Larsen is chairman and co-founder of Ripple Labs, a blockchain payments company. The San Francisco-based startup was valued at $40 billion in a November 2025 funding round. It allows for the immediate settlement of bank transfers and securities trades by utilizing its own cryptocurrency known as XRP.
The majority of Larsen's fortune is derived from his interests in Ripple, a blockchain payments company. Ripple raised $500 million at a $40 billion valuation in November 2025, according to a Bloomberg News report.
Larsen is credited in this analysis with an 18% stake in Ripple. It's valued based on price implied by the November 2025 funding round.
He also owns 2.65 billion XRP tokens. XRP is the digital asset used to complete transactions on Ripple's blockchain. The base valuation of his tokens was calculated on April 29, 2026 and is adjusted to reflect the performance of the Bloomberg XRP Index.
Outside of his Ripple-related holdings, Larsen also has investments of around $2.1 billion, the entrepreneur confirmed to Bloomberg, and these are included in this analysis at that amount.
Chris Larsen was born in San Francisco in 1960 and grew up in Cupertino, California.
The son of an airline mechanic, he was in the first generation of his family to go to college. He initially enrolled at San Jose State University to study aeronautics before deciding to pursue a business degree instead. He transferred to San Francisco State university and graduated in 1984 with degrees in accounting and business administration.
He worked as a financial auditor for Chevron after graduation, later attending Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and obtaining an MBA in 1991. He co-founded E-Loan Inc., the first company to put consumer credit scores on the internet in 1996. In 2005, he sold it to the Puerto Rican bank, Popular Inc. in a $300 million deal. Soon after, he started his next fintech company, Prosper, a group-lending platform inspired by his wife's upbringing in Cambodia.
A few months after leaving Prosper in 2012, Larsen co-founded the company OpenCoin, which would become known as Ripple, alongside Jed McCaleb, David Schwartz and Arthur Britto. The company was designed as an easy way to facilitate cross-border payments using the XRP token. Larsen holds both a stake in Ripple Labs, the company, and XRP tokens. He served as CEO of the company until 2016, when he became executive chairman.
Larsen is an active political donor and philanthropist. In April 2019, he and his wife Lyna Tam gave San Francisco State University $25 million to endow the Lam Family College of Business.