How Much Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and 7 More Billionaires Earned at First Jobs vs. Net Worth Today
It’s hard to imagine a billionaire selling sandwiches, flipping burgers or stocking shelves, but many of the world’s wealthiest people actually came from very humble beginnings. They might be cruising the Mediterranean in yachts, soaring into space, and running successful companies now, but billionaires like Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and others built their success from the ground up.
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Learn where some of the worlds most wealthy elite got their start according to information from The Small Business Blog in comparison to the riches they’ve come to possess today.
Richard Branson
Net worth: $2 billion
First job: Magazine owner
Salary then: N/A
Richard Branson isn’t known for doing anything on a small scale, so it may not surprise you to learn his first job was publishing a youth culture magazine called Student, which was for students and run by students.
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The first edition sold $8,000 worth of advertising, which covered the first run of 50,000 copies. Branson actually started Virgin as a mail-order record business to help fund his magazine efforts. The company later evolved into record sales and eventually, a record label.
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Oprah Winfrey
Net worth: $2.8 billion
First job: Grocery store clerk
Salary then: 50 cents an hour
Oprah Winfrey, one of only 97 women billionaires in the U.S., has been in broadcasting and media since the age of 16, when she read news for Nashville radio station WVOL. By the time she was 19, she was working as a news anchor, which paved the way to her first talk show, “People Are Talking.”
But her WVOL gig wasn’t her first job. Before that, she worked at a corner grocery store next to her father’s barber shop in Nashville, according to Oprah.com. “I wasn’t allowed to talk to the customers, and can you imagine for me?” she recalled. “That was very, very, very hard.”
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Mark Cuban
Net worth: $5.4 billion
First job: Door-to-door sales
Salary then: N/A
It might come as no surprise that Mark Cuban was an early entrepreneur. At 12 years old, this self-made billionaire went door-to-door selling boxes of garbage bags to pay for a pair of basketball shoes.”That’s when I learned selling was helping. Selling was not convincing,” he said, as previously reported by GOBankingRates.com.
He credited this early lesson in hustling as the key to his success. In 2023, Cuban sold the Dallas Mavericks basketball team for more than $4 billion, Forbes reported.
Steve Jobs
Net worth: $7 billion at his time of death
First job: Atari game developer
Salary then: N/A
Steve Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple, had a GPA of just 2.65 in college and eventually ended up dropping out. In spite of this, his passion for technology led him to a position as a video game technician at Atari. He was transferred to the nightshift after co-workers complained about his hygiene and habit of walking around barefoot in the offices, according to The Executive Headlines.
Notably, Jobs and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak developed the video game Breakout for Atari, selling the rights for $5,000. Jobs allegedly lied to Wozniak about the amount they received, telling him Atari paid just $700. He gave Wozniak $350 and pocketed $4,650.
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Bill Gates
Net worth: $131.3 billion
First job: Computer programmer
Salary then: $20,000
Microsoft founder Bill Gates hasn’t strayed far from his original path as a computer software developer. He wrote a computer program for Lakeside School to assist in creating student class schedules when he was just 13.
In the 1970s, Gates joined forces with Paul Allen and Paul Gilbert to launch Traf-O-Data, a program that counted traffic, according to GeekWire.com. The skills he developed set the stage to create Microsoft in 1975.
Warren Buffett
Net worth: $137.7 billion
First job: Delivering newspapers
Salary then: $175 per month
Warren Buffett, known as the Oracle of Omaha for his savvy investment decisions as the owner of Berkshire-Hathaway, has never been afraid to work hard. He started his working life as a newspaper delivery boy for The Washington Post. He also sold chewing gum and Coca-Cola, a product he still loves and invests in, door-to-door.
Buffett managed to squirrel away $2,000 by the time he was 15 and invested $1,200 of it in a 40-acre farm, where he had a profit-sharing deal with the farmer. Over his decades of investing, Buffett never lost touch with his roots — in 2012, he challenged Berkshire’s annual meeting attendees to a newspaper toss contest.
Mark Zuckerberg
Net worth: $170.4 billion
First job: Software engineer
Salary then: $0 — Zuckerberg turned down a $1 million purchase offer from Microsoft and made the software open source.
Mark Zuckerberg was still in college when he founded Facebook, but he already had several other successes under his belt. In high school, Zuckerberg created music-recommendation software called Synapse, which was similar to Pandora.
In 2002, several software companies, including Microsoft and AOL, showed interest in purchasing Synapse and offered Zuckerberg a job, but he chose to enroll at Harvard University, instead — and the rest is history. Five years later, Microsoft purchased a 1.6 percent share in Facebook for a cool $240 million.
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Elon Musk
Net worth: $196.5 billion
First job: Software engineer, 1983
Salary then: $500, the selling price for computer game code sold to a magazine
The Tesla founder has always been an avid fan of technology and space. When he was just 12 years old, Musk wrote code for his own space-themed video game called “Blastar,” which he sold to PC and Office Technology magazine for $500. Recently, a software engineer from Google took the code and rebuilt the game to play on modern machines.
Jeff Bezos
Net worth: $198.1 billion
First job: McDonald’s fry cook
Salary then: $2.69 per hour
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has come a long way from his summer job flipping burgers at McDonald’s. It was there he learned to get down to business and get his hands dirty — literally.
“My first week on the job, a 5-gallon, wall-mounted ketchup dispenser got stuck open in the kitchen and dumped a prodigious quantity of ketchup onto every hard-to-reach kitchen crevice,” Bezos told author Cody Teets. “Since I was the new guy, they handed me the cleaning solution and said, ‘Get going!'”
Note: Net worth amounts were accurate as of the time of publication on March 28, 2024.
This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: How Much Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and 7 More Billionaires Earned at First Jobs vs. Net Worth Today
