Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2014, and all its figures are from then, including the ages and fortunes cited, WhatsApp’s 450 million users and its recent acquisition by Facebook (announced in February 2014), and Starbucks’ 16,000 outlets.
A while ago we wrote about several rich and famous people who lived practically like homeless people while they fought to achieve their dreams, some of them going “all or nothing”.
It’s very common to think that today’s billionaires are where they are because they came from wealthy families or inherited their parents’ businesses.
Fortunately, these days, with a few exceptions, we have a Forbes list packed with billionaires who don’t come from rich families.
Far from it: some have known the most extreme poverty, while others worked in all kinds of jobs before owning assets worth billions. (Read: What highly successful people were doing at 25.) Here are some stories you probably didn’t know about billionaires we’ve written about before.
1. Jan Koum, co-founder of WhatsApp
He arrived in the United States from Ukraine at 16, and for a long time his family lived on US government assistance and charity, even relying on food stamps. After a life more bitter than sweet, Koum, now 37, and Brian Acton (WhatsApp’s co-founder) launched the messaging app, which grew to 450 million users and has just been bought by the giant Facebook. According to Forbes, Jan Koum’s current net worth is estimated at $6.8 billion.
2. Howard Schultz, of Starbucks
Today Starbucks has 16,000 outlets around the world, and it was a young man from a poor part of Brooklyn (New York) who turned a modest company with 60 stores into the global success Starbucks is today.
In an interview, Howard said he always felt as if he were on the other side of the tracks, seeing wealth in front of him and watching, every day, people with more resources, more money and happier families who weren’t as worried about money as his own was… and he wanted that too.
He had talent but couldn’t afford university, and in the end he won a football scholarship so he could study. He first worked for Xerox and soon afterwards set his sights on Starbucks, where he quickly became CEO. Like Steve Jobs at Apple, after several conflicts and disagreements with management, he left the company.
But some time later they came knocking again, asking him to run the company, and it was his real estate savvy and his commercial aggressiveness that grew the company from 60 outlets to today’s 16,000. His net worth is estimated at $2 billion.
(Read: The 5 universal numbers that really matter for your business’s growth)
3. George Soros. Simply George Soros
George Soros’s story deserves to be made into a film. This legendary investor, whose net worth is estimated at $20 billion, survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary and was able to go to university in London thanks to state grants.
Soros had to pass himself off as the godson of an employee of Hungary’s Ministry of Agriculture to stay safe from the Nazis.
He worked as a waiter, a warehouse porter and in all sorts of other low-paid jobs to support himself at the London School of Economics.
After graduating, luck wasn’t on his side at first, and he had to work as a sales assistant in various shops, until he finally took the risk of looking for a banking job in New York. Soros soon showed his talent, and in 1992 he led the attack on the pound sterling, putting the Bank of England in check and forcing it to lower interest rates, in a speculative operation that earned George Soros $1 billion.
(Read: Lessons from the few investors who beat the market)
4. Channing Tatum, the “sexiest man alive”
People magazine named Tatum the sexiest man alive in 2012. Today he’s an actor whose career is on the rise, with more than 16 films in less than five years.
But life wasn’t easy for him. At one point in his youth he had to hold down as many as three jobs at once, and his family’s precarious finances pushed him to use his looks to become a stripper, a job he says he never liked, because he wasn’t comfortable baring it all in public, although it earned him $200 a day for a couple of hours’ work.
In the end, his refusal to give up at Hollywood auditions paid off.
Stories like this are very common.
5. Suze Orman, the personal finance “guru”
Suze Orman is one of the most respected financial advisers in the United States, considered a guru on financial education. She is now worth around $35 million, but not so long ago she couldn’t afford to live anywhere but the back of an old van. She made herself a Gone with the Wind–style vow (“I swear I’ll never go hungry again”) and eventually achieved her goals.
Among today’s millionaires, the most common story is that of people who tried to escape poverty at all costs. We could name hundreds of cases, such as Ralph Lauren, who went from office clerk to more than 7 billion in assets; actor Daniel Craig, who had to sleep on park benches when he had just 7 cents in his bank account; or the singer Jewel, who nearly died in an emergency room because she couldn’t afford health insurance in the United States.
Perhaps another case of extreme hardship is that of Larry Ellison, of Oracle (who currently has $40 billion in assets). His only family was his single mother, who died when he was small, and he was raised by his aunt and uncle. As bad luck would have it, his aunt also died, and Larry had to drop out of university. He spent eight years in various jobs until he finally founded Oracle, today one of the most important technology companies on the planet.
Further reading
- 4 things I learned from being broke
- The 4 most striking differences between how the rich think and how everyone else does
- 10 money and finance tips to follow before you turn 30
Featured image: Tech.eu Photostream, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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