Although it might seem like America is dominating the tech industry, a look into the backgrounds of international tech titans tells a different story. Hailing from Brazil to Ukraine, here are the seven surprising techies who hailed from another nation before emigrating to America.
1) Sergey Brin, Google. Mother country: Russia.
Moving to America at age 6, Brin went founded Google with Larry Page. The pair met at Stanford University in California before dropping out to create the search engine giant.
2) Mike Krieger, Instagram. Mother country: Brazil.
Moving to America when he was 22 years old, the native Brazilian is another Stanford student who went on to found a groundbreaking tech company. The photo sharing app Instagram was sold to Facebook for $1 billion in 2012. A steep sum considering the company at that time had four employees servicing 4 million users .
3) Eduardo Saverin, Facebook. Mother country: Brazil.
In one of the biggest defection stories since the Cold War, Eduardo renounced his American citizenship in 2012 in an attempt to avoid high American taxes before Facebook when public. Citizenship woes notwithstanding, the Brazilian first immigrated to the United States in 1992 and became a citizen in 1998. Soon after he was financing Facebook from Harvard's dorm rooms with Mark Zuckerberg, a story that was popularized by the movie, The Social Network .
4) Elon Musk, PayPal. Mother country: South Africa.
After living in Canada, South African playboy Elon Musk moved to America at age 17 . The PayPal co-founder became a millionaire when Ebay bought the company in 2002 . Musk then founded two more companies: Tesla, an electric carmaker and SpaceX, the first private company to send vehicles into orbit. Being a serial entrepreneur was not without benefits as Musk is now a billionaire, worth some $10.2 billion according to Forbes .
5) Jan Koum, Whatsapp. Mother country: Ukraine.
The rags-to-riches story of Whatsapp founder is been well-documented. Moving to America when he was 16 years old, the Ukrainian American worked at Yahoo before creating his own communication app.
6) Pierre Omidyar, eBay. Mother country: France.
Moving to America at age 6, Omidyar wrote code for his website, Auction Web, in 1995 when he was 28 years old . Later renaming the site eBay, the American is now worth $7.8 billion, according to Forbes . Good move on the name change.
7) Jerry Yang,Yahoo. Mother country: Taiwan.
Born in Tapei, Taiwan, Yang immigrated to America as a child after his father died. Yet another Stanford Alum, Yang co-founded Yahoo in 1995. Fun fact: Yahoo originally was an acronym for “ Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle .”