Think of a typical billionaire and it’s likely to be someone who falls into one of two camps: founders or cofounders–like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos—or heirs, like Jacqueline Mars, granddaughter of the founder of candy company Mars, maker of M&Ms and Snickers bars; and Thomas Pritzker, whose predecessors founded the Hyatt Hotels chain he runs as CEO.
Roughly 69% of the nearly 760 U.S. billionaires listed by Forbes fall into the first category, while just more than 27% inherited a great fortune. Altogether nearly 97% of American billionaires land in these two groups.
A third category is the rarest: those who are neither founders nor heirs. Call them hired-hand billionaires–or corporate-ladder billionaires. Forbes has found just 26 people who were hired as executives–sometimes as junior employees, sometimes as CEOs–who became billionaires. These ultra-wealthy executives work or worked at just 20 companies, nearly all of which are technology or private equity firms. Among the more notable are Apple CEO Tim Cook, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Jonathan Gray, who was hired at Blackstone in 1992 fresh out of college and was named the firm’s president and Chief Operating Officer in 2018.
Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2024/02/07/hired-hand-billionaires-tim-cook-steve-ballmer-lisa-su-these-executives-amassed-10-figure-fortunes-while-working-for-others/?sh=62961eb04f47
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Roughly 69% of the nearly 760 U.S. billionaires listed by Forbes fall into the first category, while just more than 27% inherited a great fortune. Altogether nearly 97% of American billionaires land in these two groups.
A third category is the rarest: those who are neither founders nor heirs. Call them hired-hand billionaires–or corporate-ladder billionaires. Forbes has found just 26 people who were hired as executives–sometimes as junior employees, sometimes as CEOs–who became billionaires. These ultra-wealthy executives work or worked at just 20 companies, nearly all of which are technology or private equity firms. Among the more notable are Apple CEO Tim Cook, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Jonathan Gray, who was hired at Blackstone in 1992 fresh out of college and was named the firm’s president and Chief Operating Officer in 2018.
Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2024/02/07/hired-hand-billionaires-tim-cook-steve-ballmer-lisa-su-these-executives-amassed-10-figure-fortunes-while-working-for-others/?sh=62961eb04f47
Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1
Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 The vast majority of US billionaires are either founders who started companies or heirs who
00:05 mostly lucked into their fortunes, but a tiny subset got hired into jobs that catapulted
00:10 them into the ranks of the world's wealthiest.
00:16 Hi everyone, I'm Rosemary Miller here with Keri Dolan, an assistant managing editor here
00:21 at Forbes.
00:22 Thank you so much for joining me today, Keri.
00:25 Thank you, Rosemary.
00:27 Absolutely.
00:28 So Keri, what is a hired hand billionaire and how many did Forbes' reporting find?
00:35 By hired hand, what we mean is someone who was not a founder or co-founder of a company
00:40 and did not inherit their wealth.
00:44 And so this would be somebody who got hired at a company, sometimes as a junior employee,
00:50 sometimes even as a CEO, usually got equity in the company and by equity I mean a stake,
01:00 shares of stock in the company, and that equity has grown to make them worth a billion dollars
01:06 or more.
01:07 Oh, wow.
01:08 We found just 26 hired hand billionaires in the United States out of about 760 American
01:15 billionaires.
01:17 So how many, about what percent of the Forbes billionaires list are founders and what percent
01:23 are heirs?
01:24 Yeah, so it's almost 70%, 69% are founders or co-founders, entrepreneurs of some sort
01:31 and another 27% are heirs.
01:34 And in that 20% or 7% of heirs, there are some who are not just sitting home or hanging
01:41 out on their yachts.
01:42 There are people who actually are running businesses that maybe they inherited or they're
01:45 starting new businesses with money that they inherited.
01:49 But it's so it's basically about 3% of all US billionaires are hired hand billionaires.
01:56 Wow.
01:57 So what industries do these billionaires work in?
02:00 Most of them are in tech.
02:02 Some are in finance, including private equity.
02:05 Companies that have helped some of these people become billionaires include Google, Facebook
02:12 and private equity firms like KKR and Silver Lake.
02:16 So who is the richest hired hand billionaire?
02:21 Steve Ballmer.
02:23 So Steve met Bill Gates at Harvard before Bill dropped out of Harvard.
02:28 He joined Microsoft as employee number 40 and he ran the company as CEO from 2000 to
02:37 2014.
02:39 And he's sort of since left Microsoft and bought the LA Clippers basketball team and
02:44 is a very active philanthropist.
02:48 Steve Ballmer is worth $120 billion at last count and makes him one of the 10 richest
02:53 people in the world.
02:56 And who are a few well-known billionaires who are hired hands?
03:00 Yeah, there's a bunch.
03:02 Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Eric Schmidt, the former
03:10 CEO of Google and former chairman of Google, Lloyd Blankfein, the former CEO of Goldman
03:16 Sachs, to name a few.
03:18 And how many women made this list?
03:20 And is there anyone our audience would actually know of?
03:23 Yeah, five women made this list of 26 hired hand billionaires.
03:29 And I think I'd say, depending how closely you follow business, I'd say they're all fairly
03:34 familiar names, maybe some more than others.
03:36 Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Facebook, now Meta.
03:41 She joined when Facebook was a much, much smaller company and got equity along the way.
03:46 Lisa Su, the CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, AMD, the semiconductor firm.
03:52 She became CEO in 2014.
03:55 Meg Whitman, who was the CEO of eBay.
03:58 She joined eBay when it was tiny and really helped it grow.
04:01 And that's really where her fortune comes from.
04:03 She later went on to be the CEO of Hewlett Packard.
04:06 Safra Katz, the CEO of Oracle Software Company.
04:10 And the last, Jayshree Ullal, the CEO of Arista Networks, which is a networking company.
04:15 Well, Carrie, is there anything interesting that stood out to you while you were compiling
04:20 this list?
04:21 Yeah, I mean, to me, it's just, it's kind of really amazing that these people can get
04:30 a fortune of a billion dollars not being a founder.
04:34 Because as we talked about, nearly 70% of the folks who are billionaires in the United
04:41 States are founders or co-founders of a company.
04:44 So to be able to get in the door at a company and get enough stock in the company that you
04:51 could then turn that stock into a billion dollar fortune.
04:54 You know, and most of these people are also selling it along the way, so they're not having
04:58 their whole nest egg in, let's say, Sheryl Sandberg doesn't have 100% Facebook stock
05:03 in her portfolio.
05:06 But it's really quite a rare thing.
05:09 And I've known this over the years, editing the billionaires list as I have in the past,
05:15 about this class of people, but we've never really taken the time to add up how many people
05:20 were hired hand billionaires.
05:21 So it was a really interesting exercise.
05:22 Well, thank you so much for joining me today.
05:26 Thanks for having me.
05:27 Absolutely.
05:28 Thank you.
05:29 [END]