V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai was born on 2 December 1963, in Bombay, Maharashtra, India, and is an entrepreneur and inventor, said to be the creator of an electronic inter-office mail system that would eventually be called EMAIL. He was attributed by many institutions as such, until controversy and criticism led to many retracting their claims and removing the original recognitions.
How rich is Shiva Ayyadurai? As of early-2016, sources inform us of a net worth that is at $500,000, mostly earned through a successful career in business. He has extensive academic credentials and experience, and has also worked with companies in technology and medicine. All these efforts have helped raise his wealth.
Shiva Ayyadurai Net Worth $500,000
Seven years after moving to the United States, in 1977 Shiva attended a computer programming course from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. After finishing the course, he went on and matriculated from Livingston High School while helping out at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey or UMDNJ. He attended college at MIT and finished with a degree in electrical engineering and computer sciences. He took two master’s degrees concurrently, one in visual studies and the other in mechanical engineering. By 2007, Ayyadurai finished and obtained his PhD in biological engineering. The following year, he was given a grant to study and integrate Siddha to modern medicine; Siddha is the oldest system of medicine in India.
One of the more interesting events of his school life was during 1979, in which Shiva would start working on an electronic system that was meant to emulate the paper system used by offices during that time – he coined and copyrighted the term EMAIL three years later. By 2009, Shiva was hired to work in the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research to start business plans for an upcoming company extension called CSIR Tech. The offer for Ayyadurai was suddenly withdrawn and eventually led to the two sides fighting, with the company claiming that Shiva was demanding unreasonable expenses from the company. Shiva and a few co-workers retorted, saying that the company required a fix due to bad working conditions and environments.
Shiva’s Email program would suddenly gain public recognition and eventually criticism as well, when Time Techland called Ayyadurai as the person who invented Email. Many publications and institutions including the Smithsonian supported the claim, saying that despite electronic messaging existing way before his research, he had the format, code and documents to prove that he was indeed the creator of email as we know it today. The statements by the companies and the claims made by Ayyadurai then started to be questioned and criticized by various institutions. Eventually, other publications started to argue the claims and began stating that Email was done way before Ayyadurai worked on the system. Even with the claims from Shiva and other colleagues, the criticisms proved to be substantial and it led many of the original institutions to retract their supportive statements. They would publically apologize and even MIT disassociated from funding Shiva’s EMAIL research and removed his lecturing credentials, dropping his net worth a bit.
For his personal life, Shiva married actress Fran Drescher in 2014. According to him, the ceremony was not anything like a formal wedding but many close friends and family attended the occasion.
