25 Visionaries Who Created Empires From Virtually Nothing

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Some of the greatest fortunes and empires in history were created by people who started with nothing. Today, we celebrate 25 of these iconic figures – businessmen, technology entrepreneurs, even celebrities and athletes – by recalling the tales of their rise to glory. Don’t feel bad if your favorites aren’t on the list, this is just a glimpse of the many visionaries we’ve seen throughout history and there are countless others who also deserve attention. While each of them took a slightly different path to financial greatness, virtually all of them started from very humble beginnings. In no particular order:
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1. Henry Ford

It’s tough to think of a man who carried the torch of business further than Henry Ford. Ford became famous for pioneering the assembly line and in the process, becoming the first man to successfully mass produce automobiles. Amazingly, Ford jump started the Ford Motor company with virtually none of his own money. As ‘Venture Capital Sources’ explains, Ford “raised a nominal sum of money from friends for initial working capital purposes. He then proceeded to cleverly negotiate deals with his suppliers that let him purchase parts on credit.
This in turn motivated him to sell his cars quickly – at a profit – so as to repay his suppliers. After years of diligently reinvesting those profits back into the business, Ford Motor was an industrial giant – and its creator was forever immortalized as a business legend.

2. John Rockefeller

John Rockefeller is the business titan behind Standard Oil. After scratching and scrimping to buy his first oil refinery in 1862, he was already a dominant force in the industry by the 1870′s. From there, he almost single-handedly revolutionized the mass market for oil. By offering discounts to the railroads that carried his oil cross-country, Rockefeller was able to, in turn, sell it to customers for low prices that were previously unheard of. This helped establish Rockefeller’s legacy as one of America’s earliest business heroes, and he is still celebrated for his “ability to refine crude oil to produce kerosene and other products better, cheaper, and in greater quantity than anyone thought possible.”

3. Andrew Carnegie

Often referred to as the “king of steel”, Andrew Carnegie did for steel what John Rockefeller did for oil. His work in founding and operating U.S. Steel has earned him the reputation as the second wealthiest man in history. But long before that, Carnegie set to work as a lowly telegrapher in the 1850′s. By the 1860′s, his investments in railroads, bridges, and oil derricks (combined with a lucrative side job as a bond salesman. propelled him to build U.S. Steel into an enduring empire.
In the 1890′s, after much work and toil, Carnegie’s was the “largest and most profitable industrial enterprise in the world.” By the time he sold his company to J.P. Morgan in 1901, Carnegie was ready for a much-deserved retirement filled with generous philanthropy and charitable giving.

4. Thomas Edison

While Thomas Edison is best known for inventing the modern electric lightbulb in 1878, he was one of the fathers of the modern electrical grid (Nikola Tesla was the other). The impact of this innovation has been staggering. Prior to the electrical grid, the only available lighting was sunlight during the day and gas-powered lamps at night. In 1882, however, Edison took the world by storm, introducing one of the first commercial electric grids in the world. As the Objective Standard observes, “within fifty years of Edison introducing the electric grid, gas light was all but forgotten, and electricity emerged as the power source for the masses.”
Like Andrew Carnegie, Edison got his start as a telegraph operator, gradually working his way up to more rewarding and personally satisfying projects.

5. Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett is one of only two living men who can truthfully boast a larger fortune than Bill Gates. (In fact, the two are now teaming up on the largest charitable giving project in history.. He generated his larger-than-life $60 billion net worth by becoming one of Wall Street’s sharpest and most successful investors. His secret, as William Grieder writes in his book “The Soul of Capitalism” is that Buffet “stays close to his capital.” That is, he will not invest unless he personally meets with the top executives and completely buys into their business strategy.
This simple yet proven philosophy has served Buffet well, propelling him to previously unimaginable heights of wealth creation.

6. Sam Walton

Sam Walton was the mastermind behind Wal-Mart. After opening his first store in 1962, Walton vowed to remake the retail industry in the vision of his radical cost-cutting philosophy. By 1966, his fledgling chain was up to 20 stores and growing fast. The real secret to Wal-Mart’s phenomenal growth, as TIME Magazine notes, is that Walton “may have been the first true information-aged CEO.” TIME goes on to observe that Walton was the first to hire a computer whiz to overhaul the company’s logistics and inventory systems, leading to unprecedented efficiency that enabled Wal-Mart to out compete virtually every department store in existence.

7.Oprah

Winfrey
What chances of success would you give a poor woman born in backwoods Mississippi to a single teenage mother, raised in inner-city Milwaukee, raped at nine years of age, then, at the age of 14, giving birth to a son who died shortly thereafter?
Grim chances, we think. Unless that woman happens to be Oprah Winfrey. Oprah landed her first radio job in high school. She soon transferred to daytime talk TV, where, after success powering up ratings for a Chicago TV show, she started her own production company. That production company, Harpo, launched an empire. The Oprah Winfrey show is the highest-rated talk show in TV history, and has won her several Emmy Awards. She’s also an amazing philanthropist who donates a cut of her $1.3 billion net worth to a variety of causes benefitting women, children and families.

8. Lewis Ranieri

Lewie Ranieri rose up from a lowly mail room job at ex-Wall Street titan Salomon Brothers all the way to the boardroom. Upon being asked to run the newly created mortgage bond department (a move he saw as a slap in the face., Ranieri proceeded to make said department not only the most profitable one at Salomon, but for a time, the most profitable on all of Wall Street. His unique insight was that consumer mortgages could be bundled together in pools of homogeneous risk (say, 30 year mortgages with $110,000 outstanding at 12% interest. that investors of all kinds would feel comfortable buying into.
As the book “Liar’s Poker” tells it, Ranieri generated billions of dollars for Salomon and is often credited with jump-starting the entire mortgage securities market.

9. Michael Milken

Michael Milken was perhaps the first “corporate raider” in history. He made his name during the financial boom of the 1980′s by creating a market for junk bonds (the bonds of large yet under-performing corporations. Milken’s insight led him to buy junk bonds when they were cheap, knowing full well that the government would bail out these large corporations and allow him to reap huge profits when they did. According to Michael Lewis’ landmark text “Liar’s Poker”, Milken paid himself an annual salary of $550 million during his peak earning years. When all was said and done, Milken was estimated to have a net worth of over $1 billion – and a permanent legacy on Wall Street.

10. Bill Gates

No profile of the world’s prodigious wealth creators would be complete without Bill Gates. After dropping out of the nation’s top-ranked university (Harvard. because he “just couldn’t bring himself to go to class”, Gates ambitiously founded Microsoft with partner Paul Allen. The company originally set out to sell computer programming languages, but soon veered very far (and very profitably. off of that path. Instead, Microsoft created the now-ubiquitous Windows operating system that powers 90% of the world’s personal computers. Gates officially retired from Microsoft in 2008, exiting with a net worth of $58 billion and 3rd place on Forbes’ 100 Wealthiest People list.