There are many insanely wealthy individuals that are sitting on piles of money big enough for you to have trouble even imagining it. Many of them are members of families with a long tradition of wealth – but not all of them were born rich. There are many who have clawed their way among the richest people in the world through hard work and risk-taking, establishing their own lineage of wealthy individuals in the process. Today, let us take a brief look at some of them and their journey to billions.
Bill Gates
William Henry “Bill” Gates III is a philanthropist, humanitarian, investor, author, and the overall richest person in the world (as of 2017). His father was a prominent lawyer, so he didn’t exactly come from a poor family – but it was poor compared to what he achieved later in life. Gates took an interest in programming as a teenager and pursued this passion of his for the rest of his life.
Gates founded Microsoft together with Paul Allen in 1975 and dropped out of Harvard to work on its first software product, Altair BASIC. In the following years, Microsoft has continued to develop software for a series of other computer systems before signing a deal with IBM in 1980 to build an operating system for its upcoming computer, the IBM-PC. And five years later, Microsoft launched its famous Windows, making Gates – who served as a chairman and product strategist of the company – the richest man in the world.
Larry Page & Sergey Brin
Lawrence Edward “Larry” Page comes from a family of intellectuals – his father has a Ph.D. in computer science and his mother was an instructor in computer programming. It was to be expected for young Larry either to love or hate computers – fortunately, the former came to be. He started playing with “the stuff lying around” at the age of six, with this “stuff” being first-generation personal computers.
Page met Sergey Brin at the Stanford University where they teamed up to build “BackRub”, an internet crawler for their research project – a paper called “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” that has become the backbone of the search engine we all know and use today: Google. The two founded their company in 1998, after scraping together enough money to buy some servers and rent a garage in Menlo Park. From here, both of the co-founders of the company grew to become billionaires, with net worths exceeding $40 billion each.
Jeff Bezos
Last but not least, let us mention Jeff Bezos, the man behind the largest retailer in the world. His father had a bike shop, and his mother was a high-school student when little Jeff first saw the light of the day in 1964 – not the wealthiest family one could imagine. But he worked hard, graduated from Princeton, and was offered jobs at Intel and Bell Labs, among others. By the age of 30, Bezos worked his way up the ladder to become a senior VP at a hedge fund called “D. E. Shaw & Co.”.
He started his online bookstore called “Amazon” in late 1993. By the next year, he left his job to focus on his online retail outlet. The rest, as they say, is history – he went public with his company in 1996, started selling music and video in 1998, with the company ultimately growing into the online retail powerhouse and media giant we know today.
About Mohammad Mustafa Ahmedzai
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