Born Poor, Drop Out and Got Rich - The Billionaire History

It 'a fact that is not where you were born or who are born with that determines how your life will be. What you do with your life that determines how your life will be. Not long ago, Forbes Magazine published a special report on the billionaires of the world. This is a snap shot of who's who of the super rich.

I have the privilege of studying their life stories, and note that many of them began as both a poor boy from the neighborhood or a high school dropout. In this article, you too can have the privilege to read about them and, hopefully, be inspired by their history Billionaire.

Our history

IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad made headlines in early 2004, when Swedish business magazine Veckans Affärer reported that he had surpassed Bill Gates as the richest person in the world. While IKEA's unconventional ownership structure makes this matter of some debate, there is no doubt that IKEA is still one of the largest, most successful companies held by individuals around the world, with over 200 stores in 31 countries, employing over 75,000 people and generating over 12 billion in sales annually.

Kamprad was born in southern Sweden in 1926 and raised on a farm called Elmtaryd, near the small village of Agunnaryd. Kamprad began to develop a business as a boy, selling matches to neighbors from his bicycle. He found he could buy matches in bulk very cheaply from Stockholm, sell them individually at a low price and still make a good profit. From matches, he expanded to selling fish, Christmas tree decorations, seeds and later ball-point pens and pencils. When Kamprad was 17, his father gave him a reward for succeeding in his studies. He used this money to establish what has become IKEA.

The name IKEA was formed from Kamprad's initials (IK) plus the first letters of Elmtaryd and Agunnaryd, the farm and village where he grew up. He has continued to expand its activities to a variety of products, including wallets, watches, jewelry and socks. When he overcame his ability to call his customers individually, it is converted to a sort of makeshift mail order operation, hiring the local milk truck to make his deliveries.

Kamprad has a reputation for being, well, "cheap". He takes the subway to work, and it pushes, it is an old Volvo. Rumor is that when staying in a hotel if you feel the need to drink one of those expensive drinks from the wet bar, replacing it later with one taken from a nearby store. Additionally, it encourages IKEA employees to always write on both sides of a card.

Forbes magazine estimated his fortune at $ 33 billion, making him the fourth richest man in the world.

Las Vegas Sands story

Sheldon Gary Adelson is an American businessman. He is a property developer and public company CEO based in Las Vegas, Nevada. It 's also a President and Chief Executive Officer of Las Vegas Sands Corp., which owns and operates The Venetian Resort Casino and the Sands Expo and Convention Center. Adelson greatly increased his net worth at the time of the initial public offering of Las Vegas Sands in December 2004 by selling only 10% of the shares.

Moreover, 26 May 2006, Adelson Las Vegas Sands was awarded a hotly contested license to build a casino resort in Singapore's Marina Bay. The new casino should open in 2009 at a cost of $ 3.16 billion unconfirmed.

Adelson was born into a poor Jewish family in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. Son of a taxi driver in Boston, he borrowed $ 200 from his uncle to sell newspapers in 12 years. In the years that followed, he worked as a mortgage broker, investment advisor and financial consultant. At this point in his career, Adelson has created and developed to maturity more than 50 different companies, including COMDEX, a fair has developed with its partners for the computer industry. Adelson together with its partners directed COMDEX to become the largest trade fair in the world with a presence in over 20 countries.

According to Forbes Magazine, Adelson is the sixth richest person in the U.S. and the third richest in the world, with a net worth estimated at U.S. $ 26.5 billion in 2007. Forbes estimates has been earning about $ 1 million per hour for the last two years.

The Zara Story

The son of a railroad worker and a maid, Amancio Ortega received no formal higher education. He began his remarkable career as a teenager in La Coruna, Spain, the traditional center of the Iberian textile industry. When he was 13 he worked as an errand boy for a shirt maker who produced clothing for the rich. He later worked as a Draper and assistant tailor. In seeing firsthand how costs mounted as garments moved from designers to factories to stores, Ortega learned early the importance of offering products directly to customers without using outside distributors. Later, this strategy used with great success in Zara, in an attempt to control all stages of production of textiles, in order to reduce costs and gain speed and flexibility.

In the early 1960 Ortega became the manager of a local clothing store, where he noted that only a few wealthy residents could afford to buy expensive clothes. So he started producing similar items at lower prices, buying cheaper fabric in Barcelona and cutting out parts by hand using cardboard models. Ortega then sold his local elements ...