The educational backgrounds of the 10 richest men in the world: Do Bill Gates and Elon Musk drop out like Mark Zuckerberg?
Experts believe that education teaches entrepreneurs to be adaptable and flexible, which is essential in the constantly changing business ecosystem.
Through education, business people learn to identify and respond to market trends, adjust business strategies, and pivot their businesses to remain competitive.
However, some schools of thought opine that education and success in business has nothing in common. An educated man may not necessarily be successful in business, while on the other hand illiterates can be seen and have been seen succeeding in their businesses without any formal education,” they say.
The one thing Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk have in common, other than being the world’s top billionaires, are fascinating stories from their university days.
According to the Financial Express, here are the world’s 10 richest men and their education qualification
Bernard Arnault
Bernard Arnault, who recently overtook Elon Musk to become the richest person in the world, has a staggering net worth of $221 billion. He is the chairman and CEO of LVMH, the global luxury goods conglomerate, and he obtained an engineering degree from École Polytechnique, one of France’s premier engineering institutions.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk is the chief executive officer at Tesla and SpaceX, and he is the second-richest person in the world with a net worth of $1.98 billion.
He was at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in 1990. Two years later, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics and a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from the university’s Wharton School.
In 1995, he was accepted into a Ph.D. programme in materials science at Stanford University but ended up dropping out two days later to cash in on the internet boom.
Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott, his former wife founded Amazon some years ago in their rented garage in Bellevue. With time they grew the business to become one of the largest businesses in the world.
Bezos is today the second-richest person across the globe with a $193.9 billion. In 1982, Bezos enrolled at Princeton University, where he initially majored in physics but later switched to electrical engineering and computer science.
He was also awarded an honorary doctorate in science and technology from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008.
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive officer at Meta was pursuing his bachelor’s in psychology and computer science at Harvard University when he came up with the idea for Facebook.
While the social network was initially limited to users from the university, Zuckerberg and his co-founders soon realised its potential, leading the former to drop out of Harvard in 2005.
Larry Ellison
Larry Ellison is another noticeable name in the list of the world’s top billionaires. Ellison, the co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle, has a staggering net worth of $143.8 billion.
He initially enrolled in the University of Illinois at Urbana, Champaign as a premed student, where he was named ‘science student of the year’. However, he had to leave the university before taking his finals for personal reasons, following which he completed his remaining term at the University of Chicago where he studied physics and mathematics and dabbled in computer design.
Warren Buffett
Warren Buffet is one of the richest people in the world, but he was once rejected by Harvard Business School. However, in 1947, Buffett matriculated at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied for two years before transferring to the University of Nebraska.
He obtained a BSc. degree in Business Administration from the institution at the age of 19. After being rejected by Harvard, Buffet got himself enrolled in Columbia Business School for his MSc. degree in Economics, after learning that Benjamin Graham, the ‘father of the stock market’ held classes there. Hence, he attended the New York Institute of Finance.
Bill Gates
Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft was already a National Merit Scholar when he graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He enrolled in Harvard University for a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and graduate-level computer science in the same year but dropped out after two years to join forces with childhood friend Paul Allen and kick-start their own computer software company
Larry Page
Larry Page, the co-founder of Google is the eighth-richest person in the world with a net worth of $123.3 billion. He had been playing around with computers since he was six. Page completed his bachelor’s in computer engineering from the University of Michigan in 1995 and his master’s in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1998.
