John Hennessy Biography and Net Worth

John Hennessy is the current chairman of Alphabet. 

Hennessy is perhaps best known for his leadership at Stanford University, where he has spent most of his career, serving as president from 2000 to 2016. 

In 1977, he became an assistant professor at Stanford, and in 1983, he was promoted to associate professor. In 1986, he was awarded the inaugural title of the Willard and Inez Kerr Bell Endowed Chair. Hennessy gained fame at the university and across the country, for his work on computer architecture, namely reduced instruction set computer architecture (RISC). 

In 1983, Hennessy’s Stanford team developed a prototype MIPS chip. To continue this chip’s advancement, he co-founded the MIPS Computer Systems while on sabbatical from Stanford in 1984. He served for eight years as the company’s chief scientist, and spent six more as its chief architect. MIPS was later acquired by Silicon Graphics, and its high-performance graphics workstations were relied upon heavily by Hollywood in the late 1980s and 1990s. 

By 1998, Hennessy had co-founded another company, Atheros Communications, a pioneer in Wi-Fi technology. He served as chairman of its board until 2010. 

In 2000, he was named Stanford’s tenth president. During his 16-year tenure as president, Hennessy championed building projects, improved the performing arts presence at the university, and made Stanford more affordable and accessible. While he was president, Stanford’s financial aid program became one of the strongest in the nation. 70 new buildings were built from 2000 to 2016—including the addition of new performance and exhibition spaces for students. Upon his retirement, Hennessy became the inaugural director of the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program which awards select students full funding to pursue a graduate or professional degree in any of the university’s seven schools. 

Hennessy currently serves on the boards of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Cisco Systems and Alphabet, where he is chairman of the board. He has co-authored two internationally-used textbooks on computer architecture with David Patterson. 

The recipient of numerous awards and honors, Hennessy’s contribution to the worlds of computer architecture and Stanford University are immeasurable. In 2012, he received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Medal of Honor, its highest award. In 2017, he was given the ACM Turing Prize, along with David Patterson. Other awards include, the 2000 John von Neumann Medal, the 2001 Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, the 2004 NEC C&C prize for lifetime achievement in computer science and engineering, and the 2001 Eckert-Mauchly Award from the Association for Computing Machinery.

He is a member of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He also holds 10 honorary doctorate degrees. 

Hennessy received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Villanova University and his master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science from Stony Brook University.