, and from McAfee he took lessons about the weaknesses of signature based antivirus products that had to be constantly updated on each machine.
Philanthropy and public life
Kurtz has not built a large public foundation, and his charitable giving has been relatively private compared with his profile in business. He has supported causes connected to technology education and to motorsport communities, but there is limited public detail about the scale of his donations.
Outside work he is a serious racing driver. He competes in professional endurance events in sports car series, including the 24 Hours of Le Mans and other long distance races, and has won class titles in international competition. He speaks frequently at industry conferences about cyber threats, often describing attacks attributed to criminal groups and foreign state actors. CrowdStrike moved its headquarters from California to Austin, Texas, in 2021.