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25 Inspirational Rags to Riches Stories

While some people are handed everything on a silver platter, just because someone is at the top doesn’t mean it was always that way. In fact, many of the wealthiest people in the world started their journeys in slums and orphanages. Many of them even credit their hardship with giving them the motivation, understanding, and personality required to make it to the top. These are 25 inspirational rags to riches stories.

25. Andrew Carnegie

This Scottish-American industrialist started to work at a cotton mill for a 12-hour, 6-days a week job in America when he was only 13 years old after his father lost his jobs as a handweaver in Scotland. Hired later as a telegraph messenger at the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, he was able to climb the corporate ladder where he used his earnings to invest in ventures that led him to build an empire in the steel industry including his large-scale philanthropic legacy.

24. Oprah Winfrey

Born to unwed teenage parents in Mississippi, this media mogul wore dresses that her grandmother made out of potato sacks. After being molested, she ran away at the age of 13 and became a mother at 14, but her son died in infancy. Sent to live with his father, a barber in Tennessee, she got a full scholarship in college, won a beauty pageant and was discovered by a radio station. Her empire is now worth $2.7 billion which she shares with the world through her philanthropic works.

23. Maria Das Gracas Silva Foster


22. Sam Walton

During the Great Depression, Sam Walton and his family lived on a farm in Oklahoma where he milked the family cow and delivered bottles to customers to make ends meet. He joined JC Penny three days after graduating from the University of Missouri with a BA Economics degree. After WW II, with capital of $25,000 that he borrowed from his father along with the $5,000 that he saved from the army, he bought a Ben Franklin variety store which he expanded into the retailer giant Walmart and the membership-only retailer warehouse Sam’s Club.

21. Chris Gardner


20. Ingvar Kamprad

Living on a farm most of his growing up years, this Swedish business magnate had always been known for being enterprising even at a young age as he bought matches in bulk and sold them individually to his neighbors. This expanded to fish, pens and Christmas decorations. He also used the cash reward that his father gave him for good grades and used this to create a mail-order business that became the retail company IKEA. Furniture became the company’s biggest seller, which made him one of the richest men in the world today having a net worth of $3 billion.

19. J.K. Rowling

Joanne Rowling, a native of Yate, Gloucestershire in England moved to Porto, Portugal in 1990 when her mother died. While she was already writing the Harry Potter novel even before her mother’s death, the seven-year period that followed entailed a divorce from her husband in 1993, a move to Edinburgh, Scotland and a life with a daughter living on welfare while suffering from clinical depression until she finished the first book in her famous series, “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” in 1997. She was able to finish it by writing on scraps of tissue paper from the numerous cafes they visited to let her daughter sleep. With over 400 million books and the worldwide success of the Harry Potter franchise JK Rowling’s net worth is $1 billion.

18. Jim Carrey

James Eugene Carrey was born in Ontario, Canada to a middle-income family where his musician father worked as an accountant. However, things got worse for his family when his father lost his job and they all had to move to Scarborough. He worked at the Titan Wheels Factory for eight hours a day while attending school, but never finished high school. While living in a camper van, he started doing stand-up routines and eventually landed a gig in the sitcom The Duck Factory. He first gained recognition in 1990 when he became one of the casts in the sketch comedy â€˜In Living Colors.’ He later moved on to movies and became one of the highest paid comedians in America.

17. Sheldon Adelson

The son of a Lithuanian immigrant taxi driver, his mother ran a knitting store from their home. He grew up in a tenement where he shared a bedroom with his parents and three siblings, started selling newspapers at the age of 12, and started his candy-vending machine business at the age of 16. Though he tried his hand at various enterprises from packing hotel toiletries to mortgage brokering his biggest break came from developing a computer trade show. He purchased the Sands Hotel & Casino and later the mega-resort, The Venetian, from the profits of his ventures pegging his net worth today at $21.8 billion.

16. Kirk Kerkorian

The Armenian-born Kirk Kerkorian grew up at the time of the Great Depression, where he learned English on the street and dropped out of 8th grade to become an amateur boxer. He became a daredevil pilot for the Royal Air Force during WW II and delivered supplies over the Atlantic flying some of the most perilous routes. After quitting gambling in 1947, he bought some charter planes and also engaged in real estate in Las Vegas in 1962. He became the “father of the mega-resort” when he bought The Flamingo and built the stalwarts of the Las Vegas scene, The International and MGM Grand, which made him worth a few billion dollars.

15. John D. Rockefeller

One of six children born in Richford, New York, Rockefeller might have inherited his good business sense from his father, a traveling salesman who used all the tricks to get out of decent hard work and taught his son to always get the best deal in all things. His mom struggled to raise them and though they moved a number of times, he was able to finish school and get his first job as a bookkeeper where he earned $50 in three months. He decided to put up a firm and built an oil refinery with his friend Maurice B. Clark in 1859. He later bought out the Clark brothers’ refinery firm and renamed it Rockefeller & Andrews. He also founded the Standard Oil Company to become the world’s first billionaire and the richest person in history.

14. Leonardo Del Vecchio

Del Vecchio was sent to an orphanage when his widowed mother could not support all five of her children. He worked in a factory that made molds for auto parts and eyeglass frames where he lost part of his finger during an accident. He opened his first molding shop called Luxottica at the age of 23 which expanded to be the world’s largest maker of sunglasses and prescription eyeglasses. Luxottica, the known maker of Ray-Ban and Oakley eyewear, also owns 6,000 Sunglass Hut and Lenscrafters retail shops. The second richest man in Italy is now worth $11.5 billion.

13. Li Ka-shing

Born to a family that fled mainland China for Hong Kong in 1940, his father died of tuberculosis which made him quit school at the age of 15 to support his family by working for 16 hours in a factory that made plastics and plastic flowers for US export. He founded Cheung Kong Industries in 1950, which manufactured plastics at first but later on ventured into real estate. The 9th richest person in the world has ownership in a number of multi-range companies from cellular phones, banking, satellite television, steel industries, and shipping.

12. Howard Schultz

Howard Schultz came from a poor family living in the Canarsie Bayview Houses, a housing project in Brooklyn, New York, which made him want to have a lifestyle beyond what his truck-driver father can provide. As he saw escape in sport, he became a football scholar at the University of North Michigan where he graduated with a degree in communication, the first in his family to do so. While working for Xerox, he discovered a small coffee shop called Starbucks and became captivated by it. He left Xerox and became the first CEO of Starbucks in 1987, which he expanded from its first 60 shops to over 16,000 outlets worldwide, giving him a net worth of $1.5 billion.

11. Ursula Burns

Ursula Burns grew up in a housing project in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a hub for gangs. She was raised by her Panamanian-immigrant single mother who ran a daycare center at her home and ironed shirts for a fee so that she could send Ursula to Cathedral High School. She earned her Mechanical Engineering degree at NYU and became an intern at Xerox. Ursula Burns became the first African-American woman to ever lead a Fortune 500 Company and the 14th most powerful woman in the world.

10. John Paul DeJoria

Before John Paul Mitchell Systems became a success, its founder, John Paul DeJoria had a rough life. After his parents divorced when he was just 2 years old, he sold newspapers and Christmas cards to help his family until the age of 10 when he was sent to live in a foster home. An LA gang member before he joined the military, he was also employed by Redken Laboratories. He loaned $700 and founded JPM Systems to sell his company’s shampoo door-to-door while living out of his car. Today JPM Systems’ annual profit is nearly $900 million.

9. Guy Laliberte

Before Cirque du Soleil came to life, its founder, Canadian-born Laliberte started his acts in circus as a fire-eater that walks on stilts. His venture paid off when he brought his successful troupe in 1987 from Quebec to the Los Angeles Arts Festival with no guarantee of a return fare for the cast. He now commands a total net worth of $2.5 billion.

8. Do Won Chang

Do Won Chang had to work three jobs as a janitor, gas station employee, and coffee shop attendant to support his family when they moved from Korea to America in 1981. After three years of thrift-spending, he was able to open his first retail store Fashion 21, which grew to be the retail clothing giant Forever 21, a pioneer in fast fashion. The multinational clothing empire with over 480 outlets worldwide generates an annual income of $3 billion.

7. George Soros

After surviving the Nazi occupation of Hungary in 1947, George Soros escaped the country to stay with his relatives in London. He supported his studies by working as a waiter and railway porter and then sold goods at a souvenir shop after graduating. He also wrote every merchant bank in England until he gained an entry-level job at Singer & Friedlander. He became “the man who broke the bank of England” due to his famous bet against the British pound in 1992, where he earned more than a billion dollars in profit in one plunge in the Black Wednesday UK currency crisis.

6. Zdenek Bakala

With just a $50 bill wrapped in plastic and hidden in a sandwich, Zdenek Bakala fled communist Czechoslovakia in 1980 when he was 19 years old and made it to Lake Tahoe. He worked as a dishwasher at Harrah’s Casino while studying for his undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Dartmouth. He later on ventured in banking, opened his first company Credit Suisse First Boston in Prague after the fall of the Berlin Wall and presided over a coal company that has a $2.52 billion market.

5. Harold Simmons

Harold Simmons grew up in a shack in the poor rural town of Golden, Texas with no plumbing or electricity. He still managed, however, to graduate with a B.A. and masters in Economics from the University of Texas. His first venture was a series of drugstores which were almost entirely funded with a loan. This became a 100-store chain which he sold to Eckerd for $50 million. He became famous as a master of the corporate buyout and currently owns 6 companies that trade on the NYSE including the world’s largest producer of titanium, Titanium Metals Corporation.

4. Richard Desmond

Richard Desmond was raised by a single mother living on top of a garage. He quit school at the age of 14 to focus on being a drummer while working as a coat-checker to help pay bills. Though he never became famous for his musical abilities, he later opened his own record store and published his first magazine, “International Musician and Recording World” and expanded the Desmond magazine empire with publications such as the British version of Penthouse and OK!. He now owns a number of publications around the world and was listed on the 2011 Sunday Times Rich List with a net worth of Â£950 million.

3. Harry Wayne Huizenga

Harry Wayne Huizenga was born in Chicago, Illinois to an abusive father. His family moved to Florida to save his parents marriage but his father never changed. He moved back to Chicago to go to college but soon dropped out and then signed up to be a reserve in the Army. He went back to Florida after his training and bought his first dump truck to start a trash disposal business. This venture became highly profitable so he purchased more garbage trucks and later built his company, the Waste Management Inc, which became well-known all over the US. He also purchased Blockbuster stores, which later merged with Viacom. He is credited for founding three Fortune 500 companies.

2. Richard Branson

Born to a family of lawyers in Blackheath, London, he had poor academic performance due to his dyslexia. Therefore, he focused more on his business which included growing Christmas trees and raising parakeets. He later started his own record mail-order business at the age of 16. In 1972, he established the record store Virgin Records, which prospered in the 1980s with a number of outlets. He also created Virgin Atlantic Airwaves, which expanded Virgin Records into a music label, making him the 245th richest person in the world today.

1. Roman Abramovich

An orphan at the age of four, this Russian business tycoon was raised by his uncle and grandmother. He got his first break from an expensive wedding gift given by his in-laws. He dropped out of college to pursue his business, which included selling imported plastic ducks from his Moscow apartment. He then ventured into managing the oil giant Sibneft after taking it over in 1995. He continued to flip his investments with profitable ventures such as Russian Aluminum and the steelmaker Evraz Group. He is now the 5th richest person in Russia and owns the $1.5 billion yacht â€˜Eclipse,’ the largest private yacht docked in New York City and the Chelsea Football Club, among others.

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