“I’m not a billionaire, I’m a multimillionaire,” Perkins said in a January 2014 interview with Bloomberg Television’s Emily Chang. “I’ve created some billionaires, but I unfortunately am not one.”
In January 2014, he caused an uproar after writing a letter published in the Wall Street Journal in which he compared the “demonization” of the wealthy 1 percent of Americans to Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where he was a partner emeritus, distanced itself from the comments and said Perkins hadn’t been involved with the firm “in years.”
With his first wife, the former Gerd Thune-Ellefsen, Perkins had a son, Tor Kristian, and a daughter, Elizabeth Siri. Thune-Ellefsen died in 1994. He married Steel in 1998 and divorced the following year, according to Marquis Who’s Who.