With billions of people around the globe, only a tiny portion of the population are billionaires. Although their success may seem like a smooth sailing journey for others, some billionaires actually built their wealth with nothing but tenacity, fervor, and endurance.
Take a glimpse into the life of these 9 billionaires— on how they started and how they built an empire.
Elon Musk
Elon Reeve Musk is a Canadian-American born in one of South Africa’s capital cities— Pretoria. As a child, Musk was a smart aleck who likes to read, from comic books too heavily thickened encyclopedias.
At the early age of 12, Musk has started to hassle for works acquainted with programming. The self-taught child programmer created a video game called Blaster, for which he sold the basic code for $500. To make extra money, Elon also entered into selling computer parts and turned a 10-bedroom fraternity home into a club every weekend.
With $28,000 on his account, Musk started a web software company called Zip2 with his younger brother, Kimbal, in 1995. The company focuses on the development of online city guides in newspapers was later acquired by Compaq’s AltaVista for $340 million. And from the money from the Zip2 buyout, he established X.com, now recognized as PayPal.
In 2004, Musk collaborated with engineers Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard to manage Tesla Motor. Through his technology proficiency, he played a big role in the integral design of Tesla’s first electric car, the Tesla Roadster. Years under his supervision, Tesla has rosed as the world’s most coveted car brand.
He founded an interstellar travel company known as SpaceX and landed high-profile contracts with NASA to conduct military missions and design rockets. By 2025, Musk plans to send astronauts to Mars in collaboration with NASA.
Jack Ma
During his childhood years, Jack Ma mentioned that he has failed primary and middle school examinations. He flunked his college entrance examination several times before entering Hangzhou Normal University. And even after graduation, he’s yet to accomplish anything and is actually having a hard time landing a job.
After going through several rejections and knock-backs, an opportunity finally found its way to him. Jack Ma’s planted a firm root that started way back in 1995. Together with his wife, he created a site-creating company coined as China Yellow Pages. In less than a decade, he founded Alibaba alongside his 17 friends. Jack Ma now runs one of the eCommerce giants in the world.
Jeff Bezos
Bezos saw the internet’s immense potential and decided to quit his hedge fund job to start programming a site for bookselling. Most of Jeff Bezos’s wealth comes from Amazon, which he humbly founded out of his garage in 1995.
After a few years, he expanded his products to different products from electric bikes, a variety of cheese, and eventually establish new branches like Amazon Prime, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and Amazon Web Services.
From his humble garage, Bezos’ company has grown massively as the world’s largest eCommerce platform.
Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey’s rags to riches story had become an inspiration to many over the past years. She spent her childhood years with his maternal grandmother, which she experienced wearing dresses scraped from potato sacks. However, her world began turning upside down when she started living under her father’s roofed where she got the opportunity to study.
After joining Tennessee State University with a full scholarship in communications, her unprecedented career started to blossom. Oprah made her way as Nashville’s first-ever black female anchor. Soon, she was asked to host in a low-rated morning talk show, which become a top-rated talk show upon her take over. The show was now renowned as The Oprah Winfrey Show, turning her into a millionaire.
In less than a decade after starting her own production company, she spun off shows for famous guests on her program. And eventually, Oprah had diversified her business into radio shows, magazines, and movie production, opening a pathway for all billions she had achieved now.
Warren Buffet
Unlike Elon who is consistently built wealth through his epic innovations, Warren Buffett made most of his money from investing. Buffett found interest in investing and the business world at an early age and bought his first stock at 11 years old.
Buffett sold sodas, chewing gums, magazines, newspapers, and work at a grocery store to make a penny. At the age of 15, he invested in a pinball machine. Years later, he had put up machines across several boutiques.
In the early 1950s, Buffet becomes an investment salesperson. After six years, he established Buffett Associates, then later took control of Berkshire Hathaway in 1965.
All of Buffett’s investment is based on the value principle and purchases assets at a discount from their intrinsic value. He consistently sticks to his investment strategies which allowed him to make mythical proportions in the past decades.
Zhou Qunfei
Despite all struggles and difficulties, Zhou Qunfei managed to rise as the world’s richest woman in the field of technology.
Zhou had lost her mother when she was five, and her father became partially blind before she was born. Given the unfortunate circumstances, the self-made woman billionaire lived under bad financial conditions that pushed her to drop out of school at the age of 16 to work in a watch glass company as an operator.
Through night-long self-education perseverance to design various technologies, she eventually set up a silkscreen printing unit back in 1993. Zhou’s breakthrough started when Motorola reached out to ask her to design a scratchproof glass. Later, big companies like Samsung, Nokia, HTC, and even Apple trailed in pursuit.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Larry Page and Sergey Brin are graduates of Stanford University in California who made an unparalleled history for founding the most successful dot-com business in the world in their dorm rooms. Page’s room served as their project’s data hub, while Brin’s served as the business office.
In the 1990s, Brin and Page come up with an algorithm intended to solve computer tasks, which later become the basis of the Internet’s web pages.
Amancio Ortega
Spaniard Amancio Ortega stands among the wealthiest personalities in the world for owning the largest fashion clothing retailer company. Ortega started his fashion clothing venture in his small store in Spain back in 1975.
Years later, he collaborated with other women’s personages and established and established a company called Confecciones Gao, famously acknowledged as Zara. By 2021, the company has grown to over 2000 stores worldwide in 96 different markets.
According to Forbes, the mysterious founder of Zara briefly become the world’s richest person when Zara’s parent company’s stock peaked, bypassing Bill Gates in 2015. His title didn’t last long and went back to the second-richest man in the same year.
Carlos Slim Helu
Carlos Slim Helu is a Lebanese who was taught how to run a business at a young age. He was often referred to as the Warren Buffett of Mexico for investing in national bank shares back when he was 12.
Equipped with countless business training, Carlos started his own brokerage that focuses on investing in small individual businesses. By the year 1995, he had grown his business so much that could buy out companies entirely. His investments are mostly aimed at construction, mining, and real estate.
He also ventured on the world’s biggest companies like The New York Times, Saks Fifth Avenue, Volaris, and Telekom Austria. After more than a decade, Carlos was hailed as The New York Times’ biggest individual shareholder. In 2020, Carlos’ net worth reached $56 billion, making him one of the richest personalities of all time.
