Most of the world’s richest people come from normal families who worked regular jobs.
Some were doing better than others but they all started with menial jobs.
From Musk to Bezos and Gates, this is what some of the world’s richest people were doing before they became billionaires.
5. Mark Cuban sold garbage bags
American investor and film producer Mark Cuban was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to a car factory worker.
Little Mark decided he wanted more and showed entrepreneurial spirit from a young age.
In 1970, at the age of 12, Mark decided to start selling garbage bags, of all things.
Mark was big into sneakers but couldn’t afford them. And ultimately that was his motivation.
At 16, he started a new job delivering newspapers.
In 2023, aged 64, Mark Cuban is worth $5.1 billion.
4. Warren Buffett sold Coca-Cola cans
Warren Buffett has featured in Forbes’ billionaires list for at least two decades.
In 2008, Buffett briefly became the world’s richest man and today he is the fifth-richest person in the world with a net worth of $114 billion.
Now, we should point out that Buffett was never what you would call ‘broke’ because his father Howard was a Congressman.
However, Warren still had to work his way up and he did so by going door to door trying to sell Coca-Cola cans, newspapers and chewing gum.
Want to hear something crazy?
Buffett filed his first tax return in 1944… at the age of 14.
3. Bill Gates was a computer programmer
Like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates was born into a relatively well-off family.
His father William H. Gates Sr. was an attorney and wanted his son Bill to go to law school.
However, Bill wasn’t interested in that because he liked computers.
At 13, he began writing software programs, and a couple of years later, he began selling those programs.
Gates has been included in the Forbes list of world’s wealthiest people since 1987.
Today he is the sixth-richest man in the world with a net worth of $121 billion.
2. Jeff Bezos worked at McDonald’s
Jeff Bezos’s father struggled financially so Jeff tried everything he could to make ends meet.
He even worked at McDonald’s.
Things started looking up after he left high school to join the University of Florida.
After graduating in 1986, he worked at various companies before founding Amazon in the mid 1990s.
Today he is the world’s third-richest man with a net worth of $158 billion.
1. Elon Musk worked at a lumber mill
Elon Musk was born in South Africa but spent most of his school years in Canada.
Aged 17, he moved to Ontario where he worked odd jobs to support himself.
Among other things, he worked at a farm and at a lumber mill.
He co-founded PayPal in the late 1990s and sold it to eBay 10 years later.
He made $175 million from that deal.
Today, Musk owns Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter and a bunch of other companies.
He’s currently the world’s richest person, with a net worth of $256 billion.
