From Zero to Billionaire – Self-Made Billionaire Paths

If you were to guess whether world’s top 100 richest people got their money from someone else or made money themselves – you would be right to guess that most of them made their own money. But you might think that even the self-made had advantages you don’t have.

Source: Funders And Founders

From Zero to Billionaires, Almost?

After all, Mark Zuckerberg‘s father is a dentist. Maybe it did not help him become a billionaire. After all a dentist couldn’t be much help with hacking. But you also might think that having a dentist dad makes it easier to not worry about what you are going to eat tomorrow.

There is no denying that Sergey Brin is a self-made man, but you might think that his father and grandfather, both mathematicians, had something to do with him studying math in the first place.

So if your father is a cab driver or if you have no father at all, is it still possible to become a billionaire? Apparently, it is. Researching the top 100 richest people in the world, all of whom are billionaires of course, we found 8 that were from absolutely humble backgrounds. In fact even worse than the average. On top of that, they never got a college degree:

• Larry Ellison, Oracle founder, an orphan
• Li Ka-Shing, Hong-Kong famous investor, an orphan
• Leonardo del Vecchio, Luxottica founder, an orphan
• Amancio Ortega, Zara founder, son of a rail-road worker father
• John Fredriksen, oil magnate, son of a welder father
• Sheldon Adelson, Las Vegas Sands founder, son of a cab driver
• Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA founder, son of a farmer
• Francois Pinault, French art collector, son of a lumber miller

(Roman Abramovich, Russian billionaire and owner of football club Chelsea would be number 9 on the list, but he got a correspondence degree in law later in life. So technically he does have a degree. But otherwise he was poor, an orphan and qualified.)

Source: bloomberg.com.

[Editor’s Note:  This article was written by Anna Vital and originally published at Funders And Founders. Copyright 2013.]