Combined, they are worth $627 billion, but back when they were young, they accidentally spilled spilled gallons of ketchup on themselves, had doors slammed in their face and made pennies a day tossing newspapers.
See how far some of the richest billionaires in the world have come from their very humble first job beginnings…
First things first, let’s get the computer geeks who had first jobs as software programmers and software engineers out of the way. That’s just boring for a first job, and so predictable considering where their significant coding talents took them.
Jack Dorsey was a computer programmer as a high school student in St. Louis. His first job was writing dispatch software that is actually still used in the taxicab industry today. Okay, maybe it’s not boring.
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in college, but in high school he created something called Synapse, which is music recommending software that is similar to Pandora of today.
Microsoft and AOL were both interested and wanted to hire Zuck, but he went to Harvard instead and the rest is history.
Elon Musk was a software engineer when he was just 12 years old. He wrote the code for his space-themed video game called Blaster. He ended up selling it for $500. His net worth has risen by $197,999,999,500 since then.
Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel’s first job came when he was in high school in Santa Monica, California. He had an internship at Red Bull, and his earliest gig was promoting Red Bull in bars and clubs. He must have also found time to study, because he got into Stanford.
Warren Buffet pulled down a whopping $175 per month, working as a newspaper delivery boy for the Washington Post back in 1944. And to show off his prodigious investing skills at a young age, he saved $2,000 peddling papers and was able to buy into a 40-acre farm where he set up a profit-sharing deal with a farmer.
Richard Branson had my favorite first job. He owned a magazine when he was just 16-years old. It was a youth culture mag called Student. He sold $8,000 in ads for the first issue and printed 50,000 copies.
Shark Tank cast member and Dallas Mavs owner Mark Cuban was a door-to-door salesman way back in 1970, when he was a kid growing up in Pittsburgh. He was 12-years old at the time, and he sold garbage bags so he could make enough money to buy a pair of basketball shoes.
Finally, there’s Jeff Bezos. He had his first job in the 1980’s working at McDonald’s, making a whopping $2.69 per hour. One of his highlights was the battle he lost with a huge container of ketchup.
“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,” he once told author Cody Teets.
It’s a darn good thing he invented Amazon, because he would have had to work OVER 73 billion hours at McDonalds to accumulate the $198 billion in net worth that he has now.
That’s 200 million years!
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