Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2021. Several details are dated, including Oprah’s net worth, Adelson as sixth-richest American (he died in January 2021), Facebook’s “more than 2 billion users” (renamed Meta weeks later) and the Trump section, which predates his 2025 return to the presidency. Bill and Melinda Gates divorced in 2021.
Billionaires such as Amancio Ortega, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffett, among others, have certain traits and a unique set of attributes that most people lack. Or perhaps most people don’t know they have these millionaire traits and could actually work on them from within.
Maybe some of them were born with these attributes, but most of these traits don’t come naturally: they are skills these billionaires honed and habits they nurtured on their way to wealth.
These are some of the billionaire traits that carried them from their beginnings to extraordinary business success. Because these traits aren’t innate, anyone can work on acquiring them and apply them in their own life to achieve greater success and wealth.
See also: 25 habits of successful people
15 billionaire traits that led them to success
1. Vision (Amancio Ortega)
There’s no doubt that Amancio Ortega is a business visionary. A man with no formal education or business training, who nevertheless knew how to listen to the market and to customers’ needs, and to stay one step ahead of the competition. He’s a simple man who doesn’t like glamour or surrounding himself with luxury.
His vision wasn’t only for fashion but also for a low-debt, high-growth business model. Ortega didn’t buy all his shop premises; he rented them. That way, if a shop didn’t work, he closed it. Nor did he turn to franchising. All the brands and all the stores are owned by the Inditex group.
He also changed, in a way, how businesses think about competition. On a single street you can find six shops belonging to Amancio Ortega, albeit under different brands. As a result, an Inditex store’s biggest competitor is usually another Inditex store.
2. Patience (Warren Buffett): the most important billionaire trait
Warren Buffett built his fortune simply by taking his time. He isn’t a fan of fashionable stocks or knee-jerk reactions to market swings. His wealth comes from the compound interest his investments have generated over decades.
Buffett uses value investing to invest only in companies that are worth it: invest an amount, add the returns earned to the principal, give the investment time and let it grow through compounding. Mind you, compounding on very large sums of money.
3. Gratitude (Oprah Winfrey)
Despite running into all kinds of obstacles on her way to success (including racism), the queen of television hasn’t let her net worth of around 3 billion go to her head. For all her abundant success, she shows a surprising sense of gratitude. Her legions of fans are inspired by words of wisdom such as:
“Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.”
4. Courage (Michael Bloomberg)
In 1982, at the age of 39, Michael Bloomberg left Wall Street, the only full-time job he had ever had.
He took a big risk and started his own company based on an untested idea: making reliable financial information available to users and businesses on their computers.
This was before people really had many computers, and almost everyone thought it would fail. In his words:
“Life is too short to spend your time avoiding failure.”
Read: Michael Bloomberg: if you want to succeed, stop taking bathroom breaks
5. Inquisitiveness (Larry Ellison)
Larry Ellison, the college dropout and billionaire founder of Oracle Corporation, the world’s second-largest software company, says his inquisitive nature is responsible for his success.
“The most important aspect of my personality, the one that determines my success, is my questioning of conventional wisdom, doubting experts and questioning authority. Although that can be painful in your relationships with parents and teachers, it’s enormously useful in life, and even more useful in business.”
6. Tenacity (Sheldon Adelson)
Sheldon Adelson, the late CEO of Las Vegas Sands Corporation, was ranked by Forbes magazine as the sixth-richest man in the US, with a fortune of 30 billion. He started his business career at 12, and by 30 he had already built and lost a fortune twice.
Despite his losses, his tenacity never flagged, and after the opening of the Sands Macao in China, Adelson’s personal wealth grew fourteen-fold.
7. Persistence (Mark Zuckerberg)
What took Mark Zuckerberg to success was his relentless development work in Facebook’s early days. The Winklevoss twins, founders of ConnectU, one of the first social networking sites aimed at university students, were completely overrun when Zuckerberg launched Facebook.
Zuckerberg built a superior product, added more colleges and built an empire that threatened even the social media giant of the day, MySpace.
Facebook still reigns and keeps pushing the limits of social media by collecting sensitive user data, constantly changing its algorithms and selling paid advertising for products, but it’s this kind of persistence that has earned him a huge net worth.
What Zuckerberg achieved (bringing more than 2 billion users together in one place) was simply unthinkable at the time.
8. Innovation (Sergey Brin)
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, wanted to build the best search technology possible. When nobody believed in the idea and they were told that search engines weren’t a profitable business (even Yahoo didn’t want to acquire their search engine), he and his partner Larry Page maxed out their credit cards to buy servers, and by the end of the 1990s Google dominated the search engine market.
Google is among the most innovative companies of recent years because, as we can see, it not only changed internet search but is changing absolutely everything.
9. Passion (Donald Trump)
Billionaires don’t find success on their own; they use their passion to inspire and energise others. “Without passion, you don’t have energy; without energy, you have nothing,” Donald Trump often says; he has devoted his whole life to his passion: doing business. “Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion” is another line Donald Trump uses a lot.
And the truth is that Donald Trump, through passion but also through sheer drive, has achieved practically everything he set out to do. Even becoming President of the United States.
See also: An entrepreneur’s mindset: Donald Trump’s 10 commandments
10. Curiosity (George Soros)
Billionaire investor George Soros is often compared with Warren Buffett, but the two are very different in many ways. Soros is emotionally attached to his business and lets his natural curiosity influence his decisions.
World-famous for making 1 billion on a speculative trade that brought the Bank of England to its knees, Soros has a love of philosophy and sees investing as a way of testing his theories.
He is also constantly looking for flaws in his theories and is open to other people’s ideas. This kind of curiosity put him at number 26 among the richest people in the world.
Another trait I’d add for Soros is humility: he is one of the few top-level investors who openly admits he is fallible, and he doesn’t mind publicly acknowledging his mistakes or changing his mind three times in a single day about an opinion he gave to the media.
11. Confidence (Michael Dell)
Michael Dell is one of the many entrepreneurs who went from rags to riches thanks to the dotcom business. Dell enrolled to study medicine at the University of Texas in 1983, but computers were his real passion.
He started selling computers from his university dorm room and eventually dropped out to found Dell Computer Corporation.
In 1992 Dell became the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and he is still at the head of the company. He says:
“You don’t have to be a genius, a visionary or even a college graduate to succeed. All it takes is a dream and getting to work on achieving it.”
12. Creativity (Jan Koum)
The creator of WhatsApp is a self-made billionaire with a net worth of $7.1 billion, according to Forbes.
He dropped out of San José State University to start an innovative app that disrupted the mobile messaging industry.
WhatsApp was sold to Facebook in February 2014 for a whopping $19 billion.
13. Fearlessness (Richard Branson)
Richard Branson didn’t become a billionaire by playing it safe. The founder of Virgin Group, which is made up of more than 400 companies, believes you have to step out of your comfort zone and take risks if you want to achieve greatness. He says:
“You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.”
Read: What makes Richard Branson so special and unique
14. Charm (Mark Cuban)
You have to be good with people if you want to build an empire. Mark Cuban, one of the richest people in the world, knows how important it is to win hearts and minds.
“People hate dealing with jerks. It’s always easier to be nice than to be a jerk.”
Mark Cuban worked in sales and was reportedly an excellent salesman, so he learned to understand people and, without a doubt, learned how to persuade them.
15. Humility (Bill Gates)
Bill Gates and his wife Melinda (when they’re not busy plotting to destroy the world by injecting 5G into people’s veins) have devoted most of their fortune to improving the lives of the world’s poorest people.
But despite donations that add up to tens of billions of dollars, Gates acknowledges that others are making contributions more significant than his.
“I’m not going to stop eating or stop going on holiday. I’m not essentially sacrificing anything I want, and there are people who are sacrificing a great deal and giving everything to help the most disadvantaged.”
See also: How Bill Gates makes $1 million a day without doing anything
Further reading
- The 8 beliefs of successful business people
- 16 hard things you’ll have to do if you want to succeed in business
Featured image: Oracle PR from Redwood Shores, Calif., USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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