Shuttleworth made his money in 1999 when he sold his first company, Thawte, to VeriSign for a reported $570 million. He gained worldwide fame 2002 when he paid to fly into space with the Russian cosmonauts. (Rumor is, it cost him $20 million.)

As of 2013, he's guided Canonical into a $66 million private company mostly by selling its flavor of Linux software and its version of cloud computing software to enterprises.

But it's known in the Linux world for its PC software, called Ubuntu. Ubuntu is an easy-to-use Linux alternative to Mac or Windows popular with those who want to use free and open-source software, but don't want to hack everything together on their own.