• Billionaires don't always come from moneyed backgrounds.
• In fact, many famous billionaires actually grew up poor.
• From George Soros to Larry Ellison to Oprah Winfrey, here's a look at how some of the wealthiest people on the planet came up from nothing.
Billionaires aren't all born with silver spoons in their mouths.
In fact, many came from nothing at all.
The "rags-to-riches" trope may be a cliché, but it's one that's definitely grounded in reality for some famous billionaires.
Through extraordinary grit and perseverance, individuals across the globe have beat the odds and achieved their own rags-to-riches stories.
Here are 19 people who started off life poor and went on to become billionaires:
Guy Laliberté was a fire-eater before founding Cirque du Soleil.
Michael Buckner/Getty Images
Net worth: $1.19 billion
At the beginning of his career, Laliberté had fire in his belly — literally. The Canadian-born circus busker played the accordion, walked on stilts, and ate fire.
Later on, Business Insider previously reported, he took a chance and flew a troupe from Quebec to Los Angeles without purchasing a return fair. The circus troup traveled to Las Vegas and became Cirque du Soleil.
Laliberté is now the CEO of Cirque de Soleil.
Kenny Troutt, the founder of Excel Communications,
paid his way through college by selling life insurance.
Jamie Squire / Getty Images
Net worth: $1.41 billion
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 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.
Montpellier rugby club president and Entrepreneur of
the Year Mohed Altrad survived on one meal a day
when he moved to France.
Net worth:$2.6 billion
Born into a nomadic tribe in the Syrian dessert to a poor mother who
was raped by his father and died when he was young, Altrad was raised by
his grandmother.
She banned him from attending school in Raqqa, the city that is
now 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 PhD 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.
Born into poverty, Oprah Winfrey became the first
African American TV correspondent in Nashville.
Dave Kotinsky/Stringer/Getty Images
Net worth:$2.8 billion
Winfrey was born into a poor family in Mississippi, but this didn't stop her from winning a scholarship to Tennessee State University and becoming the first African American TV correspondent in the state at the age of 19.
In 1983, Winfrey moved to Chicago to work for an AM talk show which
would later be called "The Oprah Winfrey Show."
Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz grew up in a housing
complex for the poor.
Stephen Brashear/Getty
Net worth:$2.8 billion
In an interview with the Mirror, Schultz said: "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, 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.
Shortly after, he 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.
Forever 21 founder Do Won Chang worked as a janitor,
gas station attendant, and in a coffee shop when he first
moved to America.
Net worth:$3.2 billion
The husband-and-wife team — Do Won Chang and Jin Sook — behind
Forever 21 didn't always have it so easy. After moving to America from
Korea in 1981, Do Won had to work three jobs at the same time to
make ends meet. They opened their first clothing store in 1984.
Forever 21 is now an international, 790-store empire.
Investor Ken Langone's parents worked as a plumber
and cafeteria worker.
Getty Images/ Scott Olson
Net worth: $3.3 billion
To help pay for Langone's school at Bucknell University, he worked
odd jobs and his parents mortgaged their home.
public. (It was later acquired by HP.) Just two years later, he partnered
with Bernard Marcus to start Home Depot, which also went public in 1981.
John Paul DeJoria, the man behind a hair-care empire
and Patron Tequila, once lived in a foster home and
his car.
Ethan Miller/Getty
Net worth:$3.3 billion
Before the age of 10, DeJoria, a first generation American, sold Christmas cards and newspapers to help support his family. He was eventually sent to live in a foster home and even spent some time in a gang before joining the military.
With a $700 dollar loan, DeJoria created John Paul Mitchell Systems and sold the shampoo door-to-door
while living in his car. He later started Patron Tequila, and now
invests in other industries.
Ralph Lauren was once a clerk at Brooks Brothers
dreaming of men's ties.
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images
Net worth: $6.3 billion
Lauren graduated high school in the Bronx, New York, but later
dropped out of college to join the Army. It was while working as a
clerk at Brooks Brothers that Lauren questioned whether men
were ready for wider and brighter designs in ties. The year he
decided to make his dream a reality, 1967, Lauren sold $500,000
worth of ties. He started Polo the next year.
At one time, businessman Shahid Khan washed dishes for $1.20 an hour.
Sam Greenwood/Getty Images
Net worth:$7.1 billion
He's now one of the richest people in the world, but when Khan came
to the US from Pakistan, he worked as a dishwasher while attending
the University of Illinois. Khan now owns Flex-N-Gate, one of the
largest private companies in the US, the NFL's Jacksonville Jaguars,
and the soccer club Fulham.
Legendary trader George Soros survived the Nazi
occupation of Hungary and arrived in London as an
impoverished college student.
Net worth: $8 billion
In his early teens, Soros posed as the godson of an employee of the
Hungarian Ministry of Agriculture in order to stay safe from the Nazi
occupation of Hungary.
In 1947, Soros escaped the country to live with his relatives in London.
He put himself through the
London School of Economics working as a waiter and railway porter.
After graduating, Soros worked at a souvenir shop before getting a job
as a banker in New York City. In 1992, his famous bet against the
British pound made him a billion dollars.
WhatsApp founder Jan Koum emigrated to the US.
Reuters
Net worth: $9.1 billion
Koum was born in Kyiv, Ukraine. At the age of 16, he accompanied his
mother to California, where they secured an apartment through
government assistance. In order to
survive, he swept floors at a local store.
According to the Independent, Koum taught himself computer skills.
In 2009, he cofounded the world's largest mobile messaging service
WhatsApp, which was purchased
by Facebook for $22 billion in 2014.
Russian business tycoon and Chelsea Football Club
owner Roman Abramovich was born into poverty and
orphaned at
age two.
Clive Mason/Getty Images
Net worth: $11.6 billion
Abramovich was born in southern Russia, into poverty.
After being orphaned at age two, 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 found an oil business
and make a name for himself within the oil industry. Later, as 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 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.
He's a close associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal came from modest
beginnings in India.
REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
Net worth:$18.9 billion
A 2009 BBC article reported the ArcelorMittal CEO and chairman, who
was born in 1950 to a poor family in the Indian state of Rajasthan,
"established the foundations of his
fortune over two decades by doing much of his business in the steel
industry equivalent of
a discount warehouse."
Today Mittal runs the world's largest steel making company and is a
multibillionaire.
Leonardo Del Vecchio grew up in an orphanage and
later worked in a factory where he lost part of his finger.
Net worth:$22.2 billion
Del Vecchio was one of five children who was eventually sent to an
orphanage because his widowed mother couldn't care for him.
He would later work in a factory making
molds of auto parts and eyeglass frames.
At the age of 23, Del Vecchio opened his own molding shop, which
expanded to become the world's largest maker of sunglasses and
prescription eyewear with brands like
Ray-Ban and Oakley.
Luxury goods mogul Francois Pinault quit high school
in 1974 after being bullied for being poor.
Charles Platiau/Reuters
Net worth:$33.7 billion
Pinault is now the honorary chairman of fashion conglomerate Kering
(formerly PPR), but at one time, he had to quit high school because he
As a businessman, Pinault is known for his "predator" tactic, which
includes buying smaller firms for a fraction of the cost when the market
crashes. He eventually
started PPR, which owns high-end fashion houses including Gucci,
Stella McCartney, Alexander
McQueen, and Yves Saint Laurent.
Today, he owns Christie's, the world's top art business.
After his father died, business magnate Li Ka-shing
had to quit school to help support his family.
Dario Cantatore / Stringer / Getty Images
Net worth:$34.2 billion
Ka-shing fled mainland China for Hong Kong in the 1940s, but his father died when he was 15, leaving Ka-shing responsible for supporting his family.
In 1950, he started his own company, Cheung Kong Industries, which
manufactured plastics at first but would later expand into real estate.
College dropout Sheldon Adelson grew up sleeping on
the floor of a Boston tenement house
Kin Cheung/AP
Net worth:$40.6 billion
Adelson, the son of a cab driver, grew up in Dorchester, Massachusetts,
and began selling newspapers at the age of 12, according to Bloomberg
A Forbes profile of the billionaire says years later, after dropping out
of the City College of New York, Adelson "built a fortune running
vending machines, selling
newspaper ads, helping small businesses go public, developing
condos and hosting trade shows."
Adelson lost almost all of his money in the Great Recession, but he
earned much of it back in the following years. He now runs Las
Vegas Sands, the largest casino company in the world, and is
considered the most high-profile political donor in America, Forbes reported.
Oracle's Larry Ellison dropped out of college after
his adoptive mother died and held odd jobs for
eight years.
Kimberly White/Stringer/Getty Images
Net worth:$55.6 billion
Born in Brooklyn, New York, to a single mother, Ellison was raised by his
aunt and uncle in Chicago. After his aunt died, Ellison dropped out of
college and moved
to California to work odd jobs for the next eight years.
He founded software development company Oracle in 1977, which
is now one of the largest technology companies in the world.
He's now Oracle's CTO.
Vivian Giang, Jacquelyn Smith, and Drake Baer contributed to
previous versions of this article.
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