Counting billionaires: College dropouts who made it big
“I have never let school interfere with my education,” Mark Twain famously said. And, these 10 billionaires across the world lived it by making it big despite discontinuing their college education
Bill Gates | USD 91.6 billion | The second wealthiest person in the world is perhaps the most successful dropout in the world, financially. The founder of Microsoft attended Harvard for two years before leaving to start the company with his childhood friend Paul Allen, who also is a dropout billionaire. (Reuters)
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Mark Zuckerberg | USD 73.6 billion | The 32-year-old entrepreneur is also a Harvard dropout who quit the college in his first year itself. He started Facebook in his dorm room which quickly became popular across other Universities forcing him to focus on business instead. He owns 13 percent shares of the company which owns the largest social media network in the world. (Reuters)
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Larry Ellison | USD 57.1 billion | Another tech entrepreneur in the list, he is the co-founder of Oracle and he dropped out from the University of Illinois in 1963. The IPO of his company closed a day before Microsoft’s opened and both of them have followed similar paths. Today, Oracle is third largest software company by sales and Ellison owns 1.1 billion shares and a quarter of options of the enterprise. (Reuters)
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Sheldon Adelson | USD 37.3 billion | Chairman of the world’s largest casino operating company, Adelson never graduated from college. He grew up in a poor family in Boston and sold newspapers to survive at the ripe age of 12. Currently, he is the majority shareholder of Las Vegas Sands which employs over 50K people. (Reuters)
Li Ka-Shing | USD 33.5 billion | A Sino- Japanese war survivor, he fled to Hong Kong in 1940 at the age of 12. Two years later, started working as an apprentice to support the family. Fondly called Superman for his investing prowess, he owns world’s third largest real estate company, and has stakes in ports, retail chains and mobile-phone networks via CK Hutchison Holdings. (Reuters)
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Leonardo del Vecchio | USD 23.2 billion | Founder of Italian Luxottica group which sells brands like Ray-Ban and Oakley, he is another rags to riches story, bypassing the education. Son of a vegetable seller, he started working at the age of 14. In 1961, he ventured into eyewear business and has never looked back. (Wikimedia Commons)
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Thomas Peterffy | USD 2.5 billion | A New York University dropout, he is the Chairman of Interactive Brokers, the world's largest electronic broker by daily average revenue trades. Starting his career as a computer programmer, the immigrant from Hungary rose to the ladders of Wall Street using his programming skills. (Reuters)
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Jan Koum | USD 10.7 billion | Koum derives much of his wealth from the sale of WhatsApp to Facebook in 2014 - a USD 22 billion deal. Koum, a Ukrainian and former Yahoo employee, took a sabbatical in 2007 and spent a year ‘traveling South America and playing frisbee’, as Bloomberg puts it. Interestingly, he applied for a job in Facebook in that period before starting the instant messaging service in 2009. (Reuters)
Zhou Qunfei | USD 9.67 billion | The richest woman in China is the chairwoman of Lens Technology, a company which manufactures display glasses for smartphones and laptops. Her company counts Samsung and Apple as its clients. She was named the youngest self-made woman billionaire in the world by Forbes. Qunfei chose to drop out of high school to work at a factory making watch lenses for about $1 a day. (Lens Technology)
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John Collison | USD 1 billion | He is the co-founder and president of Stripe, the company that lets businesses and individuals easily accept payments over the internet, and is just 27-year-old, making himself the youngest billionaire on the planet. (Sources include Forbes and Bloomberg; wealth figure are as on March 7, 2018)
