How These Billionaires Made Their Wealth Climbing The Corporate Ladder

Forbes

The vast majority of U.S. billionaires are founders who started companies or heirs who mostly lucked into their fortunes. A tiny subset got hired into jobs that catapulted them into the ranks of the world’s wealthiest.  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=21166c764f47  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:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript  Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com  Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.

Transcript

00:00 Think of a typical billionaire, and it's likely to be someone who falls into one of two camps.

00:05 Founders or co-founders.

00:07 Like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon Chairman Jeff Bezos.

00:11 Or heirs like Jacqueline Mars, granddaughter of the founder of candy company Mars.

00:16 A third category is the rarest. Those who are neither founders nor heirs.

00:21 Call them hired-hand billionaires, or corporate ladder billionaires.

00:25 Forbes has found just 26 people who were hired as executives, sometimes as junior employees, sometimes as CEOs, who became billionaires.

00:34 Here are the top 5 richest hired-hand billionaires in the US.

00:39 Number 5. Jonathan Gray.

00:42 Gray was hired at Blackstone in 1992, fresh out of college, and was named the firm's president and CEO in 2018.

00:50 Gray and his wife Mindy established the Basser Center for BRCA at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine,

00:56 focused on the prevention and treatment of certain genetically caused cancers.

01:01 Number 4. Charles Simonyi.

01:04 Early Microsoft employee Charles Simonyi is the man behind some of the company's most successful software, including Word and Excel.

01:11 The developer has a PhD in computer science from Stanford, and worked on one of the first personal computers at Xerox.

01:18 He joined Microsoft, then a fledging firm, as employee number 40 in 1981, and spent two decades in application and development.

01:27 A native of Hungary, he left Microsoft in 2002 and founded Intentional Software, which develops platforms for productivity apps.

01:35 Microsoft acquired Intentional Software in April 2017 for an undisclosed price, bringing Simonyi back to the Redmond, Washington giant.

01:43 He supports arts and science initiatives, including a $5 million gift to the University of Washington for a computer science building in 2017.

01:51 Number 3. Ramzi Musallam.

01:54 Private equity billionaire Ramzi Musallam turned tragedy into a Forbes 400 fortune.

02:00 Musallam joined private equity firm Veritas in 1997, and was their second highest-ranking executive.

02:06 After his boss and the firm's founder died by suicide in 2012, Musallam persuaded the investors to stick with the firm,

02:12 which he then took over leading as CEO to great success.

02:16 Number 2. Eric Schmidt.

02:19 Schmidt was Google's CEO from 2001 to 2011, and its executive chairman from 2011 to 2015.

02:26 Prior to that, he had stints as CEO of Novell and chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems.

02:32 He co-founded Innovation Endeavors, a venture capital firm that has invested in Uber, SoFi, Zymergen, and others.

02:39 He has toured some of the world's most tightly controlled regimes to promote open Internet access, including in Cuba and North Korea.

02:46 More recently, Schmidt has been quietly plotting a new defense tech effort.

02:50 "A stealth military drone project," four sources with knowledge of the effort told Forbes.

02:56 Number 1. Steve Ballmer.

02:58 Steve Ballmer is the high-wattage former CEO of Microsoft, who led the company from 2000 to 2014.

03:05 He joined Microsoft in 1980 as employee number 30, after dropping out of Stanford's MBA program.

03:11 Ballmer ran Microsoft as CEO after the first dot-com crash, and through efforts to catch up to Google in search capabilities and Apple in mobile phones.

03:20 In 2014, the year he retired from Microsoft, he bought the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion.

03:27 Forbes estimates that the team is now worth $4.65 billion.

03:32 He has ramped up his philanthropy since 2014, putting over $2 billion into a donor-advised fund with a focus on economic mobility.

03:40 To date, the Ballmers have given away more than $3.5 billion.

03:44 Ballmer is building a privately funded $2 billion arena in Inglewood, California.

03:49 The Intuit Dome, expected to be ready this year, is rising across the street from the $5 billion SoFi Stadium,

03:56 the 70,000-seat home of the city's two NFL teams, and Hollywood Park Casino.

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