In contrast to his current glory, Warren Buffett was an “average” student, Bill Gates was a troublemaker, Jeff Bezos had a miserable 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥hood, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were “bookworms”.
Billionaires are not 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 into wealth and fame. Steve Jobs was an unwanted and abandoned 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥, Jeff Bezos was the son of a teenage mother and had a difficult 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥hood, Elon Musk was bullied at school, Warren Buffett was a rebellious 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥, a mediocre student and a runaway. So where did they start? Here is what Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dreamed of and did when they were 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥ren.
Jeff Bezos: From a miserable 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥hood to a wealthy billionaire
Jeff Bezos is currently one of the richest billionaires on the planet. The founder and chairman of Amazon built his fortune from selling books, but to date, he has become one of America’s startup legends.
Despite his wealth and success, Jeff Bezos had a difficult 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥hood. He was 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 to a 17-year-old teenage mother. His 𝐛𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐡 was the result of a high school romance. His father was only 18 at the time. They married and quickly divorced because of his father’s alcoholism. After his mother remarried, he lived with his mother and stepfather. He spent summers working on his grandparents’ farm.
That story is told in the book Jeff Bezos: From Selling Books to Selling Everything on Amazon.
Illustration photo.
Since 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥hood, Jeff Bezos was a smart and mischievous boy. He was always curious and explored everything around him. He turned the garage into a laboratory, found a way to cheat the neighbor’s electricity and explored every corner as well as tested some “crazy” experiments.
At the age of 16, Jeff came up with the idea of opening a summer camp called Dream Institute for elementary school students. Each student would pay a $600 fee and go through challenges he set for himself.
He was also a high school valedictorian and a national merit scholar before enrolling at Princeton, where he was one of about 20 students in the electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) program.
“You have to remember, he wasn’t famous back then, and there were talented people everywhere,” recalled a Princeton classmate. “We were a quiet, quirky group of guys.”
After graduating from Princeton University with honors, he was invited to work for many leading technology companies, but the billionaire refused all invitations and went to work for Fitel. After a while, he left Fitel to work for DE Shaw Investment Fund and became the youngest deputy director after 4 years of work.
However, Jeff later gave up this dream job of thousands of people to realize the idea of selling books online and founded the world’s leading e-commerce company Amazon. Then step by step, he realized his dream and created his own empire.
Although he didn’t start at the finish line and his parents’ marriage wasn’t perfect, Jeff Bezos always tried his best to achieve success.
Warren Buffett: “Mediocre” education but passionate about business, became an “investment tycoon”
Having been honored many times as the world’s most outstanding investor, few people know that when he was young, Warren Buffett was a rebellious 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥. At school, Buffett was only classified as having “average” academic performance. Not only that, he also stole things from the Sears store and ran away from home.
Although not outstanding in academic achievements, Warren Buffett showed himself to be a very passionate and entrepreneurial boy from an early age. He once tinkered with a battery and peddled Juicy Fruit, Spearmint and Doublemint gum for 5 cents.
In 1942, the “little boy” Warren Buffett bought his first stock, at the age of 11. At the age of 13, he delivered newspapers to households in the neighborhood and had saved up $2,000 by the age of 15, a huge amount of money at that time. Without hesitation, he invested $1,200 in a 40-acre farm in England and rented it out for profit.
After that, Warren Buffett also built other business plans to earn more money such as: Buying used golf balls for $3.50 and reselling them for $6, selling postage stamps and buff cars, buying and installing ball polishing machines in local hair salons at a discount…
By the age of 17, Warren Buffett was earning $53,000.
Now, Warren Buffett is the boss of the investment company Berkshire Hathaway and is known as the “Investment Tycoon” and “Oracle of Omaha”. He has a famous business principle that many people love: “Rule 1: Don’t lose money; Rule 2: Don’t forget rule 1”.
Bill Gates: The hyperactive, trouble-making boy became the co-founder of the world’s leading technology corporation
The book Bill Gates: The eccentric genius with the Microsoft startup legend tells that Bill Gates was the son of a famous lawyer and a banker, but as a 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥, he was a naughty, cunning, daring and playful 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥 to the point of forgetting to study. Gates had a peaceful 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥hood in Seattle.
Although he was a hyperactive and troublemaking 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥, he was extremely studious and loved to read, having read the entire encyclopedia by the age of nine.
At age 13, Gates attended a prep school for gifted students. When he was in eighth grade, the school’s mothers’ club purchased an electromechanical typewriter and a calculator for the students. Gates found it interesting to learn computer programming in BASIC and dropped out of math classes to pursue his programming interests.
The first program he wrote was an implementation of the tic-tac-toe game that allowed players to compete against the computer. The machine fascinated Gates and he wondered how it could always execute software code so perfectly.
When the PTA funds ran out, he and other students switched to other systems, including DEC’s PDP minicomputer. Computer Center Corporation banned four Lakeside students—Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—from using its computer system for an entire summer after the four exploited bugs in the operating system to gain extra computer time.
At the age of 19, Gates dropped out of Harvard University after two years of study and started a computer software company with his high school friend Paul Allen. That company was the “predecessor” of Microsoft Corporation and Gates never graduated from college.
Elon Musk: Loved reading and technology since 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥hood, became a billionaire conquering Mars
Elon Musk was 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, to a middle-class family, with an engineer father and a model mother. In the eyes of 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥ren his age, Musk was a “freak who only said impossible things.” “When the kids were busy partying and playing sports, he sat alone in the library,” Musk’s father said.
At school, Musk was often bullied and was once pushed down the stairs by a classmate, beating his body until it was bruised. With no friends, the 9-year-old boy spent 10 hours a day reading books, mainly about science, in the school library. After finishing all the books, he turned to the Encyclopedia Britannica and quickly mastered its contents.
Elon Musk proved to be an intelligent boy and passionate about technology from a young age. When he was only 10 years old, he was attracted to the computer at first sight and convinced his father to buy it. After getting a computer, he excitedly stayed up 3 nights to study how to use it.
By the age of 12, the “freak” had stunned his friends by programming a simple game called “Blastar” and selling it for $500 to a technology magazine. He also researched rockets, and later founded SpaceX, a space exploration technology corporation.
At age 16, Musk and his younger brother, Kimbal, hatched the idea of opening a mini-movie theater near their school. Despite having all the necessary contracts and suppliers in place, the plan had to be abandoned due to the inability to resolve the land documents.
Steve Jobs: From a guy with no goals in life to the creator of the most expensive “apple” on the planet
Steve Jobs is an American businessman and inventor. He is also the co-founder, chairman and former CEO of Apple Inc.
As a 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥, Steve Jobs had no clear goals in life. He grew up in Mountain View, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. Jobs was a mischievous boy from a young age, curious about the workings of the brain, he used hallucinogens to experiment with what the brain would be like without sleep.
At 17, he and a friend devised their first business plan — they built and sold Blue Boxes, illegal devices that allowed people to make free long-distance phone calls, for about $170 each.
Jobs dropped out of Reed College, saying, “I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life and I didn’t know how college would help me figure it out. I was scared because my parents had invested so much in my education, but I tried to reassure myself that everything would be fine. Looking back, it was the best decision I ever made.”
A year and a half later, Jobs moved back to his parents’ home in Los Altos, Calif. While looking for a job, he came across a job posting from video game maker Atari. Jobs was one of Atari’s first 50 employees, earning $5 an hour.
Having an incomplete 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥hood, Steve Jobs was an unwanted 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥. Steve Jobs’s maternal grandfather did not agree to let Jobs’ parents marry because of religious differences. Jobs’ mother had to give 𝐛𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐡 to him in another land and asked a midwife to find someone to adopt him.
One day, her neighbor said: “Isn’t it sad to think that your biological parents don’t want you anymore? That’s why they gave you up for adoption to a complete stranger.” That sentence was like an electric current running through Steve’s heart, causing him pain and hurt. The fact that he was abandoned made him constantly worried.
Mark Zuckerberg: The Bookworm
Zuckerberg’s father often shares the parenting philosophy he and his wife have agreed on: Protect your 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥ren from financial worries, encourage them to find their own interests, express pride, and set limits.
While at prep school in the early 2000s, Zuckerberg wrote a program that used artificial intelligence to predict users’ musical preferences. He then went to Harvard, where he started Facebook and met his future wife, Priscilla Chan, while waiting in line for the bathroom.
“He was a nerd and had little time for the outside world,” Chan told The New Yorker in 2010.
Mark Zuckerberg was 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 into a family with a dentist father and a psychologist mother who quit her job to take care of the 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥ren and manage her husband’s clinic.
When he was 12, Mark wrote a messaging program for computers at his father’s clinic for internal communication, called ZuckNet. Realizing his son’s potential, his father hired David Newman – a software developer – to mentor Mark. Soon, David Newman had to admit that Mark was a prodigy and he found it difficult to keep up with this teenage genius.
In 2002, Mark began his undergraduate life at Harvard University and served as a guide for a digital study for art history majors. He also built “Course Match,” a simple text-based program that allowed students to see who had taken which courses and who was undecided about which ones.
At the same time, Harvard was planning to create a yearbook for all of its students, and it was expected to take a year to gather all the information needed. Mark immediately began programming and launched TheFacebook. Within half a month, 50% of Harvard students had signed up to become members of this social network. Eventually, Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to build his own company and turn Facebook into a world-famous social networking brand.
