6 Growing up in a housing complex for the poor, Howard Schultz, who has a net worth of $3.1 billion, worked as a salesman for Xerox after graduation, left Starbucks after they refused his idea to create a cafe, started his own cafe, bought Starbucks, and renamed his own cafe “Starbucks.”

Howard Schultz’s father was once a US army trooper and then a truck driver. Schultz escaped from poverty by playing sports such as football and basketball, and also became the first person from his family to attend college. After graduation, he worked as a salesman with the Xerox Corporation, but it was after he joined Hammarplast, a Swedish drip coffee maker manufacturer, that things began to change. The Starbucks Coffee Company of Seattle was only a coffee-bean shop when Schultz visited them as they were a client of Hammarplast. He was interested in working with the company, and a year later, he joined as its Director of Marketing.

When Schultz went to Milan, Italy, he saw how cafes lined the streets and served excellent espresso, serving as meeting spaces. He tried to convince the founders of Starbucks Coffee Company to start serving espresso and roll-out a cafe concept. Later, the company refused to roll out the cafe concept company-wide and said they did not want to get into the restaurant business. This is when Schultz resigned and collected money from his friends to start a coffee store, “Il Giornale.” Eventually, he bought Starbucks’ retail unit for 3.8 million dollars, opened more stores, and expanded it internationally. (source)

7 Ralph Lauren dropped out of college to work in the army and then took up a job as a sales assistant selling ties at a store. He started his own line of ties at 28, worked out of a single “drawer” from a showroom, and made deliveries himself. Now he has $7.2 billion.

Born to an Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant family in New York, Ralph Lauren did not complete his college education. He served in the US Army from 1962 to 1964 and then left to work as a sales assistant for Brooks Brothers selling ties. Thereafter, he worked as a salesman for a tie company, and when he was 28, he convinced the president of Beau Brummell, the tie manufacturer he was working for, to let him start a line of his own.

In 1967, the Ralph Lauren Corporation began with selling ties, and a year later, Lauren launched his line of menswear naming it “Polo” after his love for sports. He worked out of a single drawer from a showroom in the Empire State Building and made deliveries on his own. He was so good at his work that the Manhattan store of Bloomingdale’s, for the first time, gave a designer their entire in-store boutique and sold his line exclusively. Seven years later, his clothes were already being worn by actors in the movies. From then onwards, the sky was the limit for him. (source)

8 Leonardo Del Vecchio grew up in an orphanage and worked at a factory making molds for eyeglasses and auto parts. At 23, he opened his own molding shop, expanding it to become the world’s largest maker of sunglasses with brands like Ray-Ban and Oakley. He now has a net worth of $21.9 billion.

The founder of Luxottica, the world’s largest producer and retailer of sunglasses and lenses, Leonardo Del Vecchio was born to an impoverished family. His widowed mother sent him and his siblings away to an orphanage as she could not take care of them. Later on, he was working in a factory as an apprentice tool-and-die maker where, in an accident, he lost a part of his finger. He decided to use his metalworking skills to create spectacle parts and moved to Agordo in Italy which was the hub of the Italian eyewear industry.

At 23, he started his own molding shop, and in 1971, he entered the contract manufacturing business establishing the Luxottica brand. Today, the company has over 77,000 employees and 7,000 stores. (1,2)

9 Jan Koum, who has a net worth of $9.7 billion, was the son of a construction laborer in Ukraine. He immigrated to California with his mother at 16, swept grocery floors, and stood in line to collect food stamps. At 18, he was an expert computer hacker, and at 33, he founded WhatsApp.

Jan Koum got a small, two-bedroom apartment with the help of a social-support program where he lived with his mother and grandmother in California while his father lived in Ukraine. He was 21 when his father died, and 24 when his mother died after a long battle with cancer. He worked as a cleaner at a grocery store and eventually developed an interest in programming. He worked as a security tester at Ernst & Young as he studied at San Jose State University and then joined a group of hackers going by the name of “w00w00” in 1996. It was at Ernst & Young that he met Brian Acton. In 1997, Yahoo! hired him as an infrastructure engineer, after which he quit school where too he worked along with Acton.

In 2007, they both took a year off to travel to South America and played in an ultimate frisbee league. They both applied to work at Facebook, and they were both rejected! In 2009, Koum discussed his idea of WhatsApp with the name inspired from the common phrase “What’s up?” with his friend Alex Fishman. Acton later joined WhatsApp and was given the “co-founder”’ status after he brought in seed funding. Approximately seven years after Facebook rejected them, the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, invited Koum to have dinner at his home. Ten days later, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion. (source)

10 Kirk Kerkorian, the owner of MGM movie studio and three popular hotels in Las Vegas, was born to Armenian-immigrant parents, dropped out school, learned English on the streets, and became a boxer to earn a living. He had a net worth of more than $4 billion when he died in 2015.

Described as “the father of the mega-resort,” he has built the world’s largest hotel three times, every time beating his own record. He first built the International Hotel in 1969, then the MGM Grand Hotel in 1973, and finally the MGM Grand in 1993. In 1969, he purchased the MGM movie studio.

Born to parents of Armenian origin, he dropped out of school in the eighth grade and became a fairly skilled amateur boxer fighting under the name “Rifle-Right Kerkorian.” Later, he learned to fly in the Mojave desert, not wanting to join the infantry sensing the onset of World War II. Pioneer aviator Pancho Barnes agreed to give him flying lessons in exchange for Kerkorian’s services in milking and looking after his cattle. In six months, Kerkorian gained his commercial pilot’s license. He used his savings to buy a plane and then operated a chartered airline which gave him enough money to buy 80 acres of land in Las Vegas. Nothing stopped him after that. In 2000, he was named the “10^th largest donor in the US” by Time. (source)