Page 26 - Forbes - USA (March 2020)

New Billionaire
Book Value
Leaders from the worlds
of business, academia, QUID PRO . . . WHOA!
entertainment and
24 politics share what’s on
their bedside table.
George Kurtz has struck it rich with CrowdStrike—
despite a trumped-up allegation about his cybersecurity
R
E company from the 45th president.
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O Tory Burch
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F Fashion Mogul
A LIFE
by Simone Veil

It’s hard to imagine that
I didn’t know about the
French politician Simone
Veil until she died, at 89, in
2017. But when I read her
obituary, I knew I wanted
to learn more. She led
an extraordinary life. So
I bought her memoir, A
Life (Editions Stock, 2007),
which was translated into
English by Tamsin Black.
Veil is considered one of the year ago, the world didn’t really know much about CrowdStrike, and
heroines of modern France.

Her journey is both surprising A George Kurtz, the cybersecurity firm’s cofounder, was perfectly happy
and inspiring: She was an with that. This all changed in September when a redacted transcript of
Auschwitz survivor, but her President Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky
brother and parents were
killed in the Holocaust. She became public. In it, the two men discussed CrowdStrike, which had
trained as a lawyer and been hired by the Democratic National Committee to investigate Russian hacking dur-
became a renegade fighter, ing the 2016 election, and Trump pushed Zelensky to investigate the firm, claiming it

in a Catholic country, for a
woman’s right to choose. She had stashed a DNC server in Ukraine.
managed to win over a na- “I didn’t think when we started a company, we’d be mentioned by two heads of state,” PHOTOGRAPH BY TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD FOR FORBES; ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID MAHONEY
tion and change the course NEW BILLIONAIRE BY ANGEL AU-YEUNG; BUY HOLD SELL BY CHRISTIAN KREZNAR
of history. I found her life sighs Kurtz, 49, who says his company did nothing wrong—and never set up a server
and the way she wrote about in Ukraine. “The best thing for us is to keep our heads down and focus on stopping
it fascinating, so I’ve been breaches. The rest of it is kind of noise.”
recommending her book
often. It seems that every- When clients like the DNC hire CrowdStrike, the Sunnyvale, California, company

one is used to men “making” deploys its cloud-based breach-detection software, called Falcon, to scan for hackers.
history; I’m very interested This can be a lucrative endeavor. CrowdStrike can be hired for one-off, bespoke inves-

in attempting to recalibrate

that. Veil stood up for what tigations—as with the DNC—but a 4,000-company client roster that includes Amazon
she believed in—and in turn and Credit Suisse pay a monthly $6.99 per computer to keep Falcon monitoring their
changed life for women
in France. systems. All this work should amount to $465 million in revenue during CrowdStrike’s

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