Daniel Ek is the Chairman, co-founder, and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the music streaming service Spotify. As of October 2022, Daniel's net worth is $1.8B.
Daniel Ek started his career at a very young age when he was just 13 years old. Daniel, having a keen interest in Technology, started making websites for clients from his home, and charged the first client $100 and the second $200 for their websites. Gradually, he started to charge $5,000 per website.
In an attempt to expand his business, Daniel started recruiting students from his class to work on the websites from the school computer lab by bribing them with video games. With such efforts, his earnings reached $50,000 per month. When he turned 18, Daniel was managing a team of 25 people.
Later he worked in a senior role at the Nordic auction company Tradera. He also worked as the CTO of Stardoll.
Daniel also started a company named Advertigo, an online advertising company, it was later sold to TradeDoubler in 2006.
Daniel Ek also served as the CEO of μTorrent, but for a brief period, until μTorrent was sold to BitTorrent on December 7, 2006.
Also Read | Pieter Elbers: Know the CEO of India’s Preferred Airline, IndiGo
It was in 2002 when the idea for Spotify emerged to Daniel Ek at a time when peer-to-peer music service Napster shut down and another illegal site Kazaa took over.
In October 2008, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon launched their legal music streaming service Spotify. Initially, Spotify ran on a peer-to-peer distribution model but later switched to a server-client model in 2014.
At Spotify, Ek serves as the CEO while Martin serves as the Chairman. In October 2015, Martin announced that he would be stepping down as chairman, and Daniel Ek would become the Chairman of Spotify along with his current role as CEO.
Spotify has 217 million active users, as of April 2019. As of June 2017, the company had raised over $2.5 billion in venture funding.
In 2017, Daniel Ek was named the most powerful person in the music industry by Billboard.
Recently, in May 2022, Spotify CEO invested an additional $50 million to acquire more Spotify shares.
Also Read | Mark Schneider: Know the CEO of Nestle
Daniel Ek, born on 21 February 1983, grew up in the Rågsved district of Stockholm, Sweden. He completed his graduation from high school in IT-Gymnasiet in Sundbyberg in 2002. From the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, he studied engineering but dropped out to focus on his IT career.
Daniel tied the knot to Sofia Levander in 2016. The couple is blessed with two children.
