Ken Langone, Net worth: $1.1 billion
Age: 75
Schooling: BA, Bucknell University; MBA, New York University
Hometown: Roslyn Heights, N.Y.
Money made: Investing
Best-known venture: Home Depot
Born to a plumber and a cafeteria worker in Roslyn Heights, N.Y., Kenneth Langone dug ditches and worked as a caddy while at Bucknell University. To help pay for school, his parents mortgaged their home. Langone later earned an MBA at New York University on a part-time basis. His first fortune came in 1968, when he partnered with Ross Perot to take Electronic Data Systems (HP) public. In the 1970s he teamed with Bernard Marcus to start Home Depot (HD), which they eventually took public in 1981. Langone hasn't kept the rewards all to himself: In 1999—and again in 2008—he reportedly gave New York University separate gifts of $100 million.
Alan Gerry, Net worth: $1.15 billion
Age: 81
Schooling: Dropped out of high school
Hometown: Liberty, N.Y.
Money made: Cable TV
Best-known venture: Cablevision Industries
The son of Russian immigrants, Gerry dropped out of high school to join the Marines. He started a tiny television repair business after training via the G.I. Bill. In 1956, starting with $1,500 saved from his business, Gerry borrowed $20,000 to create a cable company and worked from the ground up, borrowing carefully without equity partners or initial stock offerings. By the time he sold to Time Warner Cable (TWC) in 1996, Cablevision Industries had become the country's eighth-largest cable provider, with 2,500 employees and 1.3 million subscribers. "We were filling a need," Gerry says. "People were so hungry for television."
Carl Berg, Net worth: $1.3 billion
Age: 73
Schooling: B.A. University of New Mexico
Hometown: Tucumcari, N.M.
Money made: Real estate and venture capital
Most well-known venture: Mission West Properties
At the age of 10, Carl Berg's father died and his schoolteacher mother was left to raise him alone in rural New Mexico. To pay his way through college, Berg repaired vending machines at day and worked as a clerk at what Berg called "the best hotel in town" at night. Berg took the hotel job with the goal of meeting someone that would give him a job in investment banking. "My theory worked fine," Berg says and explained that he eventually approached a regular who turned out to be the largest home builder in the country. The man offered Berg a job in the local office. "I would call all the time and raise hell about way they were running the home office," Berg says. "When I got ready to graduate college, he said 'Berg, if you're ready, you can come run the mortgage company.'" Eventually, Berg used the skills he learned in the mortgage business to make a real estate fortune in Silicon Valley. From there, he branched out into venture capital, a business he continues today. "The way I'm approaching it is, I'm trying to give someone else the opportunity that I had," Berg says. "I do everything I can to make the company succeed." Today, Berg is chairman and chief executive of Cupertino (Calif.)-based Mission West Properties (MSW), a giant real estate investment trust.
Stephen Bisciotti, Net worth: $1.3 billion
Age: 50
Schooling: Bachelor's degree, Salisbury State University
Hometown: Severna Park, Md.
Money made: Staffing
Best-known venture: Allegis Group
Stephen Bisciotti's father died when Bisciotti was just eight years old, leaving his mother to raise three children alone. Bisciotti worked his way through school and went into the temporary help business after graduating from Salisbury State in Maryland. At 23, Bisciotti and his cousin founded a high-tech temp agency in a basement office; sales reached $1.5 million in the first year. He built that company into Allegis Group, now among the nation's top staffing firms, and stayed true to his Maryland roots in 2004, when he bought the Baltimore Ravens National Football League team.
Leon Charney, Net worth: $1.3 billion
Age: 72
Schooling: BA, Yeshiva University; law degree, Brooklyn Law School
Hometown: Bayonne, N.J.
Money made: Real estate
Best-known venture: L.H. Charney Associates
Leon Charney made more than a billion dollars from real estate investments, especially in properties around Manhattan's Times Square. The Leon Charney Report, his weekly cable TV show, states that his "rise to international prominence is a classic 'American Dream' story." Charney started amid humble beginnings as the child of immigrant parents. His father's death while Charney was young left the family destitute. Charney worked his way through college and law school, singing at times for money. (He still serves as a cantor.) With $200 in the bank, he started a law firm and first came to prominence advising President Jimmy Carter on the 1978 Camp David Accords.
Thomas Peterffy, Net worth: $1.4 billion
Age: 65
Schooling: Dropped out of engineering studies to immigrate from Hungary
Hometown: Budapest
Money made: Brokerage firm
Best-known venture: Interactive Brokers Group
Born in Budapest during a 1944 Russian bombing raid, Thomas Peterffy moved to New York in 1965 as a refugee from Communist Hungary. He spoke no English when he arrived, then found a job as a draftsman. At night he taught himself computer programming. In 1977, Peterffy bought a seat on the American Stock Exchange and shocked traders in the early 80s when he brought an early handheld computer to the floor. The company that eventually grew out of that seat on the AMEX became Interactive Brokers Group, now known as IBG. According to a November 2005 profile in Institutional Investor, Peterffy wrote computer code in his head while trading during the day, then went back to the office to apply computer models to trading. The early use of computers made him a pioneer in the field. Today the company's website claims it logs more than a million trades per day.
Alec Gores, Net worth: $1.7 billion
Age: 57
Schooling: Bachelor's degree, Western Michigan University
Hometown: Nazareth, Israel
Wealth from: Leveraged buyouts
Best-known venture: Gores Group
Raised in Nazareth, Israel, Alec Gores moved with his family to Flint, Mich., at the age of 15. Members of his extended family were in the area and he worked at everything from stocking shelves to being a butcher at his uncle's grocery store while obtaining computer science and math degrees at Western Michigan University. On graduating, Gores started a company to sell software and hardware to small and midsized businesses. After selling it to Continental Telephone in the early 1980s, he realized he no longer wanted to start businesses from scratch, so he started buying promising companies he believed were underperforming. Today, with $2.7 billion under management, Gores Group has acquired more than 80 companies since 1987 in the areas of industrial equipment, technology, telecommunications, health care, and business services.
Carl Lindner Jr., Net worth: $1.7 billion
Age: 91
Schooling: Dropped out of school at 14
Hometown: Norwood, Ohio
Money made: Convenience stores
Best-known venture: United Dairy Farmers
In 1938, when Carl Lindner Jr. was 19, most milk was delivered by milkmen. Carl Lindner Sr. came up the idea of selling milk from the family's dairy farms in grocery stores, eliminating a lot of delivery costs. Carl Jr. and three siblings helped support the family by running milk routes through the Depression, then expanded the business into what would become one of the Midwest's largest chains of convenience stores, Cincinnati-based United Dairy Farmers. Eventually Lindner branched into insurance and real estate. From 1999 to 2006, he owned a controlling interest in the Cincinnati Reds of Major League Baseball.
Albert Ueltschi, Net worth: $1.85 billion
Age: 93
Schooling: High school diploma
Hometown: Frankfort, Ky.
Money made: Training pilots
Best-known venture: FlightSafety International
At the height of the Depression and still in high school, Albert Ueltschi opened a hamburger stand to earn money with the goal of learning to fly. Using the eatery as collateral, he bought a bi-wing airplane with $3,500 he borrowed. According to a profile in The Warren Buffett CEO: Secrets of the Berkshire Hathaway Managers, a book by Robert P. Miles, Ueltschi sold rides, put on airshows, and eventually flew clients around the country. In 1951 he borrowed $15,000 to start FlightSafety International, a company to train pilots. Ueltschi sold it to Warren Buffet for a reported $1.5 billion in 1996.
Oprah Winfrey, Net worth: $2.7 billion
Age: 56
Schooling: B.A., Tennessee State University
Hometown: Milwaukee
Money made: Media
Best-known venture: The Oprah Winfrey Show
Born in poverty in Mississippi and raised in Milwaukee, Oprah Winfrey moved to Nashville in 1968 to live with her father. Two years later, she won a scholarship to attend Tennessee State University. At 19 she was hired as Nashville's first African American TV correspondent. In 1983, she relocated to Chicago to take on the AM Chicago talk show later renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show. Her work in movies, radio, and publishing built an influential business empire. The first African American to appear on Forbes' billionaires list, Winfrey has frequently been the sole African American to make the roster.
David Murdock, Net worth: $2.7 billion
Age: 87
Schooling: Received high school diploma in 2009
Hometown: Wayne, Ohio
Money made: Real estate and acquisitions
Best-known venture: Dole Food Co.
Homeless and with little more than a few cents to his name after serving in World War II, David Murdock borrowed $900 from a Good Samaritan. He bought a diner in Detroit and flipped it for a profit of $700, then used the proceeds to buy a car to drive to Arizona. In the desert Southwest, he started building homes, starting a real estate empire that grew to include Dole Foods Co., Castle — Cooke, and nearly all of the island of Lanai, Hawaii. Murdock's credo is listed on the company website: "To do the impossible, you must see the invisible."
Kirk Kerkorian, Net worth: $2.9 billion
Age: 93
Schooling: Dropped out of 8th grade
Hometown: Fresno, Calif.
Money made: Airlines, hotels, and investing
Best-known venture: Tracinda
Kerkorian started earning money for his Armenian-immigrant family at the age of 9, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He dropped out of eighth grade to become a boxer known as "Rifle Right Kerkorian" and earned his first serious paychecks ferrying bombers across the Atlantic Ocean for Britain's Royal Air Force during World War II. He turned his flying practice into an airline and eventually went into constructing many of Las Vegas' biggest hotels. Kerkorian later branched into buying troubled companies such as automakers through Beverly Hills (Calif.)-based Tracinda. He has been Detroit's rescuing angel and menacing demon through various rounds of owning stock in General Motors (GM), Chrysler, and Ford (F). Since recession set in, Kerkorian and Tracinda have quit automotive stocks and diversified.
John Paul DeJoria, Net worth: $4.2 billion
Age: 66
Schooling: High school diploma
Hometown: Los Angeles
Money made: Hair products
Best-known venture: John Paul Mitchell Systems and Patrón Spirits
No stranger to hard times, John Paul DeJoria was born to immigrant parents and spent time in an East Los Angeles foster home. Following two years in the U.S. Navy, his odd jobs included stints as a janitor and gas station attendant. At times he was homeless. DeJoria worked his way up in hair care and cosmetic companies before joining with Paul Mitchell in 1980 to launch a hair products company, putting up an initial investment of just $700. The packaging was printed in black-and-white because color printing was too expensive.
Ralph Lauren, Net worth: $4.6 billion
Age: 71
Schooling: Dropped out of what is now Baruch College
Hometown: The Bronx
Money made: Clothing
Best-known venture: Polo Ralph Lauren
Ralph Lauren graduated high school in the Bronx, then dropped out of college to serve in the Army reserve. Next he worked as a clerk at Brooks Brothers, then toiled as a tie salesman—which caused him to decide that men were ready for wider, brighter designs. According to a profile in Time, Lauren sold $500,000 worth of ties in 1967, the year he started designing them for St. Louis-based Beau Brummell Cravats. The next year, he started Polo (RL) with $50,000 from clothier Norman Hilton. The company tallied $5 billion in revenue during its 2010 fiscal year.
Harold Hamm, Net worth: $5.8 billion
Age: 64
Schooling: High school diploma
Hometown: Lexington, Okla.
Money made: Oil and gas
Best-known venture: Continental Resources
Harold Hamm grew up milking cows, gathering eggs, and feeding chickens. The youngest of 13 kids born to sharecropper parents in Oklahoma, Hamm says that he hardly remembers a time when he wasn't working. "We came up working for the family unit," Hamm says. "You certainly learned quickly to do your part." At the age of 20, he bought a water pump truck to deliver drilling fluids and service drilling rigs. "That is the company that became Continental Resources (CLR)," Hamm says. "It was a very meager start." He says he raised his kids in much the same way he grew up. As his fledging company got off the ground, Hamm's wife kept the books and his daughter, starting as young as six, would answer telephones. At the end of last year, the Enid (Okla.)-based company estimated its proved reserves at 257.3 million barrels of oil, with interests in 2,317 wells. Continental Resources generated $627.7 million in revenue, according to the company's 10-K. Hamm remains at the helm. As he puts it: "I get as much excitement going to work today as I did when I was 20 years old."
Sheldon Adelson, Net worth: $14.7 billion
Age: 77
Schooling: High school diploma and some college
Hometown: Boston
Money made: Trade shows and casinos
Best-known venture: Las Vegas Sands
Sheldon Adelson grew up the son of a cab driver in Boston's rough Dorchester neighborhood. He started selling newspapers at the age of 12 and later dropped out of college to become a court reporter. According to The New York Times, Adelson sold toiletry kits to motels and tried mortgage brokering, then struck it rich when he founded Comdex, an annual computer trade show. He went on to build Las Vegas hotels around conventions, rather than casinos—not that he left the casinos out. At the end of 2006, The Times has estimated, Adelson's net worth had grown by about $1 million an hour for two straight years.
Larry Ellison, Net worth: $27 billion
Age: 66
Schooling: Two years, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; one term, University of Chicago
Hometown: Chicago
Money made: Software
Best-known venture: Oracle
Ellison was born in Brooklyn to a single mother, who asked an aunt and uncle to raise him in Chicago. According to the Academy of Achievement, Ellison dropped out of college and drove to California after his adoptive mother died. There, he held odd jobs for eight years before founding a software development company in 1977. That venture is today known as Oracle (ORCL), one of the world's largest technology companies. This year, Ellison achieved a dream in the realm of sailing when he won the America's Cup and brought the oldest trophy in international sports back to the U.S. for the first time in 15 years.
