The Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes put Andy Bechtolsheim's net worth at about $28.9 billion in 2025, ranking him 68th in the world. Most of it comes from his stake in Arista Networks, where he is chief architect and chairman.
His wealth began with technology companies he helped build. He was employee number one at Sun Microsystems, which he co-founded in 1982 with Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla and Bill Joy. In 1995 he founded Granite Systems, a Gigabit Ethernet switch maker that Cisco bought in 1996 for $220 million. He owned 60 percent.
In September 1998 he and David Cheriton invested $100,000 in Google before it had been incorporated. At Google's IPO the stake was worth at least $1 billion. The widely repeated claim that he coined the name Google is not true, though he did push the founders to incorporate under it.
Bechtolsheim and Cheriton founded Arastra in 2005 after selling their earlier company Kealia to Sun in 2004. It became Arista Networks, which listed on the NYSE in June 2014. Arista reported revenue of about $9.0 billion and net income of about $3.5 billion in 2025, and its market value was $201.08 billion on 6 November 2026, according to companiesmarketcap.com.