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Twenty Billionaires Who Started With Nothing
- phillijw 16y agoDoesn't everyone start with nothing?
- JabavuAdams 16y agoConnections? Inherited wealth?
- ced 16y agoA country that encourages entrepreneurship? Free access to high school education? Genes that drive you forward instead of slouching on the couch? A home? Food on the table?
- krohrbaugh 16y agoIt's curious that so many of them are 70+ years old, which means they were the right age to benefit from the huge economic boom that occurred in the United States after World War II. Seems to support the hypothesis that success is equal parts smarts, hard work and timing.
- hop 16y agoAnd compound interest.
- nico 16y agoWhat about luck?
- portman 16y agoAverage age = 72.25 Sheldon Adelson 77 Carl Berg 73 Stephen Bisciotti 50 Leon Charney 72 John Paul DeJoria 66 Larry Ellison 66 Alan Gerry 81 Alec Gores 57 Harold Hamm 64 George Joseph 89 Kirk Kerkorian 93 Ken Langone 75 Ralph Lauren 71 Carl Lindner Jr 91 David Murdock 87 Thomas Peterffy 65 Howard Schultz 57 Kenny Troutt 62 Albert Ueltschi 93 Oprah Winfrey 56
- maxklein 16y agoOr maybe it just takes time to become a billionaire when you start out with nothing.
- JabavuAdams 16y ago... a more interesting story than "200 M people who started with nothing, and ended up with nothing."
- wslh 16y agoAlso, it's more or equally probable to win the lottery, casino, poker?
- _delirium 16y agoA few of them are even pretty similar in the mechanics. The first person the article profiles is Harold Hamm, a wildcat driller who struck a huge well in 1971, more or less by luck (he doesn't appear to have used any of the geological-formation analysis that modern drilling uses). Gold-prospecting had some similar success stories.
- btilly 16y agoAlso, it's more or equally probable to win the lottery, casino, poker? One of those is not like the others. In the long run poker is almost entirely a game of skill.
- uuilly 16y agoIf you're talking about the US this is a popular misconception. The number of rich and poor people does stay the same from generation to generation. But the people themselves move very fluidly through these brackets. One of the best predictors of income bracket is age. Young people are much more likely to be poor but they seldom remain poor. As they gain more experience they become more valuable and pull themselves out of poverty. Likewise many people with medium and large amounts of money lose it and become poor. Saying, "In 1990 10% of the US is poor and in 2010 10% are still poor" is pretty silly if most of 1990's poor are different people than 2010's poor. Tracking flesh and blood people through time using tax returns from the IRS yields dramatically different conclusions than tracking buckets of people using Census data. I'd like to do a visualization of income bracket churn in the US. From what I've read I imagine it would look roughly like this: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/02/23/movies/20080223_REVENUE_GRAPHIC.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/02/23/movies/2008022... Also Thomas Sowell has written extensively on this exact subject. Here is an article about this misconception that is a lot more elegant than this comment: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/11/income_confusion.html http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/11/income_con...
- marcusestes 16y agoI'm fascinated with how many of these guys suffered the death of a parent at a young age. I suppose nothing provides you with an all-encompassing motivation to build security and wealth like being raised by a single lower middle class parent.
- mrshoe 16y agoThere's a pretty explicit selection bias here. They compiled a list of people who "started with nothing". Among the set of all billionaires, I doubt you would see a very high incidence of being raised by a widow(er).
- marcusestes 16y agoThere are 1,011 names on Forbes' Billionaires List. Of those, how many do you imagine were born poor? My bet is that this list represents a fairly large selection of billionaires who "came from nothing."
- dantheman 16y agoI believe the parent post was saying that, having one parent would more make you more likely to be poor. So when looking at the list of billionaires who are poor the majority would have one parent.
- nikcub 16y agoMuch higher than you think. Take the list of billionaires and all of those who are not from the US or Europe and who do not have 'Sultan' in their title likely started with nothing.
- hans 16y agoAnother "you suck for being poor" story ... [update] really? 4 neg points, nice.
- paul 16y agoIt's interesting how many of them dropped out of school.
- kmfrk 16y agoDon't tell Peter Thiel.
- patrickk 16y agoAlso interesting is how many of them grew up without a father.
- TimothyFitz 16y agoRelated: Steve Blank's hypothesis that dysfunctional families breed people for the chaotic world of startups: http://steveblank.com/2009/05/18/founders-and-dysfunctional-families/ http://steveblank.com/2009/05/18/founders-and-dysfunctional-...
- electromagnetic 16y agoI find Gene Simmons' talks on this to be rather telling. Summary: With no father, his mother was working 2 jobs and was rarely home while he was asleep as a child. He said he'd wake up from a nightmare crying for his mom but she didn't come. He'd then be crying out of fear as he was helpless and alone. Then he'd cry himself out with anger because she wasn't there. He said that was the thing he hated most growing up, the feeling of helplessness. He knew money brought security, so he's spent his life making sure he has security through money. To say KISS isn't exceptionally talented, that I can list a few dozen bands off the top of my head that are far more talented... but barely any of them are as widely known, with as big a fan club, and with as much financial success. Simply put; to say The Beatles are reputed to have sold a billion records (IE 10 times KISS' sales figures) it shows how little their company is marketed to say that the band's members net worths are estimated in the $600M range, but Simmons' is actually reported in the $300M range.
- yesno 16y ago... 50 years ago that is (check their age).
- hswolff 16y agoI'm interested in seeing a mini-timeline of their rise to success. As in, at what age did they start their successful venture and how many failures preceded it. Humanizing these success stories is almost essential to fully appreciate their accomplishments but to also put everything in context. Although just a fluff piece, it could be so much more with that additional information.
- d2viant 16y agoAs one example, if you read The Snowball (the biography about Warren Buffett), it's a really interesting look at the individual, specific decisions he made throughout his life. It's narrated as a timeline, so you can see how each decision he made impacted him 10 or 20 years down the road.
- klbarry 16y agoFor an in depth look at famous business billionaires lives, how the made their decisions, and really just the details of their rise, I cannot recommend enough H.W. Brand's Masters of Enterprise: http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Enterprise-American-Business-Winfrey/dp/0684854732 http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Enterprise-American-Business-W... He is a great historian as well, but this is one of my favorite books.
- rbranson 16y agoThey started as white guys, besides Oprah of course. EDIT: Perhaps I should have been clearer. Given the average age, they were significantly advantaged by the color of their skin and patriarchal state of society, so they didn't start with "nothing." They took advantage of the many opportunities afforded to white males at the time. I'm not saying they were lazy or don't deserve their wealth, but Bloomberg seems to be painting them in the best possible light.
- nhangen 16y agoWould downvote if I could.
- rbranson 16y agoCare to explain? Clearly there is a correlation here. Do you believe it's just coincidence that there is one non-white person and one non-male in the entire group?
- sukuriant 16y agoPerhaps they thought you were insinuating that it's more difficult/impossible for people that aren't white and male to become millionaires. Given their age, however, perhaps it was more that, when they were growing up, it was easier to become great, as societal pressures, presumptions and restrictions were very different. I would hope that in another 70 years, the collection of previously less-privileged trillion/quadrillionaires (read: inflation) is more representative of society as a whole.
- rbranson 16y agoI agree with you. Edited my comment above to reflect my full opinion.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- quinndupont 16y agoBullshit. Yet another fluff piece attempting to keep the American Dream alive. Even the briefest encounter with demographic statistics shows that poor stay poor, rich stay rich. In fact, in just today's Globe and Mail (Canada): http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/the-rich-really-are-getting-richer/article1819803/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/the-rich-really...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- detst 16y ago> poor stay poor, rich stay rich Sure, but I've always thought about the American Dream as opportunity. Whether an individual takes an opportunity before them is a personal choice but it's still there for the taking. That can't be said everywhere in the world. Nothing about the "American Dream" guarantees success and no one says it's easy.
- mlinsey 16y agoCan you explain how the statistics cited in your link support your argument? All I see are comparisons of income distributions at various points in time - without any discussion of whether people are moving between different parts of the distribution.
- sandipc 16y agothe title of the article is "Twenty Billionaires Who Started with Nothing" given that this is just a collection of photos and facts, how is this piece bullshit?
- Retric 16y agoStarted with: While most of the world's richest people earned their money, some had farther to climb. Neither Bill Gates nor Warren Buffett inherited wealth, <- that's wrong, buffet had a significant trust fund from dead relatives. Even most of the world's richest people earned their money is somewhat debatable, years of compound interest + a solid nest egg helped many billionaires along. And plenty of them benefited from more from less than ethical behavior and or luck than hard work. PS: If you want to look for patterns look a little closer to the bell curve. Start talking about 1 person out of 6 million and patterns are next to meaningless.
- patrickk 16y agoInteresting article about Thomas Peterffy, number 16 on the list (pdf): http://www.iinews.com/site/pdfs/IIMag_InteractiveBrokers_Nov_2005.pdf http://www.iinews.com/site/pdfs/IIMag_InteractiveBrokers_Nov... From the Business Week piece on him: "According to a November 2005 profile in Institutional Investor, Peterffy wrote computer code in his head while trading during the day, then went back to the office to apply computer models to trading. The early use of computers made him a pioneer in the field."
- kzm 16y agoHow many of them are Jewish?
- run4yourlives 16y agoOnly 6 have college degrees, and only one anything more than that (and MBA). More than anything, I think that shows how massively out of touch the education system is. It truly is designed for turning out as many drones as possible.
- chunkbot 16y agoYou're kidding, right? How can you draw such a conclusion from a list of twenty billionaires?
- run4yourlives 16y agoBillionaires from nothing. Exactly the type of people that an education system is supposed to help succeed.
- dools 16y agoThis type of thing frequently annoys me: Larry Ellison: "There, he held odd jobs for eight years before founding a software development company in 1977" If he started with nothing, holding odd jobs, no savings, etc. how did he found a company? These "start from nothing" tales are like graphs: when the scale on the Y-axis is sufficiently large you lose all detail at the bottom end of the scale - the all important details that happen very early in someone's "career" that make all the difference in the long run. The minor things like having your parents pay for you to go to college (if you live in a country that doesn't supply you with free education) or finding an angel investor or getting a scholarship to attend the right school etc. are all to do with being fortunate - and all of them classify, in my opinion, as "starting with something". Whilst it's true that generational inheritance is not the only way to become successful and every single one of these people have worked very hard to achieve their well deserved success, there are people who have truly nothing and despite being as ready and willing to work and as bright and dilligent as the next person, just happen to never be in the right place at the right time. And yet we re-tell these glorious stories of the tiny tiny fraction of people that enjoy stellar rags to riches stories and it reinforces the greatest lie in capitalism: that if you're poor, it's your own fault. Poverty is very much a social problem and needs to be dealt with on a social scale - not by taunting the poor by saying "Look!? They did it, what's wrong with you? Why can't you do it?"
- nestlequ1k 16y agoReally? So the success story is only valid if they start with zero dollars, crippled, and recently diagnosed with a terminal illness? These are people who grew up in a rich country sure, and used every advantage they could. However, their daddies didn't fund their dreams. They only had the same resources that everyone on this board has. The fact that they took it, and turned it into a billion dollars is something to be respected. No one here is taunting the poor.
- dools 16y agoI didn't say that these success stories are invalid, but I do think that they're told in a disempowering way. The focus of the story is not "The amazing story of 20 billionaires and how they found success" but the fact that they started with nothing. However this (and every other story I've seen like it - at least that I can remember) glosses over the true practicality of those early stages. Larry Ellison had some odd jobs then founded a software company. My original post complains that about the "scale" of the story - because it ends at 1,000,000,000 the differences of $10,000 or even one or two million dollars sometimes that people were fortunate enough to have in order to fund their enterprise are too small to register but they're incredibly important. Also in response to: They only had the same resources that everyone on this board has My guess is that the majority of people on this board aren't as poor as the people I'm referring to when I say "taunting the poor". I don't by any means consider myself poor and I'm not complaing that I feel taunted by this, but perpetrating this rags to riches story over and over again and saying that people start "with nothing" is demoralising to the truly disempowered. I think it would be more appropriate to tell these stories in an empowering way: where very minute practical details of day to day survival were addressed whilst telling the story of how Larry Ellison "founded a software company" after "starting with nothing" then "having odd jobs".