Billionaires don't always come from moneyed backgrounds. In fact, a lot of famous billionaires actually came from nothing.
Many of the world’s richest people came from humble backgrounds to become billionaires, with childhood poverty, war and other issues driving them on to wealthy. Here are some of the wealthiest people who survived a challenging upbringing and went on to build huge billion-dollar empires.
You don’t have to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth to achieve great things in life — though it certainly helps. Still, a lot of today’s billionaires had very modest beginnings. Growing up poor didn’t stop these CEOs, celebrities and business experts from reaching the pinnacle of success — and it shouldn’t stop you. Through extraordinary grit and perseverance, individuals across the globe have beat the odds and achieved their own stories.
Whether you’re in need of some inspiration to start your own business, or you want to learn how to become a billionaire, take a look at how these famous folks made it to the top. From Steve Jobs to Larry Ellison to Oprah Winfrey, here's a look at how some of the wealthiest people on the planet came up from nothing.
Here are 15 people who started off life poor and went on to become billionaires:
1. Oprah Winfrey
Media Mogul Oprah Winfrey, worth $2.6 billion, is an American media executive, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. She has a large number of A-lister friends and an impressive number of mansions.
Winfrey was born in poverty in Mississippi and raised in Milwaukee, Oprah Winfrey moved to Nashville in 1968 to live with her father. Two years later, she won a scholarship to attend Tennessee State University. By focusing on school, participating in beauty pageants and then working at a radio station, Winfrey was able to enter the media world. At 19, she was hired as Nashville's first African American TV correspondent. In 1983, she relocated to Chicago to take on the AM Chicago talk show later The Oprah Winfrey Show. Her work in movies, radio, and publishing built an influential business empire.
2. Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs an American inventor, entrepreneur, and industrial designer. He was the CEO and co-founder of Apple Inc., CEO and majority shareholder of Pixar Animation Studios, CEO founder and chairman of NeXT Inc., and a member of The Walt Disney Company’s board of directors. His bold ambitions revolutionized six industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.
According to Jobs, two things are required to build a successful company: passion and people. Jobs said so in an interview he did with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates in 2007.
In 1976, when Jobs was just 21, he and Wozniak started Apple Computer in the Jobs’ family garage. They funded their entrepreneurial venture by Jobs selling his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak selling his beloved scientific calculator. Jobs and Wozniak are credited with revolutionizing the computer industry with Apple by democratizing the technology and making machines smaller, cheaper, intuitive and accessible to everyday consumers.
He famously started Apple in a garage with co-founder Steve Wozniak in 1976 after dropping out of college. The tech company has a market capitalization of $1 trillion.
3. Howard Schultz
Starbucks chairman and Ex CEO Howard Schultz helped Starbucks become the company it is today — a giant coffee retailer with more 28 218 retail stores in more 70 countries and a market value of about $83 billion. However, this successful businessman, who boasts a net worth of $4.0 billion, wasn’t born into wealth.
Schultz grows up in Brooklyn, New York, and with his younger sister, Ronnie, and brother, Michael, he grew up in the New York City Housing Authority. His father was a truck driver and the family were poor.
Encouraged by his parents, Schultz got a place at Northern Michigan University. Schultz ended up winning a football scholarship to the University of Northern Michigan. He worked as a bartender. After graduating he got a job in sales at Xerox. Shortly after, he took over a coffee shop called Starbucks, which at the time had only 60 shops. Schultz became the company's CEO in 1987 and grew the coffee chain to more than 16,000 outlets worldwide. Howard Schultz's current net worth is $4.0 billion.
4. Ralph Lauren
Known for its polo shirts and high-end ties, the Ralph Lauren fashion brand is easily recognizable. But did you know that there was a time when the iconic fashion designer couldn’t even afford clothes?
“As a kid, I was always into clothes, but I didn’t have the money to buy them,” Lauren told fellow billionaire Oprah Winfrey in a 2002 interview. “When I’d get my brothers’ hand-me-downs, there was an energy in me that made me say, ‘I want to get my own things, to make my own statement.’ Somewhere along the line, that energy — coupled with my exposure, through movies, to a world I hadn’t known — turned into something.” Young Ralph Lipschitz (he would later change his surname to Lauren) loved movies, and some say that Old Hollywood stars continue to inspire his designs.
That “something” is now a fashion brand with a market value of nearly $8 billion, according to Forbes. As for Lauren, he’s worth a cool $7 billion and is considered one of the richest fashion icons.
5. Larry Ellison
Oracle founder and former CEO Larry Ellison was born in New York City but grew up in a lower-middle-class community on the South Side of Chicago. “I’ll never complain again about living in a bad neighborhood, after moving from the Lower East Side of Manhattan to a still-worse neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago,” said Ellison in an interview posted on the Academy of Achievement website. “After my ninth month, I kept my mouth shut about the neighborhood.”
A 1997 Vanity Fair profile on Ellison described his childhood home as a “cramped walk-up apartment.” According to the article, Ellison was raised by his great-aunt and great-uncle, who was once successful in real estate but lost everything in the Depression. Although he came from modest beginnings, Ellison is now a multibillionaire worth $71.6 billion. And Oracle has a market value of almost $183 billion.
“Everyone who works hard, and maybe a little cleverly, has the opportunity to make almost anything possible,” said Ellison in the Academy of Achievement interview. “That’s the American Dream, that anything here is possible.”
6. Do Won Chang
In 1981, Jin Sook and Do Won "Don" Chang emigrated from South Korea to Los Angeles in pursuit of success and new opportunities. Penniless, without formal education, and speaking in broken English, the Changs struggled at first. Originally going into the coffee business, they soon discovered that was not going to be their ticket to success. For a few years, Don worked as a janitor, pumped gas, and served coffee to make ends meet for him and his family.
Everything changed, however, when he made one crucial observation. "I noticed the people who drove the nicest cars were all in the garment business," Don told in a 2010 interview.
Soon after, he opened a 900-square-foot clothing store called Fashion 21. It would go on to become the fast-fashion retailer Forever 21. Every year, the store brings in roughly $4.4 billion in sales from over 600 stores. His net worth is now $3.3 billion.
7. Sheldon Adelson
He’s the chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands, the largest casino company in America, but Sheldon Adelson had to earn his $35.2 billion fortune the old-fashioned way. Born to Eastern European Jewish immigrants, he grew up in a tough neighborhood of Boston, sharing a one-room tenement with his parents and three siblings.
Born in 1933, Adelson grew up in Dorchester, a notoriously rough part of Boston. His father was a taxi driver and his mother ran a knitting group. It seems Adelson was keen to build an empire from the get-go, as he started his first business when he was 12 when he borrowed $200 from his uncle to purchase a license to sell newspapers locally. He started selling newspapers at the age of 12 and later dropped out of college to become a court reporter. According to The New York Times, Adelson sold toiletry kits to motels and tried mortgage brokering, then struck it rich when he founded Comdex, an annual computer trade show. He went on to build Las Vegas hotels around conventions, rather than casinos—not that he left the casinos out.
In a 2010 “Nightline” interview, Adelson explained how his rough upbringing helped him become a shrewd businessman. “My parents were poor and their whole life they gave everything to their children. So, I’m talking not from a white-shoe background or from a privileged background. I’m talking [as] somebody who wore his skin down on his fingers trying to climb the ladder of success.”
To honor his heritage, he has donated more than $50 million to Jewish schools in the Las Vegas and Boston areas, and another $50 million to the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center, according to The New York Times.
8. J.K. Rowling
In a 2013 interview with the London-based Daily Mail, J.K. Rowling shared her struggles as a single parent, before the Harry Potter books turned her into the world’s highest-paid author. “I remember 20 years ago not eating so my daughter would eat,” she said. “I remember nights when there was literally no money.”
Those days are long past, as the author earned $95 million between June 2016 and June 2017. Now a philanthropist, Rowling enjoys giving back so much that an estimated $160 million in charitable giving contributed to her fall from billionaire status in 2012. Today, Rowling’s fortune is back up to $1 billion, according to Celebrity Net Worth.
9. Mohed Altrad
EY World Entrepreneur of the Year 2015 and Montpellier rugby club president Mohed Altrad is worth $2.5 billion. He heads up the $4 billion Altrad Group, which provides construction and maintenance services, but his start in life was worlds apart from this. Of his past he said: "I had no special dream – only the ambition not to accept my initial destiny."
Mohed Altrad came from humble beginnings, born an orphaned Bedouin in the Syrian desert. Raised by his grandmother, Altrad was banned from going to school, but an innate drive to learn saw him attending school anyway. He eventually won a scholarship to study in France despite speaking no French and having very little money.
In France, Altrad was poor and lived off one meal a day, yet managed to earn himself an undergraduate degree in physics and math, and a Ph.D. in computer science. In 1985, after a short spell working for a tech firm and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Altrad bought a bankrupt scaffolding manufacturer in France. With his partner, he created the world's leading scaffolding company.
10. Jan Koum
Instant messaging whizz Jan Koum is worth $9 billion. In April 2018, Koum announced his impending departure from Facebook HQ in California, however he continues to work one day a month and banks close to half a billion dollars every financial quarter, stalling until his remaining stock options vest.
When Jan Koum moved to California from the Ukraine as a teen his family struggled to stay above the poverty line. Koum relied on food stamps and swept floors to make ends meet. Despite his tough upbringing, Koum worked hard at school. By the age of 18 Koum became interested in programming and enrolled at San Jose State University.
In 1997, Koum was hired by Yahoo! as an infrastructure engineer where he worked for nearly nine years before leaving aged 30 with enough cash to launch his own business. In 2009 Koum co-founded real-time messaging app WhatsApp. The app was so successful Facebook bought it for a massive $19 billion and Koum was invited to sit on the Facebook board.
11. Leonardo Del Vecchio
Luxottica founder Leonardo Del Vecchio is one of the richest men in not just Italy but the entire world, worth $21.9 billion. Yet the founder of one of the most powerful companies in the eyeglasses market rose from modest beginnings to make it to the top.
Born in Italy, Del Vecchio was one of five children. Sadly, because his family was so poor, Del Vecchio, along with his siblings, was sent to an orphanage. He later went to work gruelling shifts in a factory making moulds for eyeglass frames. He began apprenticing at a car and eyewear parts factory at age 14 to put himself through design school.
All Vecchio’s hard work and work experience paid off and at 25 he went on to open his own moulding shop. Luxottica eventually went on to become the world’s largest maker of sunglasses, owning Sunglass Hut, LensCrafters, Ray-Ban and Oakley and making glasses for virtually every brand, including Bulgari, Chanel, and George Armani.
12. Thomas Peterffy
Thomas Peterffy has a net worth of $18.1 billion and is the richest person in the state of Florida. He is the founder and CEO of Interactive Brokers, a leading securities firm boasting over $6 billion in equity capital. But Peterffy's story of success is nothing short of extraordinary.
Peterffy was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1944 in a hospital basement during a Russian air raid. In search of the American dream, he emigrated to New York when he was 21 with no English and no money. Through hard work and perseverance, he managed to get a job as an architectural draftsman for an engineering firm and went on to program computers there.
By the 1970s he had saved up enough money to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, working on the electronic trading of securities. In 1993, he started Interactive Brokers and the company was so successful Peterffy became known as the father of digital trading.
13. Francois Pinault
French tycoon and luxury fashion brand founder Francois Pinault are worth an incredible $34.5 billion. Pinault and his family own a 3,000-piece art collection, with works by Picasso, Mondrian, and Koons, auction house Christie's, several vineyards, a French soccer club, a theater in Paris and a luxury yacht and expedition company. In 2019, they plan to open a museum in France.
For someone who leads such a lavish lifestyle, you would not expect the fashion mogul to have been bullied for being poor at school. Pinault eventually dropped out, yet this didn’t affect his business smarts. In 1963 the Frenchman went on to start Kering (formerly PPR), which made wood and building materials.
In 1999 Pinault changed the direction of the business towards luxury goods when he bought a controlling stake in Gucci Group. Kering now owns fashion brands Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, and Stella McCartney, to name a few. The group also owns sports brand PUMA and the $19 billion company is run by Pinault's son.
14. Li Ka-Shing
Li Ka-shing is revered as one of the most influential businessmen in Asia, and he is certainly the richest, worth $29.6 billion. In March 2018 Li announced plans to retire as chairman of CK Hutchison Holdings and CK Asset Holdings and his son Victor will take over the conglomerate, which now has 323,000 employees and operates in more than 50 nations.
Li hasn’t always been so blessed. At age 12, his family fled from China to Hong Kong and his father, a primary school principal-turned-watch factory worker, died shortly after. Li was forced to leave school and work 16-hour days in a plastic factory to support his family. This gave him the drive to start his own company, Cheung Kong Industries, which manufactured plastics.
Cheung Kong Plastics, named after the Yangtze River, was started with $6,500 in savings and loans from relatives, but he eventually moved into real estate. His Li Ka Shing Foundation has donated more than $2.6 billion, with over 80% going to the Greater China region.
15. Lakshmi Mittal
Steel industry tycoon Lakshmi Mittal wasn't always rolling in dough. Rather, he grew up in a poor Indian family near Rajasthan. According to BBC News, Mittal "established the foundations of his fortune over two decades by doing much of his business in the steel industry equivalent of a discount warehouse." He bought up parts of other steel companies that were going cheap and transformed them into profitable ventures. Mittal has topped the UK's Rich List more than five times and has a current net worth of $11.8 billion.
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