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Jim Clark: The Comeback Billionaire Who Bet On Apple

This article is more than 10 years old.

In 2009, a whopping 332 people were wiped off the Forbes Billionaires List, largely due to the financial crisis that began in the fall of 2008. Among the casualties was former Stanford professor Jim Clark, who made his name founding two companies: Silicon Graphics and Netscape Communications.

After three years in exile in the realm of nine-figure fortunes, Clark is back on the Forbes Billionaires List this year, cracking the $1 billion threshold thanks to super successful bets on some of Silicon Valley's biggest companies. (His net worth is an estimated $1 billion.) The 67-year-old father of a newborn baby girl is taking things a bit easier these days, spending his time on his yacht, Athena, writing code and programming all things Apple.

An old Valley hand, Clark has been using his technical insights and deep pockets to muscle his money into some of the most established social media and technology companies.

He's also investing in Apple.

Clark voraciously began buying into  Apple in February 2009, when shares cost just under $100. His most recent purchase was Tuesday this week, when snapped up $20 million more shares of the Cupertin0, Calif.-based company. On Wednesday, the stock closed at $530.69, up 0.08% vs. Tuesday after Apple unveiled its new iPad and AppleTV earlier in the morning.

"I've eked my way up after losing quite a bit of money in 2008," Clark says via phone from his Florida office.

After peaking in 2008 on Forbes' annual Billionaires List with a net worth of $1.4 billion, Clark toppled from his perch the following year. He first appeared on the Forbes 400 list, which ranks the United States' 400 wealthiest individuals, in 2006. This year, he clocks in just at the cusp with a $1 billion fortune.

Looking back on his investment in Apple in 2009, Clark, a computer whiz who has been programming for over 45 years, says he was "going out on a limb." He had only just began writing code for his iPhone less than a year before and "thought of phones like everyone else."

After writing programs as a hobby for the iPhone, the former Stanford computer science professor began to realize the gadget's intrinsic value, which he says is grounded Apple's 1997 acquisition of NeXT. "Well into programming [the iPhone], I realized tremendous value from their acquisition of NeXT," he says. "It's very hard to explain to people who don’t program, but the object-oriented programming system made programming the Mac and iPhone so easy." The iPhone is a manifestation of NeXT's fundamental importance, says Clark, the intersection of hardware and an elegant operating system.

Apple's acquisition of NeXT is written in company lore, as it reintroduced cofounder Steve Jobs into the fold of a then-struggling Apple. Jobs provided the will. For Clark, NeXT provided the technical ingenuity and cutting-edge platform that the company needed.

After realizing, beginning in 2009, that no company could compete with Apple's jack-of-all-phones, Clark went on an Apple share-buying bonanza. He also began shorting the stock of traditional handset manufacturers--among them Palm, whose operating system he calls "a relative toy." "I had a huge short again Blackberry," he says, adding that other companies he shorted included  Nokia, Erisson and Motorola. Clark calls Windows' attempt to break into the phone industry "brain-dead."

Clark says he expects Apple to hit a market capitalization of $1 trillion within the next three years, citing the large population of the world that Apple is just starting to sell to, including China.

  The Netscape cofounder also likes his social media. He's invested $40 million in Facebook and $30 million Twitter, though he calls the latter a much riskier bet because it hasn't found a way to monetize their operations.

With Facebook, Clark sees great value in the size of the company's user base, which is about 845 million active monthly user's according to an S-1 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in February. He said that the company's potential $100 billion valuation is very possible.

"It's become such a pervasively used thing I feel like they'd really have to stumble to make it really not worth that," Clark says.

If Facebook does reach the $100 billion mark, expect Clark, who also has 40,000 bottles of Burgundy wine and a vast art collection, to be on our list of billionaires for many years to come.

Follow me on Twitter at @RMac18.