Catrina M. Padilla’s answer is only narrowly correct. A celebrity who has been invited in by Quora to answer 10 questions as clickbait in a session, and never shows up on Quora again, does not count to me as being on Quora in any meaningful sense. Whatever Quora might want you to think (or, more importantly, might want advertisers to think.)
And all Mark Zuckerberg did, 8 years ago, is ask a handful of questions.
Adam Goldberg in her list has at least had some moderate activity, although minimal past 2012.
Dushka Zapata has no Wikipedia entry, although her mum might: Carol Miller (author) – Wikipedia. Quora-famous does not count as famous; by that metric, I’m on Quora too.
I have a soft spot for Pat Cash as a famous person on Quora, simply because he’s an Aussie that has come back to Quora on occasion, outside of being invited through a session.
I’m going through the Answer Wiki, and removing people with 15 answers or less (8–13 answers being what you get on a celebrity session), or people who only wrote answers on only one to three dates (e.g. Uzo Aduba, Scott Aukerman, which points to repeat celebrity sessions, or them getting bored very quickly), and people with no English Wikipedia entry. (An entry for his company, or other mentions on Wikipedia, do not count: Oliver Emberton. Robert Frost, Noam Kaiser, Gayle Laakmann McDowell, Denis Oakley, Mark Rogowsky, Siri, Balaji Viswanathan are out too.) I am putting a very deliberate asterisk against people who are Silicon Valley-famous (or in the case of Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the Indian counterpart).
Honourable mention to Andy Weir. He only spent one day on Quora, but he churned out 100 answers. At least he took his session seriously. And he didn’t have to be interviewed to do it.
I’m also putting up how many answers they have put up, and when their last answer was. Active Quora users, they are not.
- Clayton C. Anderson (247; Aug 2017)
- Marc Andreessen* (83; 2014)
- Michael Arrington* (20; 2013)
- Glenn Beck (52; 2016)
- Tim Bergling (52; 2015—and it’s lovely to see Avicii subjected to the Real Name Rule)
- Stewart Butterfield* (17; 2015)
- Steve Case* (16; 2011)
- Pat Cash (39; May 2017)
- Vint Cerf* (34; June 2017; his latest answer, ironically, is to “Why isn’t Vint Cerf famous”)
- Charlie Cheever* (1495; 2012)
- Leroy Chiao (110; Apr 2017)
- Thomas Cormen (382; Aug 2017)
- Mark Cuban (32; Jun 2017)
- Adam D’Angelo* (973; Aug 2017)
- Daniel Ek* (46; 2016)
- Sid Espinosa (36; 2012)
- Stephen Fry (42; 2015)
- Kevin Greutert (18; Jan 2017)
- Aubrey de Grey (310; Jul 2017)
- Jeff Hammerbacher* (1240; Aug 2017)
- Auren Hoffman* (401; Aug 2017)
- Sean Hood (228; May 2017)
- Drew Houston* (22; Feb 2017)
- Tim Kaine (34; Oct 2016)
- Ashton Kutcher (41; 2015)
- Adrián Lamo* (507; Jun 2017)
- Max Levchin* (37; 2016)
- Om Malik* (16; 2014)
- Daryl Morey (28; Mar 2017)
- Dustin Moskovitz* (74; Apr 2017)
- Justine Musk (33; Mar 2017)
- Adam Nash* (68; 2015)
- Craig Newmark* (164; Mar 2017)
- Peter Norvig* (39; Aug 2017)
- Jeff Perry (22; 2014)
- Michelle Rodriguez (30; 2014)
- David S. Rose* (6364; Aug 2017)
- Kevin Rose* (16; 2012)
- Sheryl Sandberg* (26; 2016)
- Vijay Shekhar Sharma* (93; Jul 2017)
- Mark Suster* (71; 2016)
- Kevin Systrom* (58; 2012)
- Werner Vogels* (16; 2013)
- Jimmy Wales* (947; Jul 2017)
- Yishan Wong* (1593; Aug 2017)
You will notice that it is a much smaller list. 128 goes down to 45. If you take out Silicon Valley types, it’s down to 18. If instead you reduce it to people who’ve written 100 answers or more: 14. People who have written an answer this month: 7.
And it’d be an interesting exercise to go through *this* list, and see how many you’ve heard of.
I get 17, but 4 of them only via being on Quora.
(And I did know who Vint Cerf is beforehand.)