The benefits of a sound, solid education are undeniable. But there are also exceptions: these former school or college dropouts are now billionaires.
Billionaires like Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey not only have a huge fortune in common, but also an unusual CV. Because they are all successful today, even though they either dropped out of school or university years ago.
Editorial team finanzen.net
11th place: The ranking
A successful school leaving certificate and a subsequent completed degree are the ideal prerequisites for a steep career – or so the theory goes. The following billionaires without a degree or even a school qualification prove that in reality things can often be completely different; The status is June 19, 2023.
Source: finanzen.net, image: TijanaM / Shutterstock.com
10th place: Oprah Winfrey
She is one of the most influential personalities in America and the undisputed queen of the talk shows: Oprah Winfrey. Her net worth is $2.5 billion, even though she stopped studying in 1973 to pursue her career.
Source: forbes.com, finanzen.net, image: s_bukley / Shutterstock.com
9th place: Richard Branson
Richard Branson was born in London in 1950. Because of his dyslexia, he didn’t do well at school and so he left school at the age of 16 without any qualifications. A short time later, Branson founded his company Virgin. The former record mail order company has now become a huge company, offering numerous products under its name, from soft drinks to an airline. Richard Branson’s net worth is estimated at $3.0 billion.
Source: forbes.com, finanzen.net, Bid:Prometheus72 / Shutterstock.com
8th place: Walt Disney
Walter Elias Disney was born in Chicago in 1901 to a Canadian-Irish carpenter father and a German mother. Walt Disney also did not attend secondary school, which was not unusual at the time. The boy helped his parents on their farm. But his hobby was drawing – which marked him as a dreamer in the eyes of many of his fellow human beings. However, the dream became reality and a mega-empire Disney emerged: his heirs are now worth several billion US dollars.
Source: forbes.com, finanzen.net, image: S_Bukley / Shutterstock.com
7th place: Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg was not accepted at the Film Department at the University of Southern California at a young age and then dropped out of the studies he had already started. However, in 2002, 30 years and two Oscars later, he successfully completed his degree. His net worth today is around $4.0 billion.
Source: forbes.com, finanzen.net, Image: Joe Seer / Shutterstock.com
6th place: Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs also had a school leaving certificate, but he dropped out of his studies after the first semester. However, this did not keep him away from the university; he continued to live with friends in a dormitory, collected deposit bottles and voluntarily attended a few courses. A little later he founded his computer empire Apple, with which he became rich. His fortune was estimated at around $9.4 billion before his death.
Source: forbes.com, finanzen.net, image: Annette Shaff / Shutterstock.com
5th place: Michael Dell
Michael Saul Dell was born in Houston, Texas in 1965 into a middle-class family. He founded his computer company Dell from his college dorm when he was just 19 years old. Shortly thereafter, he left the University of Texas without a degree to devote himself entirely to his passion for IT. Dell is now a whopping $59.1 billion richer.
Source: forbes.com, finanzen.net, image: Dell
4th place: Li Ka-shing
Li Ka-shing is one of the richest men in Asia with a fortune of $38 billion. At the age of 15, after the death of his father, the trading entrepreneur from China was forced to take a job in a factory in order to support the family. However, this did not deter him from a career that began in 1950 with the construction of a plastic flowers factory. Today he owns investment companies, is involved, among other things, in the drugstore chain Rossmann and has taken over the British telephone provider O2.
Source: forbes.com, finanzen.net, Image: EdTech Stanford University School of Medicine
3rd place: Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg is probably one of the most famous dropouts in this ranking. Although Zuckerberg graduated from school, he never completed his psychology and computer science studies at Harvard University. After his company Facebook (now Meta) became successful and profitable, Zuckerberg dropped out of university in 2005 without graduating. His net worth today is an estimated $99.7 billion.
Source: forbes.com, finanzen.net, image: Facebook
2nd place: Amancio Ortega
Amancio Ortega grew up in a very poor family and had to learn early on to do without a lot of things. At the age of twelve he dropped out of school and started working as an errand boy in a shirt shop. He worked his way up, entering the business world in the 1960s and becoming his own boss. He continued to expand his company – in 1975, he finally achieved great entrepreneurial success with the first Zara store. Today, Ortega has an estimated fortune of $88.6 billion, according to Forbes magazine.
Source: forbes.com, finanzen.net, image: Inditex
1st place: Bill Gates
Bill Gates studied mathematics at Harvard University for two whole years, then dropped out and devoted himself entirely to his company, Microsoft. Forbes magazine estimates the American’s fortune at $118.2 billion.
Source: forbes.com, finanzen.net, image: Shutterstock.com
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