There are 2,604 billionaires in the world, and 55.8% of them are self-made. That's according to the Billionaire Census published Thursday by market research firm Wealth-X.
Azim Premji. After his father's demise, Azim Premji dropped out of Stanford University to take care of the family business.
John D. Rockefeller became the world's first billionaire by measurable dollars. The Standard Oil Company founder became a billionaire in 1916 and was worth about 2% of the national economy. According to Forbes, the Rockefeller family's wealth stood at $8.4 billion as of 2020.
quadrillionaire (plural quadrillionaires) Somebody whose wealth is greater than one quadrillion units of the local currency. quotations ▼ (by extension) An extremely wealthy person.
In 2020, with Americans dying in large numbers from the pandemic, Bezos had become to billionaire wealth hoarding what Barry Bonds had become to home run records. As noted by USA Today, the reporting on Bezos becoming the first trillionaire occurred when Amazon workers were publicly protesting over safety issues.
Born to a struggling single mother in Brooklyn, Larry Ellison was raised by his aunt and uncle in Chicago. After his aunt tragically passed away Ellison dropped out of college, moved to California and worked odd jobs to make ends meet for the next eight years.
1. Bill Gates. Bill Gates is a billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist, but he's most known for his role as the co-founder of Microsoft. The thoughtful and bespectacled computer programmer from Seattle, Washington, has been one of the wealthiest people in the world for decades.
Chris Dawson can't read or write. However, that doesn't stop the billionaire founder of The Range from communicating with his army of employees – he simply subjects them to phone calls at dawn.
Kylie Jenner, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates: The 'self-made' billionaires who were born into riches.
Business titans such as William Boeing and Walter Chrysler actually grew their fortunes during the Great Depression.
When Ramsey's National Study of Millionaires asked where the riches came from, they found that a whopping 79% didn't receive any inheritance from parents or other family members. Not one cent. Unpaid bills perhaps (though the study didn't ask).
How you can build wealth. If you're not independently wealthy, you may be discouraged by the fact that only 27% of the ultra rich are self made. However, it shows it's possible for ordinary people to become rich without winning the lottery or inheriting large sums of money.
The Hurun Global Rich List 2023 showed that 70% of the billionaires are self-made and only 30% are legacy. Some of the self-made billionaires include Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Gautam Adani and others. As many as 247 self-made women made it to the list this year, down by 22 from last year.
Fittingly, the most common subject matter for higher education was economics and finance, suggesting that when you know money, you know how to make money! Billionaires such as Warren Buffett, Alice Walton, and Elon Musk have degrees in economics.
Richest man in the world, Bill Gates, dropped out of Harvard to focus on Microsoft full-time. Sure, he may have had the most intelligent computer software the world had ever seen up his sleeve, but still, he dropped out and still managed to be the world's biggest success.
But old age is not a requirement for amassing great wealth. In fact, there are 15 people around the globe who boast a three-comma fortune despite being 30 years old or younger. The youngest of this mostly lucky bunch are Clemente Del Vecchio and Kim Jung-youn, neither of whom have hit their 20s yet.
Austin Russell, the 28-year-old CEO of California-based Luminar Technologies, remains the world's youngest self-made billionaire, with a net worth of US$1.
If you stacked $100 bills totaling $1 trillion on top of each other, the stack would be 631 miles high. This is what $1 trillion in spending look like. Kathy Hess and 65 others like this.
Genghis Khan
Much of the wealth came from plunders, taxes and control of caravan routes along the Silk Road and provide the Mongols with valuable revenue. He owned 270,000 horses and precious stones diamonds worth $1 trillion and gold deposits weighing in at a whopping 2 million tons totaling $11 trillion alone.
Walton Family
The Walton family knows its way around some retail revenue. Its namesake, mega-retailer Walmart, has an estimated global revenue of $611.3 billion. As the family owns nearly half of the company, they should be quite comfortable for generations to come.