Andrew Mason Net Worth

What Is Andrew Mason's Net Worth and Salary?

Andrew Mason is an American entrepreneur and musician who has a net worth of $200 million.

Andrew Mason is best known as the founder and former CEO of Groupon, the online daily-deals company that became one of the fastest-growing businesses in internet history. Groupon grew out of Mason's earlier collective-action website, The Point, and expanded from a small Chicago operation into an international company with thousands of employees. Its extraordinary rise led Google to offer approximately $6 billion to acquire the company in 2010. Groupon rejected the offer and completed a blockbuster IPO the following year, briefly making Mason a billionaire on paper.

Groupon's public-market success did not last. The company struggled with accounting problems, slowing growth, heavy competition, and concerns about whether daily deals were sustainable. Mason was fired as CEO in 2013 after Groupon had lost most of its peak market value. He subsequently returned to his musical interests, created the audio-tour company Detour, and founded Descript, an artificial intelligence-powered platform for editing audio and video. Mason served as Descript's CEO before becoming executive chairman in 2025.

At Mason's request, his annual Groupon salary was reduced to just $756.72 in 2011. When he was fired, his cash severance amounted to approximately $378.36, representing six months of salary.

Early Life

Andrew Mason was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the nearby suburb of Mount Lebanon. His father was a diamond salesman, while his mother operated a photography business.

Mason showed an entrepreneurial streak at an early age. When he was 15, he started Bagel Express, a Saturday-morning bagel delivery service for residents of his neighborhood.

After graduating from Mount Lebanon High School, Mason attended Northwestern University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in music in 2003. He played in bands, studied piano, and worked at Chicago recording studio Electrical Audio under producer and engineer Steve Albini.

Mason later worked as a web developer for InnerWorkings, a company founded by Chicago entrepreneur Eric Lefkofsky. He briefly enrolled in a public policy graduate program at the University of Chicago before leaving to pursue his first major internet business.

The Point and Groupon

With $1 million in financial backing from Lefkofsky, Mason launched The Point, a website designed to help groups organize around charitable, political, and social causes. Campaigns would only proceed once enough people pledged their support.

The broad concept proved difficult to market, but one part of the site showed promise: organizing groups of consumers who wanted to receive discounts from local businesses. Mason and his colleagues separated the idea into a new service called Groupon, a combination of the words "group" and "coupon."

Groupon launched in Chicago in 2008. Its first promotion offered two pizzas for the price of one at a restaurant located in the same building as the company's offices.

The business expanded at an extraordinary pace. Groupon offered subscribers deeply discounted restaurant meals, spa treatments, events, vacations, and other products and services. The company collected money from consumers and shared the proceeds with participating merchants.

By 2010, Groupon was operating internationally and generating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. Google offered to acquire the company for around $6 billion, but Groupon's founders and investors chose to remain independent.

Groupon went public in November 2011. The IPO priced shares at $20 and raised $700 million, making it the largest American internet offering since Google's IPO seven years earlier.

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Net Worth Rise & Fall

Before Groupon became a public company, it completed a financing round of approximately $950 million. Around $810 million of that money was used to purchase shares from founders, executives, employees, and early investors rather than fund Groupon's operations.

Mason sold around $28 million worth of shares through pre-IPO transactions. Lefkofsky and entities controlled by his family collected nearly $400 million.

When Groupon completed its IPO, Mason controlled approximately 43.6 million shares. The stock was priced at $20, opened for trading at $28, and reached an early high of $31.14. At that peak price, Mason's stake was worth approximately $1.36 billion, making him a billionaire on paper.

The rejection of Google's $6 billion offer initially appeared to have been an excellent decision. Groupon entered the public market with a valuation that exceeded $12 billion and briefly approached $20 billion.

However, the company soon faced accounting revisions, regulatory scrutiny, rising expenses, disappointing earnings, and declining enthusiasm for daily deals. Groupon shares lost more than 80% of their value during Mason's final years as CEO.

By the time Mason was fired in February 2013, his remaining shares were worth around $200 million. The roughly $1 billion decline in his fortune represented the disappearance of paper wealth rather than the loss of $1 billion in cash. Mason had already secured tens of millions of dollars by selling stock before the IPO.

Groupon filings showed that Mason's disclosed holdings had declined to approximately 19 million shares by early 2014, less than half the number he controlled at the IPO. After his ownership fell below the level requiring continued public disclosure, the precise size and eventual disposition of his Groupon stake became unknown.

Departure from Groupon

Groupon's board fired Mason as CEO on February 28, 2013, following another disappointing earnings report. Mason responded with an unusually direct letter to employees in which he acknowledged that he had been fired and accepted responsibility for the company's problems.

His unconventional response reflected the sense of humor that had defined his tenure. Mason had cultivated a deliberately eccentric public image and frequently mocked the formal language and traditions associated with corporate management.

Several months after leaving Groupon, he released "Hardly Workin'," a seven-song album of motivational business music. The songs offered management advice about leadership, communication, goal setting, and office culture.

Detour and Descript

Mason returned to entrepreneurship with Detour, a mobile application that provided immersive, location-aware audio tours. The tours combined narration, interviews, music, and sound effects, automatically progressing as listeners walked through cities and historic locations.

Detour launched in 2015 and expanded to several cities. Bose acquired the company's software and audio-tour library in 2018.

While developing Detour, Mason's team created technology that allowed audio producers to edit recordings by changing a written transcript. That technology became the foundation for Descript, which launched as an independent company in 2017.

Descript expanded from transcription and podcast editing into a broader audio and video production platform. Its tools allow users to remove words, rearrange clips, eliminate filler phrases, improve sound quality, generate captions, record screens, and create synthetic speech by editing text.

The company raised $50 million in a 2022 funding round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, bringing its total financing to approximately $100 million. The round valued Descript at around $550 million.

Mason remained Descript's CEO until 2025, when product executive Laura Burkhauser succeeded him. He transitioned to the position of executive chairman.

Personal Life

Andrew is married to singer-songwriter Jenny Gillespie Mason, and they have two sons. The family has lived in Berkeley, California.

Music has remained a significant part of Mason's life outside of technology. In addition to releasing "Hardly Workin'," he has played piano and accordion and contributed to recordings by his wife.

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