For Okta CEO Todd McKinnon, the company’s first quarter results could not have gone any better. The firm, which runs a user authentication platform for tens of thousands of institutions, beat Wall Street’s revenue and earnings estimates results in late May. Most important was one of its reasons for the success: the company said it was seeing increasing demand for identity tools from the rise of AI agents.

Investors took note. The stock gained 8% that day—and has continued to surge since, up about 50% through July. That’s enough to make McKinnon a billionaire, according to calculations by Forbes. It’s not his first time: McKinnon was a billionaire in 2021 and 2022 thanks to a surge in software stocks during the time, but saw his fortune tumble as part of a broad selloff that erased billions of dollars from technology valuations. Now another boom, AI, has thrust him back into the three-comma club.

McKinnon was born in Fremont, a small town just outside San Jose, California where his father worked as a human resources executive. Because his family did not own a computer, he spent a lot of time at a friend’s place whose data scientist father owned a PC, honing his skills. In 1993, he graduated from Brigham Young University with a business degree, then California Polytechnic State in 1995 with a Master’s in computer........

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