The stock photography business has its first billionaire.
Bloomberg news reported that last week Jonathan Oringer, the founder of
Shutterstock Inc. (SSTK) became a billionaire. Oringer owns 18.5 million shares of Shutterstock, or 55 percent of the outstanding shares. Last week shares of the company reached a record high of $56.44. Today, shares are trading at around $56 per share which makes Oringer’s holding worth in excess of one billion dollars.
The value of Shutterstock has more than tripled since selling shares in an initial public offering last October. Bloomberg reports that according to Andre Sequin, an analyst at RBC Capital Market, Oringer is the first billionaire to be created in Silicon Alley, a collection of technology startups in New York.
In an interview at his 34th floor office in New York’s financial district last month Oringer said, “I’ve never been very flashy or high-profile, I’ve always stayed under the radar.”
While Getty Images is larger than Shutterstock in terms of gross annual sales, the holdings of the company are much more widely disbursed and the company has much greater debt than Shutterstock. It is believed that neither Mark Getty nor Jonathan Klein have anything approaching one billion dollars in terms of personal assets.