Jaron Zepel Lanier was born on 3 May 1960, in New York City, USA, of Austrian-Jewish descent through his mother – killed in a car crash when he was 10 – and Ukrainian-Jewish through his father, severely injured in the same crash. He is a writer, composer, visual artist and computer scientist – probably best known for being a pioneer in the field of virtual reality. He founded VPL Research, Inc., selling VR goggles and gloves, the first company to do so. All of his efforts have helped put his net worth to where it is today.
How rich is Jaron Lanier? As of mid-2017, sources estimate a net worth that is at $5 million, mostly earned through a successful career in computers and music. He has helped in numerous projects for Internet2 and Microsoft, and has also composed music, plus is a collector of rare instruments. As he continues his career, it is expected that his wealth will also continue to increase.
Jaron Lanier Net Worth $5 million
Jaron attended New Mexico State University. He took graduate level courses, and received a National Science Foundation grant to study mathematical notation. He learned computer programming, but then attended art school in New York, before perhaps surprisingly working in New Mexico as a midwife for a short period of time.
Lanier then went to work for Atari, where he would meet Thomas Zimmerman, and when he lost his job after Atari was split into two companies in 1984, he focused on creating visual programming language or VPL, and he and Zimmerman founded VPL Research to focus on virtual reality technology. They had some success, increasing their net worth, however in 1990 the company went bankrupt, and their patents were bought by Sun Microsystems.
In 1997, Lanier began working for Internet2 as the Chief Scientist of Advanced Network and Services,studying advanced applications. In 2001, he became a Visiting Scientist at Silicon Graphics Inc., working there for the next three years, and concurrently he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University, and a visiting artist at New York University.
Jaron’s wrote numerous works focused on computer philosophy, including “One-Half of a Manifesto” which states that computers are unlikely to replace humans in a few decades. He’s also written on post-symbolic communication which he states is a direct behavioral expression of thought. He also criticized the collective wisdom of the internet – including websites such as Wikipedia – as tending to exaggerate details. In 2010, he wrote the book “You Are Not a Gadget” which criticizes open source and open content productions on the internet. Three years later, he wrote “Who Owns the Future?’ which explains how the middle class is disenfranchised from online economies. All apparently helped raise his net worth.
He’s also worked in the music industry, contributing to new classical music since early in his career. He writes orchestral music, and has done numerous commissions which have been played around the world. He released a classical music album entitled “Instruments of Change” and he also worked on the soundtrack of the film “Three Seasons’ utilizing a lot of Asian instruments, and for which won awards at the Sundance Film Festival. He’s also written numerous articles on music, and the state of the industry.
For his personal life, in his mid-30s he was married to Deborah for two years, but discloses no other information. It is known that Lanier is part of numerous advisory boards, including the Board of Medical Media Systems, Microdisplay Corporation, and NY3D. He also founded the National Tele-Immersion Initiative, which aims to develop computer technology to help people separated by great distances get an illusion that they are physically together.
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