On July 1st 2026, at the sound of the bell on Wall Street which starts the stock market prices, a few hundred young people who find themselves working in Via Bonnet in Milan – aged between 30 and 40 – suddenly found themselves millionaires. To be precise, they are those who that day had in their hands at least 35 thousand shares of the Bending Spoons company, the Italian unicorn that landed on the Nasdaq by selling its shares at 29 dollars each, which is the highest listing of an Italian company for years now. The latest of some importance after that of Nexi in 2019, which raised 2.3 billion euros from investors on Piazza Affari.
Two billion dollars for each founder
All this meant, at the listing price, a fortune of 2.4 billion dollars (approximately 2.25 billion euros) for the company’s president and frontman Luca Ferrari, according to the package of shares currently held. For Patarnello, Danieli and Querella – the other three founders – a wealth slightly lower but still above the bar of 2 billion dollars.
If the four are now billionaires – and without having inherited industrial empires -, behind them there is an army of young collaborators who have benefited from this share price.