F1 boss Toto Wolff reveals crazy history working with 'internet hacker' from huge search engine website

Toto Wolff

F1 boss Toto Wolff reveals crazy history working with 'internet hacker' from huge search engine website

The man's got some anecdotes!

Chris Deeley

Tuesday 14 July 2026 16:45 Updated: 17:11

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Toto Wolff has amassed obscene amounts of wealth over the years in his business career, which has led with him working with some interesting characters.

Even outside of the personalities of the F1 circus, the Austrian businessman has run across some true characters via his investment companies – including a teenage hacker who he ended up going into business with.

The Bits and Pretzels conference recently posted a video of a talk Wolff had given at one of their events where he told that story, having tracked down the person who ran the biggest search engine in Austria at the time (now long-since pushed out of the market by Google, of course).

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When he met with the Austronaut founder, he discovered that the search engine was being run by a 17-year-old who was hacking systems to make the site work. Obviously, they went into business.

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Wolff explains early venture capital journey

Wolff explained: "My racing career ended because of a lack of money, I was 22. I thought well, I want to be first in starting to work. I ended up in a venture capital environment but obviously I had no capital, so it was more 'venture'.

"What I tried to do was consulting for equity. The internet started to kick off in the United States, I was there with a friend. Went back to Austria, tried to identify the players in Austria.

"There was a search engine that was called Austronaut, it had two million users out of a population of eight million. So I visited the guy who ran it, it was a 17-year-old boy from Graz. I said 'well, how do you access the SMSC servers?' and he said 'I'm hacking. They stop me every week, but then I go through another mobile provider. At the moment I'm going through Nigeria, and next week it's gonna be Norway.'

"I said if we were to put a proper company around you, if we were to raise capital of a certain valuation, I wanna have 50 per cent of the company, or 25 per cent of the company, whatever it was. Then we put a real venture capital company around, we IPO'd some of these companies, and that is truly what I love to do."

F1 Mercedes Toto Wolff