When George Kurtz acquired a minority stake in the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team, it marked more than the arrival of another American investor into a championship whose valuations have accelerated in the cost cap era.
Formula 1 has entered a period of financial maturity. Spending limits have stabilised operational losses, franchise values have climbed and the sport’s commercial footprint in the United States has expanded rapidly.
Ownership stakes are no longer paddock passes into the F1 ecosystem. They are structured investments into a performance-driven business.
Kurtz’s purchase of part of Toto Wolff’s Mercedes holding in November was not a heart-over-head decision. He had been assessing the economics of the sport for several years, observing how governance reform and cost discipline had reshaped its long-term viability.
His relationship with Wolff predated the transaction. CrowdStrike had already become embedded within Mercedes as a technology partner, operating inside the team’s performance infrastructure before ownership discussions began.
Mercedes was not actively selling equity. The transaction required alignment not only on capital but on contribution. Kurtz’s background in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and scaling a cloud-driven organisation positioned him as more than a passive shareholder.
The move deepened an existing partnership. But his path to Mercedes had begun more than a decade earlier, in circumstances that unfolded very differently.
Betting on himself
Kurtz’s career began with computers, not corporate leadership.
He was programming by fourth grade, then took a more conventional route through university, choosing accounting and starting out at Price Waterhouse before moving into cybersecurity in the early 1990s, when the web was only just emerging.
That blend of technical instinct and financial discipline became the foundation for his first company, Foundstone, which he later sold to McAfee.
A spell at McAfee followed, a period that both broadened his view of the market and sharpened his appetite to build again.
“At some point I got frustrated, I began thinking that I can do security better than a lot of the products that are out there,” Kurtz told Sector.
“That’s how I started my first company, Foundstone, in 1999, which I sold to McAfee. Then I spent seven years there, which really got me into what I do today, redefining that whole market of protecting against threats and keeping companies from being breached.”
I spent seven years at McAfee, which really got me into what I do today, redefining that whole market of protecting against threats and keeping companies from being breached.
George Kurtz
By 2011, he believed the industry’s architecture was heading in the wrong direction. CrowdStrike was built around a cloud-first model that now looks inevitable, but at the time was far from consensus.
“Part of that journey was looking at the industry and saying, and this is in 2011, there’s got to be a better way to do it,” he said.
“My idea was that it should all be done from the cloud. Now, that may sound obvious in 2026, but it wasn’t so obvious in 2011. And in fact, a lot of our competitors, a lot of the big guys just laughed at us when I started the company.”
The leap for Kurtz was less a calculated play and more a belief in his own ability to build something industry altering.
“For me, it was betting on myself and the team,” he said.
“I knew we could do something that was transformational in the industry. You never know how big it’s going to be until you get along on the journey.
“There’s no straight line to success. There’s lots of ups and downs to certainly get to where we are today.”
The scale became fully visible later, after the company had survived the volatile early phases and established itself at the highest levels of the enterprise market.
“As we got into 2019, when we IPO the company, we kind of looked at it and said, wow, this thing is going to be really big,” Kurtz said.
“I knew it was going to be successful, but you never know the level of success. We’ve also been super fortunate that we had the right people and we had the right product, at the right time.”
The man who wrote the book
CrowdStrike did not enter an empty market.
When Kurtz founded the company, cybersecurity was already populated by thousands of vendors, many of them established and with deep enterprise relationships.
However, his own authority was built over decades and that experience became part of the pitch.
“I was pretty well known for writing a security book (Hacking Exposed), which became really, really popular,” he explained.
“So it’s 20 years of trust – and the book always helps. There was a catchy phrase that some of our early guys had – do you want the guy who read the book or wrote the book helping you? It’s a pretty easy question.”
By the time CrowdStrike launched, Kurtz had already spent years advising organisations through some of the most complex security incidents in the market.
Do you want the guy who read the book or wrote the book helping you? It’s a pretty easy question.
George Kurtz
“I think people realised that I was focused on customer outcomes, focused on delivering,” he said.
“My saying is, if you take care of the customer, everything takes care of itself. So I had that level of trust going into CrowdStrike when I started it.
“Then we were able to leverage those worldwide relationships to attract the best team and attract the biggest customers.”
That trust meant CrowdStrike was not starting from anonymity. The early credibility helped the company recruit talent and secure enterprise customers at a speed that would have been difficult without that foundation.
Lightning in a bottle
Despite his experience and the accompanying confidence, Kurtz was also aware that CrowdStrike would have to cut through a market that was already swelling.
“There are 6,000-or-so security companies, so it’s rarefied air,” he said.
“You just hope that you’ve got the right car, the right engine, the right team for that year – to put it in Formula One terms – to make it all happen and we were able to do that.
“Customers loved the outcome of not being breached and when you put all that together, it’s really lightning in a bottle. There are so many companies that try to do what we’ve done and try to have the success we have.”
Using a racing metaphor should not come as a surprise, given Kurtz’s other passion in life – as a self-confessed ‘gearhead’ – is motorsport.
Even in the early days of his career, he was keen to get into F1, although the first attempt did not quite come off.
The deal that never happened
It was during his days at McAfee when Kurtz first saw the opportunity to partner with an F1 team, and even back then it was Mercedes that was his preferred destination.
A deal was almost struck with the help of a now familiar face in the paddock – as Kurtz explained.
“So let me go back, I think it was 2010, I had cut a deal when I was at McAfee,” he said.
“I cut a deal with Mercedes and it was Nico Rosberg and it was Michael Schumacher at the time that we were going to be on the car.
“I remember getting this deal put together and the guy that was helping me put this deal together was a guy named Zak Brown at JMI (Just Marketing International)”.
“So I was very excited that we were going to have McAfee on that Mercedes car.”
The sponsorship was agreed. The plan was in motion. Then the corporate landscape shifted.
I always said in my next company, at some point, we’re going to be on the Mercedes car and that was 2010. I hadn’t even started CrowdStrike.
George Kurtz
“Then the next year, as things are unfolding, McAfee is going to be acquired,” Kurtz said.
“Intel was buying them and basically when the deal happened, Intel didn’t want the sponsorship for whatever reason.
“So the whole deal fell apart and I didn’t have any control over it because they were buying the company.”
At that point, Kurtz made a promise to himself.
“So I always said in my next company, at some point, we’re going to be on the Mercedes car and that was 2010. I hadn’t even started CrowdStrike.”
That determination from Kurtz, and his success when CrowdStrike launched, would ultimately see him achieve his ambition in 2019.
From partner to part owner
Kurtz did return to Mercedes. The promise he made in 2010 was eventually fulfilled through CrowdStrike.
“Fast forward to 2018. We got a call from the Mercedes team and they basically had some security needs and they were looking for the best technology, best product to protect all the IP and everything that we do,” he said.
“Obviously, in Formula One you want an advantage in your data, you want an advantage in your strategy, what you’re building. So they became a customer of ours.
“I was a racer, I’m a gear head, petrol head, loved Formula One and then I met Toto and we basically said, ‘okay, how do we work together?’”
The sponsorship came later, with CrowdStrike growing fast but its profile still heavily based in North America,
“What I wanted to do before the IPO, we were very well known in North America, but we didn’t have a worldwide audience,” Kurtz said.
“So when you think about our expansion, we wanted to expand not only in the US, but obviously the rest of the world and every Formula One race is equivalent to a Super Bowl in terms of viewership. It’s massive.
“We’re just this tiny company that was going to IPO. And we got on the car, people started to associate the brand and the rest is history.”
The relationship did not stop at sponsorship. In a deal that valued Mercedes at $6 billion, Kurtz purchased 15 percent of Wolff’s ownership interest.
Wolff, who owns one-third of the team alongside Mercedes-Benz and INEOS, received approximately $300 million for the sale through his holding company, Motorsport Investment Ltd.
Kurtz is not a passive shareholder, and as part of the agreement he was also appointed as a Technical Advisor to the team, reflecting both his background in cybersecurity and the increasingly data-driven nature of F1 operations.
“I looked at this first as an investment, not as a just a fun thing to do,” added Kurtz.
“I love the team. I love the sport. But you’ve got to look at it with disciplined eyes and understand the business of Formula One.
“If it wasn’t, in my opinion, a good business, I wouldn’t have done it. But when the cost cap came in, you’ve seen the business of Formula One flourish.”
Kurtz had been in discussions with Wolff for some time before any transaction materialised, with the personal relationship only strengthening the connection.
“So I’d been speaking with Toto over the last couple years and these are things that are not easy to put together, as you might imagine,” he said.
“At Mercedes, nobody’s selling, right? They all are invested in the business. They think it’s a great business but we were able to put a deal together where not only could I become a minority owner, but then also have a role in the technology when we think about AI and its role in Formula One and performance.
“Also on the commercial side, obviously, I have a lot of relationships in the US and a big part of Mercedes is to expand its commercial business within this market now that we have three races in the US, so that’s really how it came together.”
Driving ambition
A winner at Le Mans and Daytona, there is one advantage of Kurtz’s position at Mercedes that is neither financial nor technical.
“There’s a whole bunch of videos on YouTube of me doing it,” he replied when asked by Sector about the chance to get behind the wheel of a Mercedes F1 car.
“So basically, right before COVID, I’m having dinner with Toto and he says, ‘Hey, why don’t we do like a CEO event for CrowdStrike, and we can get the top five CEOs, and we’ll train them to get into a modern Formula One car.”
For Kurtz, it was a great idea that the pair picked back up after the global pandemic had subsided, but the requirements in terms of size and weight meant Kurtz himself ended up in the cockpit rather than his staff.
“The first one we did was in ’21 – it was me and Lewis Hamilton, and we took out the W12. Then the next year, I went to Silverstone with George Russell, and I took out the W12 and the W04. Then the next year, I went to Abu Dhabi and I took out the W13.
“Then this year, they let me take out Lewis Hamilton’s W11, which was the 2020 car, the actual car that he finished Silverstone with on three wheels. That was cool.”
