Yelp Co-Founder Jeremy Stoppelman Is Worth Millions
Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO, has built a net worth in the millions through his salary and stock ownership in Yelp, a company he co-founded in 2004.
Feb. 2 2023, Published 1:52 p.m. ET
The online review platform Yelp removed thousands of reviews in 2022 that contained hateful, racist, or other potentially harmful content. According to Yelp’s annual Trust & Safety Report released this week, the platform deleted more than 475 racist reviews of Asian-owned businesses, 320 reviews of Black-owned businesses, 800 of Latino-owned businesses, and 410 of LGBTQ-owned businesses.
Over 265 million reviews of everything from restaurants to plumbers have been contributed to Yelp since it was founded in 2004 by Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons. What's Jeremy Stoppelman's net worth?
What is Jeremy Stoppelman’s net worth?
Stoppelman is still at Yelp and serves as the company’s CEO. He has built a net worth of about $256 million through his salary and stock ownership in Yelp, Wallmine reports. Stoppelman’s salary at Yelp is over $6.3 million annually, and he owns more than $20 million in Yelp stock shares.
Jeremy Stoppelman
Yelp CEO
Net worth: $256 Million
Jeremy Stoppelman co-founded Yelp in 2004 with former PayPal colleague Russel Simmons and $1 million investment from PayPal co-founder Max Levchin. In 2010, Stoppelman rejected a bid by Google to buy the company. He took Yelp public in 2012.
Age: 45
Alma mater: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Who invented Yelp?
Stoppelman invented Yelp with Simmons, his former work colleague. The two men worked together at PayPal before the company was bought by eBay.
The story of Yelp’s beginnings starts with a bad cold. Stoppelman was sick and frustrated with the process of trying to find a doctor on the internet. At the time, he was a part of the startup incubator MRL Ventures with Simmons, and the two started brainstorming ideas on better ways to find doctors and other service providers.
“Back then, there was very little information on the Internet; it was frustrating. We realized the best way to find a doctor, or other services, was by word of mouth,” Stoppelman told The Wall Street Journal in 2012.
PayPal co-founder Max Levchin put up a $1 million investment to help Stoppelman and Simmons get Yelp off the ground.
Stoppelman was part of the “PayPal Mafia.”
Stoppelman, Simmons, and Levchin were all part of the “PayPal Mafia,” a group of former PayPal employees and founders who went on to start other tech companies. Other members of the PayPal Mafia include Elon Musk (Tesla), Jawed Karim (YouTube), Peter Thiel (Palantir Technologies), and Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn).
After getting his bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Stoppelman went to work as an engineer at X.com, which would eventually become PayPal. He left PayPal in 2003 after the eBay acquisition.
Does Stoppelman own Yelp?
Stoppelman owned Yelp up until the company went public in March 2012. Search engine giant Google approached Stoppelman in 2010 about buying Yelp. Apple founder Steve Jobs called Stoppelman personally to urge him to decline Google’s offer, the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2012.
“Yelp's continued success as an independent company suggests we made the right choice, and nothing is more rewarding than charting your own course,” Stoppelman told the WSJ about his decision to turn down Google. He had made the decision even before getting the call from Jobs. “The focus for me was always about passion around the problem — connecting people around small local businesses. That's important. It was never going to become just an economic entity that we would sell to the highest bidder.