Some of the world’s wealthiest people started out dirt poor. These rags-to-riches stories remind us that through determination, grit, and a little bit of luck anyone can overcome their circumstances and achieve extraordinary success.
- Roman Abramovich
Abramovich was born in southern Russia, into poverty. After being orphaned at age 2, he was raised by an uncle and his family in a subarctic region of northern Russia. While a student at the Moscow Auto Transport Institute in 1987, he started a small company producing plastic toys, which helped him eventually find an oil business and make a name for himself within the oil industry. Later, as the sole leader of the Sibneft company, he completed a merger that made it the fourth biggest oil company in the world. The company was sold to state-run gas titan Gazprom in 2005 for $13 billion.
He acquired the Chelsea Football Club in 2003 and owns the world’s largest yacht, which cost him almost $400 million in 2010.
- Mohed Altrad
Born into a nomadic tribe in the Syrian desert to a poor mother who was raped by his father and died when he was young, Altrad was raised by his grandmother, who banned him from attending school, in Raqqa, the city that is now the capital of ISIS.
Altrad attended school anyway, and when he moved to France to attend university, he knew no French and lived off of one meal a day. Still, he earned a Ph.D. in computer science, worked for some leading French companies, and eventually bought a failing scaffolding company, which he transformed into one of the world’s leading manufacturers of scaffolding and cement mixers, Altrad Group.
He has previously been named French Entrepreneur of the Year and World Entrepreneur of the Year.
- Kenny Troutt
Troutt grew up with a bartender dad and paid for his own tuition at Southern Illinois University by selling life insurance. He made most of his money from the phone company Excel Communications, which he founded in 1988 and took public in 1996. Two years later, Troutt merged his company with Teleglobe in a $3.5 billion deal. He’s now retired and invests heavily in racehorses.
- Howard Schultz
In an interview with the British tabloid Mirror, Schultz says: “Growing up I always felt like I was living on the other side of the tracks. I knew the people on the other side had more resources, more money, and happier families. And for some reason, I don’t know why or how I wanted to climb over that fence and achieve something beyond what people were saying was possible. I may have a suit and tie on now but I know where I’m from and I know what it’s like.”
Schultz ended up winning a football scholarship to the University of Northern Michigan and went to work for Xerox after graduation. He then took over a coffee shop called Starbucks, which at the time had only 60 shops. Schultz became the company’s CEO in 1987 and grew the coffee chain to more than 16,000 outlets worldwide.