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Andreas von Bechtolsheim
Status
Born in 1955 (age –). Living in California.
Criminal status: Settled SEC civil insider-trading charges in March 2024 without admitting or denying wrongdoing, agreeing to pay $923,740 and to a five-year bar from serving as an officer or director of any public company. SEC press release.
Summary
Andreas "Andy" von Bechtolsheim is a German-born electrical engineer, entrepreneur, and investor who co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and served as its chief hardware designer. He was one of the first two investors in Google, writing a $100,000 check to Larry Page and Sergey Brin in September 1998 before the company was legally incorporated, an investment Forbes reports is the largest source of his fortune.
He later founded Granite Systems (sold to Cisco in 1996) and Kealia (sold back to Sun in 2004), and in 2004 co-founded Arista Networks, a high-speed data-center networking company, where he served as Chairman and Chief Development Officer until December 2023. He now holds the non-executive title of Founder and Chief Architect at Arista.
In April 2011, Bechtolsheim joined Facebook, Intel, Rackspace, and Goldman Sachs as a founding board member of the Open Compute Project, an industry initiative to openly share data-center hardware designs rather than keep them proprietary. He remains the project's individual board member today.
Ownership
Bechtolsheim holds roughly a 15-17% stake in Arista Networks through the Bechtolsheim Family Trust, according to Bloomberg's billionaire profile citing the company's 2025 proxy statement. He resigned as Arista's Chairman and Chief Development Officer in December 2023 and, following his SEC settlement, is barred from serving as an officer or director of any public company for five years.
Family & Heirs
Bechtolsheim's Forbes profile lists his marital status as single. The SEC's 2024 insider-trading complaint recorded that he placed the Acacia trades through the brokerage accounts of a close relative and an associate.
Evidence
Analysis
Bechtolsheim's documented record centers on a single 2024 SEC "shadow trading" case: he traded Acacia Communications options through a relative's and an associate's accounts after learning, through Arista's own business dealings, that Cisco was preparing to acquire Acacia. The SEC's complaint notes the trades produced $415,726 in combined profit, a sum he settled for more than double without admitting wrongdoing.
His domicile move to Nevada, reported as tax-motivated and made as he was exiting Arista's public-company officer roles under the SEC ban, eliminated California income and capital-gains tax exposure on his unrealized equity position. Separately, Arista paid Cisco $400 million in 2018 to settle a multi-year patent and copyright suit alleging the company Bechtolsheim chaired had copied Cisco's networking technology rather than building it independently.
Questions
Bechtolsheim's own trading profit in the SEC case was small relative to his net worth, raising the question of how personal financial temptation functions at extreme wealth levels versus the structural choice to route trades through other people's accounts. Separately, the 2018 Cisco settlement was a company-level judgment against Arista rather than a personal finding against Bechtolsheim individually, though he chaired the company throughout the litigation.