Who wants to be a billionaire? Tech wonder David Karp, evidently.
The 26-year-old tech wonder, a high school dropout from New York, is now on his way to becoming a billionaire thanks to the all-cash deal.
The plucky, 26-year-old Tumblr founder has sold his popular blogging platform to tech behemoth Yahoo for an amazing $1.1 billion, news site AllThingsD reported Sunday.
The deal is bound to make boatloads of dough for the native New Yorker and high school dropout, while cementing his place among the growing pantheon of celebrated tech entrepreneurs, like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“This is obviously a validation of David’s efforts,” said Sree Sreenivasan, the chief digital officer at Columbia University. “It’s also a validation of New York as an environment to nurture and grow startups.”
The move also appears to reflect a change of heart for the budding tech maven, who until last year publicly opposed peddling his social media site to turn a quick buck.
Karp, who grew up on the upper West Side, began noodling with computer code when he was 11 and launched his own consulting business soon thereafter.
The boy wonder spent only one year at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science and thumbed his nose at attending college.
After bouncing around Japan, Karp began tinkering with Tumblr inside his mother’s tiny apartment in 2007. His office has since moved to the Flatiron District.
Karp, an avid Vespa rider, nested with his girlfriend Rachel Eakley, a grad student and chef, in a modest West Village apartment until last year. But he now lives in a luxury $1.6 million loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Apparently, it’s not cluttered. “I don’t have any books. I don’t have many clothes,” Karp told Forbes. “I’m always so surprised when people fill their homes up with stuff,” Karp told Forbes.
His microblogging site — which allows users to quickly post pictures, text and video — has surged to more than 100 million users, who upload 90 million posts per day.
It is especially popular among a younger demographic — making Tumblr attractive to Yahoo.
With a value of around $800 million, Tumblr trails far behind Facebook, whose elusive value is somewhere in the tens of billions of dollars.
Still, the deal marks the biggest acquisition for Yahoo since CEO Marissa Mayer took the helm of the company last year. The web pioneer has gobbled up several other small start-ups, including Propeld, Summly and OnTheAir
