How These Billionaires Made Their Wealth Climbing The Corporate Ladder

  • 8 months ago
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

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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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