Eduardo Saverin was pushed out of Facebook and is now worth $32.4 billion

Eduardo Saverin was removed from Facebook before it was worth anything. He sued, settled, and kept about 2% of the company.

That stake is now worth $32.4 billion, according to Bloomberg, making him the wealthiest person in Brazil, the richest resident of Singapore and the third-wealthiest individual in Latin America. Forbes has put him between $33 billion and $36 billion during August, with the variation reflecting daily movements in Meta Platforms shares, which remain the source of almost all his money.

He was 19 when he agreed to fund Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, providing the initial capital that let the company launch, and he served as its first chief financial officer. The falling out came in 2005. His shareholding was diluted and he was pushed out of the company, and the litigation that followed restored a meaningful position. The 2010 film The Social Network dramatised the dispute, with Andrew Garfield playing him.

Facebook's 2012 listing converted what he kept into billions, and Meta's growth since has compounded it every year.

He was born in São Paulo in March 1982 to Roberto Saverin, a businessman who worked across clothing, shipping, energy and real estate, and Sandra, a psychologist. The family emigrated to Miami in 1993, where he attended prep school before going to Harvard and taking a degree in economics.

Singapore has been home since 2009, and he renounced his American citizenship two years later, ahead of the Facebook listing. The decision drew heavy criticism in the United States at the time. He has not moved since, and he owns a Good Class Bungalow on Nassim Road, among the most restricted residential addresses in the country.

The second business is the one he actually runs. Saverin co-founded B Capital in 2015 with Raj Ganguly, a veteran of Boston Consulting Group and Bain Capital, and the firm now manages more than $12 billion across healthcare technology, financial services, enterprise software and consumer technology in the United States, Asia and Europe. It raised a further $500 million in July for early-stage investing.

Its Asia-Pacific focus gives him direct exposure to the technology markets of Southeast Asia, India and China, which he has been inside since moving to Singapore.

Almost none of this happens in public. Saverin runs no listed company, gives few interviews and has built no media presence of the kind most fortunes his size attract.

The exception came last month. Fenway Sports Group announced on Aug. 14 that it had signed a definitive agreement to sell a minority stake in Liverpool to 1892 Holdings, a consortium fronted by the British-Indian entrepreneur Amit Bhatia and including Saverin and Jeff Bezos. The buyers took more than 30% of the club at a valuation of roughly $6 billion, against the $400 million Fenway paid for it in 2010. Bhatia, a son-in-law of the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, co-owned Queens Park Rangers for eighteen years before leaving recently. It is Bezos's first investment in football.

Saverin is 44, married to Elaine Andriejanssen since 2015, and has one child.

The stake he was pushed out of trying to keep has outlasted almost every argument about whether he deserved it.