To become an entrepreneur, you must dedicate your time and money back into the business you are building. Oftentimes, successful entrepreneurs don't start a business for the money, they start a business to provide a service to the public that makes their lives easier. You won't believe the journey the people on this list had to take to get where they are today. This is the top 10 most successful entrepreneurs in the world. Number 10, Vera Wang.
Born in 1949 in Manhattan, New York, Vera Wang had a privileged upbringing. She became a figure skater during high school. She competed in the figure skating championship with her partner, James Stewart.
Unfortunately, her skating career fell short when she failed to make it to the Olympic team. Her entrepreneurship journey began after she graduated from college and earned a degree in art history. She started working for Vogue at the age of 22, and within just a year, she was promoted to fashion editor.
And for the next 15 years, she continued to hold that position until 1987. She quit her job during that year and started a job as a design director for Ralph Lauren. Wang realized that there was a shortage of non-stereotypical bridal gowns, so, with the financial help of her father, she opened her own bridal boutique. Her boutique rose to fame right away, and her clientele was made of popular celebrities such as Kate Hudson and Victoria Beckham.
The price range of her wedding dresses is between $7,500 and $23,000. Number 9, Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban is another inspiring entrepreneur whose net worth is estimated to be around $4.3 billion United States dollars. He began earning his own money at the young age of 12 by selling garbage bags to afford pricey basketball shoes.
While he was just an undergraduate student at Indiana University, Cuban managed to scrounge up enough money to buy a bar a move that was considered daring by his professors. After graduation, Cuban founded his first company MicroSolution. which he sold seven years later for $6 million United States dollars.
He launched a website called Audionet with fellow university students. The website, which was renamed Broadcast.com, earned him $13.5 million United States dollars in revenue. In 2000, he bought a major stake in Dallas'Mavericks, and thanks to him, the team began to win more games until they became NBA champions.
Cuban continues to invest money in startup companies, including the and even became an investor on the popular TV show Shark Tank in 2011. Number 8, Steve Jobs Co-Founder of Apple, Steve Jobs is a legend in the entrepreneurship world. Jobs was interested in electronics at a young age. He made the daring move of asking the Hewlett Packard president for parts for a high school project of his.
Hewlett was very impressed by Jobs and offered him an internship at his company where Jobs met Steve Wozniak. One of Wozniak's hobbies was building small computers.20 years old Jobs took an interest in this hobby and convinced him to start a business with him. They set up a shop and Jobs garage in his parents'house, named it Apple, and started working on the prototype. The first prototype raised enough cash to develop their product, and they created Apple II, which earned $200 million USD in revenue within the first two years.
Due to a few hardships along the way, Steve Jobs sold his share of Apple and resigned in 1985. He launched a new company, Next, and attempted to sell the next computer, but his attempts failed due to the expensive price. He then shifted his attention to another business, Pikeser Animation Studios, where the animated movie Toy Story was created. The movie was a big hit, and Pikeser's worth was at $1 billion United States dollars.
Apple then bought Pikeser for $400 million United States dollars and rehired Jobs again. For the next 10 years, Apple began to launch products that were massive successes, thanks to Steve Jobs. He officially resigned from his CEO position in 2011 and passed away six weeks later from cancer.
Number 7. Sergey Brin. With a net worth of 66 billion United States dollars, Sergey Brin was titled the seventh wealthiest person in the world as of July 2020. Brin was born in Moscow, Russia and moved to the USA in 1979. He was enrolled at Stanford University. and during his orientation day, he met Larry Page.
The two of them transformed Bryn's dorm room into an office. They created a website, PageRank, which ranked other websites on the number of page links that they had. This website soon became a search engine, which they called Google in 1998. They also launched the company Google Inc., and within its first five years, Google reached great success with more than 18 million searches a day.
The company continued to grow. and it acquired YouTube for $1.6 billion in stock in 2006. Bryn stepped down from his role from Google's parent company in December of 2019. Number 6, Larry Ellison. Founder and CEO of Oracle, Larry Ellison is an American entrepreneur with a net worth of $72.9 billion United States dollars. Ellison grew up in Chicago, and was raised by his aunt and uncle who adopted him.
He attended the University of Illinois, but dropped out after just one year after the death of his adoptive mother. Ellison never graduated from college. For the next 10 years, Ellison continued to jump from one job to another.
During those years, he began learning basic computer skills and software programming. He started working on the first IBM-compatible mainframe system, and in 1977, he launched Oracle. As Ellison continued to develop and update Oracle, the revenue started to double every year for seven consecutive years.
Despite a few bumps in the road, Oracle's success never stopped, and as Oracle's largest shareholder, Ellison became one of the world's richest people. Number 5, Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg became a household name when Facebook gained worldwide fame and success.
His love for programming started in high school, he and a fellow student, Adam D'Angelo, created a plugin that caught the attention of Microsoft. The two of them were offered a job at Microsoft, but they both rejected it to attend college. Zuckerberg went to Harvard University to study programming, but that wasn't enough to satisfy his love for programming. In 2004, he created a website, which he named Fasimash, where he uploaded pictures of other students that he acquired by hacking into the database of the university. He had a vision of creating a website where students could be introduced to one another, and he successfully created Facebook, which was a combination of Mispus and Frienster.
He officially launched Facebook with his co-founder from his dorm room, and within just a few weeks, a large number of students created their profile on the platform. After a year and a half, Zuckerberg had earned $12.7 million. Currently, Facebook has more than 2.4 billion active users and is one of the most visited websites on the internet.
Zuckerberg's net worth sits at $96 billion United States dollars. Number 4, Elon Musk. Elon Musk is a South African entrepreneur that took the world by a storm.
As a child, he was introverted and loved to read. He was also very interested in computer programming. In 1989, he attended Queen's University, and in that same year, he obtained Canadian citizenship, as he thought it would help obtain American citizenship, which he acquired in 2002. He went to Stanford University but dropped out less than a week later to take advantage of the rise of the internet. He created his first company. ZIP2 Corporation, with his brother.
The company was sold for $307 million. He then created XCOM, which merged with another company that had a money transfer service, and that was the birth of PayPal. Musk became a billionaire when he sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion. SpaceX, Elon's third company, was founded in 2002. His company made history as the first private company to send a spacecraft to space. With SpaceX's success, Musk became a co-founder of Tesla Motors, a company dedicated to creating electric cars.
And as of 2020, his net worth is estimated to be around $83.6 billion United States dollars. Number 3, Bill Gates. Founder of the world's biggest software company, William Henry Gates III, more famously known as Bill Gates, is an inspiring example of a successful entrepreneur.
Bill Gates was born in 1955 in Seattle. Despite his parents wanting him to pursue a law career, Gates was more interested in programming and coding. He attended a prestigious school in Seattle where he, alongside Paul Allen, a fellow student, started to ditch their classes to use the school's computer room. At the age of 16, the two students created software that earned them $20,000. Gates and Allen were attending Harvard University when the world's first microcomputer was created.
They took this as an opportunity to contact the manufacturer about having written a version of a computer language for the microcomputer when in actuality, they hadn't written anything. To their surprise, the president of the company asked them to see what they have written. The two of them worked day and night to write it, and it successfully ran, and that's how Microsoft was born.
In 1986, Gates was earning $61 million after the release of the operating system Windows, and he became one of the richest people overnight. By 1999, his wealth was estimated to be a staggering $90 billion. Gates'net worth currently sits at $114 billion.
Number 2, Jeff Bezos. It can be said with confidence that Jeff Bezos is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time. Bezos was born in 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
His first job was during high school, he worked as a cook during the morning shift. After high school, he attended Princeton University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and computer science, with an impressive GPA of 4.2 in 1986. After graduation, He received multiple job offers before he began working at the then-newly founded investment bank D.E. Shaw & Company. He worked there for four years and became the company's youngest senior vice president. Bezos was once browsed by the company's CEO, and he was the first to be hired by Bezos.
He was also the first to be hired by Bezos. using the internet and he discovered that the world wide web usage was increasing tremendously each year. He decided to take advantage of this discovery and to open an online bookstore.
He moved to Seattle with his family and started working on the software for his virtual bookstore with a handful of employees out of his garage. He created Amazon.com, named after the river, where he listed 1 million books. The first purchase was made in July of 1995, and the website continued to grow in popularity.
thanks to mailing lists and newsgroups. By 1996, Amazon's sales achieved more than $15 million in sales and had grown into a company with 1,000 employees. He decided to diversify his company and to sell more than just books to eliminate any competition. The company continued to grow and dominated all of the online retail websites.
Despite Bezos'humble beginning, he became one of the richest and most successful entrepreneurs in the world. with a net worth of $190.6 billion. Number 1. John D. Rockefeller.
John D. Rockefeller, born in 1839, was an entrepreneur who revolutionized the oil industry and became one of the richest men in the world. His net worth is estimated to be $418 billion in 2019. He was born to a middle-class family, and at the age of 16, he landed his first job working as an assistant in a bookstore, earning $50 United States dollars per month. At the age of 20, he was working as a commission merchant with a business partner when he saw an opportunity in the oil industry.
He closed his company, which had grossed $450,000, and opened his first oil refinery in Cleveland. And within the first two years, Rockefeller dominated the oil industry, and his refinery became the largest in Cleveland. Check out the videos on screen now if you want to continue your venture down the business rabbit hole.