About
Christopher Ashton Kutcher, born Feb. 7, 1978, has juggled an A-list acting career with a thriving stint as a tech investor and philanthropist. First, audiences chuckled at his lovable goofball Michael Kelso on That ’70s Show, and next they watched him slip into Steve Jobs’s black turtleneck in the 2013 biopic Jobs. Off-screen, he co-founded Sound Ventures, a firm that has quietly put hundreds of millions of dollars into companies shaping artificial intelligence and consumer tech.
Today Kutcher is as likely to appear on a conference stage discussing startups as he is to show up on a red carpet. He has an estimated net worth north of $355 million, driven not just by Hollywood paychecks but by early bets on Airbnb, Uber, Spotify, and, more recently, AI innovators like Hugging Face.
Before Fame
Kutcher spent his childhood in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, growing extremely close to fraternal twin brother Michael, who was born with cerebral palsy and eventually needed a heart transplant. His parents, Diane and Larry, instilled in him a spirit of resilience, and Ashton frequently attributes Michael’s medical struggles as the catalyst for his initial fascination with science.
Following high school he had signed up at the University of Iowa to pursue biochemical engineering, with the goal of assisting in finding heart disease treatments. A talent agent from his own neighborhood caught sight of him at a modeling contest in 1997; before long he was on his way to New York, signing with an agency and trading lab goggles for casting calls. A year later he’d be cast as Kelso on That ’70s Show.
Trivia
- Venture Visionary: Sound Ventures, the firm he runs with music executive Guy Oseary, closed a dedicated $243 million AI fund in 2023 and has since expanded it beyond $260 million, backing startups from OpenAI to emerging players like Landbase.
- Guest Shark: Kutcher brought a fresh — and often humorous — perspective as a guest investor on Shark Tank during the show’s seventh season premiere in 2015.
- Advocate Against Exploitation: In 2009 he co-founded the nonprofit Thorn, which develops tech to fight child sexual abuse material online. He stepped down as board chair in 2023 after backlash over character-reference letters written for former co-star Danny Masterson, saying he didn’t want the controversy to distract from Thorn’s mission.
- Practical Joker: Long before social media pranks, Kutcher hosted MTV’s hidden-camera series Punk’d, catching celebrities off guard and turning “You’ve been punk’d!” into an early-2000s catchphrase.
- Health Hurdles: While preparing for the film Jobs, he adopted a strict fruit-only diet that landed him in the hospital with pancreatitis, a lesson he now jokes about when discussing extreme method acting.
Family Life
Kutcher’s initial celebrity marriage was to Demi Moore in 2005; the two parted ways six years later and divorced in 2013. In 2015, he wed his former That ’70s Show co-star Mila Kunis in an intimate ceremony at Oak Glen, California.
The couple keep their kids — daughter Wyatt Isabelle (born 2014) and son Dimitri Portwood (born 2016) — mostly private, making only the occasional humorous anecdote about parenting on podcasts or social media. Their relaxed strategy even created an online controversy in 2021 when they confessed they don’t plan daily baths for the children unless “you can see the dirt.”
Associated With
- Mila Kunis: Beyond their on-screen teen romance as Jackie and Kelso, Kunis and Kutcher have teamed up for Super Bowl commercials and charity campaigns, including a 2022 fundraiser that sent millions to help refugees from Kunis’s native Ukraine.
- Guy Oseary & Effie Epstein: As co-managing partners at Sound Ventures, they share credit (and frequent panel appearances) for the firm’s growing AI-focused portfolio.
- Shark Tank Cohort: Throughout his time in the tank, Kutcher sat next to Mark Cuban, Lori Greiner, Kevin O’Leary, Barbara Corcoran, and Robert Herjavec, providing entrepreneurs with star power and Silicon Valley smarts.
- Human-Rights Partners: Although he has stepped down from Thorn’s board, he is still associated with groups fighting exploitation online and frequently works with policy makers and technology companies to advocate for greater protections for children.
