Michael Moritz: The richest Welshman to walk the Earth

Michael Moritz, chairman of Sequoia Capital LLC

(Image credit: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Michael Moritz, arguably “the richest Welshman to have walked the Earth”, made his fortune via investments in tiny companies that later grew into Google, PayPal and LinkedIn, says The Times. Although no longer running Sequoia – he quit as a partner of the venture-capital firm in 2023 after 38 years – he retains a benign view of Silicon Valley and its tycoons, with most of whom he’s on first-name terms. “If you think of who’s done more to increase prosperity in the United States – Silicon Valley or the US government – it’s clearly Silicon Valley… Imagine what would happen if the lights were turned off at Alphabet and Amazon and Meta.”

No fan of Donald Trump, whom he dismisses as “an absurd buffoon”, Moritz says he “made the case as politely as possible” to friends in the venture-capital industry that “character comes first when you pick a leader”. But it “fell on deaf ears”. He is nonetheless sceptical about suggestions that the tech industry cheered on the US president’s second election. There were a few people “who had loud megaphones on social media”, he says, but most tech moguls are simply trying “to weather” Trump. “He’s running a protection racket and they’ve got to pay for protection.”

Moritz, 71, who was born in Cardiff to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, has just published “a powerful family memoir” titled Ausländer, says the Financial Times. “Anyone hoping for an inside account” of his prescient investments at Sequoia will be disappointed. “Moritz’s California self” – as represented by the colossal paintings by abstract artists on his walls – is only “dimly glimpsed” as a counterpoint to the darkness of his family’s past. The book is both a Holocaust story and an examination of the present. “Occasionally I receive reminders that, because of my ethnicity, others are eager to hasten my demise,” he writes of the anti-semitic hate mail that occasionally reaches his San Francisco home.

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Moritz’s account starts with his parents, who were sent to the UK from Germany in the 1930s and eventually settled in South Wales, where his father became a professor at Cardiff University, says Wales Online. Their childhood experiences left them with a constant “fear of having the rug ripped out from underneath you”, Moritz told The Times. Like his father, he was very able academically – studying history at Christ Church, Oxford, and later winning a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. But he claims his parents “always felt that either I was crooked or extremely lucky”. Had he ever been investigated as an investor, “my mother would have been calling to offer witnesses to the SEC about her son’s appalling character”. As a young man, Moritz shrugged it off – beginning his career as a journalist on Time magazine. A subsequent book about the creation of Apple, based on interviews with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, caught the attention of Sequoia. He joined the firm and swiftly emerged as one of the most successful venture capitalists in the Valley.

What is Michael Moritz doing now?

Now worth more than £4billion, Moritz and his novelist/sculptor wife Harriet recently pledged $9million to the city of San Francisco to fund food benefits shut down by Trump. He also finances The San Francisco Standard, a newspaper he co-founded. In Britain, the couple supports the Booker literature prize and funds bursaries for low-income students at Oxford. They recently chipped in £150million to fund a new wing of the National Gallery. Still, Moritz is assailed by a growing sense of unease, seeing the UK as an increasingly “hostile place” for Jews. Although he holds both British and US passports, he has also applied for German citizenship, citing an “emotional connection”. It’s also a bleak nod to the past. “I think the lesson I’ve learnt is that you can never have enough passports.”

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.