What do the ten richest men in the world have in common?

The ten richest men in the world really have in common, and why is almost everything you think you know about it false? 

There’s a photo that’s repeated on the front pages and that almost no one reads correctly. Ten men. Two point eight trillion dollars between them—more than the GDP of France. And an entire industry of conferences, courses, and books dedicated to explaining how to replicate it, almost always drawing the wrong lessons. 

This article does the opposite; it starts with the facts, not the moral. It examines what these ten people have in common and, just as importantly, what they don’t. Because myths about wealth creation aren’t based on what these men actually have in common, but on what people imagine they have in common. 

I. The photo, and why this particular photo

Forbes updates the ranking every month, so it’s a good idea to note the date. As of September 1, 2026, the list is as follows: 

One hundred percent are men. Half are worth two hundred billion dollars or more. The “poorest” of the group is worth one hundred and forty-eight billion. The richest woman on the planet, Alice Walton, Walmart heiress, appears in sixteenth place with one hundred and sixteen billion. 

But the most revealing fact about this particular edition is an absence. In August, Bernard Arnault and Warren Buffett, two men who at some point in their careers were the richest in the world, dropped out of the top ten after the shares of LVMH and Berkshire Hathaway fell. With them, the last representation of the pure investor and the luxury brand builder disappeared from the top. 

Read this carefully, because it has consequences: in the current picture, not a single investor remains. Warren Buffett, the best documented capital allocator in history, can’t keep up with the rate of appreciation of technology assets. If anyone thought they would make this list by investing their money wisely, the data has just proven them wrong. All ten are traders. Nine built their own companies; the tenth joined one when it still fit in a building. 

II. The central finding: ownership, not income

If only one sentence had to be salvaged from this article, it would be this: extreme wealth does not come from income, it comes from property. 

None of these ten men got rich by saving, earning a salary, or investing their spare change in the stock market. All ten own a very large percentage of a single company, and—this is the second link, and the one almost everyone overlooks— they didn’t sell. 

Amancio Ortega retains nearly 59% of Inditex half a century after opening the first store. Jeff Bezos, after three decades of systematically selling shares and a divorce that cost him a quarter of his stake, still owns around 8% of Amazon. Musk maintains an estimated 42% stake in SpaceX. Page and Brin stepped down from their executive roles at Alphabet in December 2019 and remain controlling shareholders. 

This directly contradicts almost all financial advice, and it deserves clarification to prevent a lot of harm: concentration creates wealth; diversification preserves it. They are two different games, with opposing rules, and confusing them is the most costly mistake the average aspiring investor makes. Diversifying when you have nothing is an elegant way to guarantee you’ll never have anything. Concentrating when you already have everything is an effective way to lose it. 

And that’s where their real income comes from, which is ridiculously low compared to their fortunes. Ortega receives around three billion euros annually in dividends from Inditex; Ballmer, around one billion dollars a year in dividends from Microsoft. Nobody here lives on a salary. 

III. The machine: why your dentist will never arrive

Nine of the ten companies come from the technology sector: software (Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Meta), hardware and semiconductors (Dell, Nvidia ), e-commerce (Amazon), and Musk’s industrial-aerospace combination. The ranking reflects the continued dominance of technology, artificial intelligence, and large global corporations. 

The shared economic characteristic isn’t “technology” as a label, but something more precise: near-zero marginal cost and network effects. Selling the ten millionth copy of a software costs practically the same as selling the first. A search engine improves the more it’s used. A social network without users is worthless, and with three billion users, it has no possible competition. 

Amancio Ortega is the exception that proves the rule. He sells clothes, a centuries-old business, with very real marginal costs. His innovation wasn’t in textiles but in logistics. He compressed the cycle between design and storefront from months to weeks and vertically integrated the supply chain to achieve this. He made speed the scalable asset. He’s the only one on the list who built a machine of this size without code. 

The practical consequence is uncomfortable but clear. No professional whose income is tied to their hours—however brilliant—can reach this point. There is an arithmetic ceiling. Doctors, lawyers, consultants, and architects have excellent markets and a hard limit. The right question was never “how much do I earn,” but “what do I own, and how does that grow while I sleep?” 

IV. The time factor

This is the fact that most bothers audiences, and the one that is most needed.

An average of thirty-five years invested in the same asset. Zuckerberg, the youngest of the group at forty-two, has been with Meta for twenty-two years. The average age of the top ten is sixty-three. 

This is where the most widespread and damaging misinterpretation of the entire genre occurs. It’s true they started very young: Dell founded his company at nineteen in a college dorm in Austin; Zuckerberg also at nineteen, at Harvard; Page and Brin at twenty-five; Bezos and Huang at thirty; Ellison at thirty-three. But they started early and got rich late. Confusing “founded at nineteen” with “became a billionaire at nineteen” is the fuel of the entire get-rich-quick industry. 

There are no shortcuts on this list. Any promise of getting here in five years is, in all likelihood, a scam or a mirage of statistical survival. 

V. Geography

Nine of the ten are American. The only non-American is Amancio Ortega. 

This is not a biographical curiosity; it is probably the most decisive structural variable on the list after ownership. For fifty years, the United States offered a combination that almost no other country had simultaneously: a gigantic and homogeneous domestic market, deep capital markets willing to pay extremely high multiples for future profits, a venture capital industry capable of financing losses for a decade without batting an eye, research universities connected to industry, and a legal framework that normalizes business failure instead of punishing it for life. 

The fact that Ortega has built the tenth largest fortune in the world from A Coruña, without any of that, is statistically more extraordinary than any other trajectory on the list. 

VI. The Strangers

Half of the top ten are immigrants or children of immigrants. 

Musk left South Africa for Canada before he turned eighteen, worked various jobs, and enrolled at Queen’s University of Ontario and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. 

Sergey Brin came to the United States from Russia at the age of six, when his family was fleeing anti-Semitism, and is now the richest immigrant in the country. 

Jensen Huang arrived from Taiwan at the age of nine, and spent part of his teenage years at a rural boarding school in Kentucky that his parents mistakenly believed to be a prestigious school. 

Jeff Bezos was raised by his stepfather, Miguel Bezos, a Cuban exile who came to the United States alone as a teenager. 

Larry Ellison was born to a single mother of immigrant origin and was raised by uncles on the South Side of Chicago. 

The pattern of the outsider with nothing to lose and no debt to the established order appears time and again. The immigrant has not inherited the reasons why “things are done this way here.” 

VII. 0.2% versus 40%. Education as inheritable capital 

There is one piece of information on this list that is rarely addressed in the business press, almost always due to discomfort, and that deserves serious treatment precisely because silence hands it over to those who misuse it. 

Let’s be transparent. Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sergey Brin are Jewish. Four out of ten, 40%. If we broaden the criteria to include maternal ancestry, we add Larry Page and Steve Ballmer —Ballmer’s mother, Beatrice Dworkin, was Jewish; Page is of Jewish descent, although he wasn’t raised religiously—bringing the figure to 60%. 

The global Jewish population is approximately 15.8 million people, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics and Jewish Agency counts, out of a world population of about 8.2 billion. That is, around 0.19%. An overrepresentation of about two hundred times. 

A methodological caveat before we continue, because this is what separates analysis from sensationalism: ten people do not constitute a sample. With such a small sample size, a change in Oracle’s stock price radically alters the percentage. 

The most compelling evidence of this phenomenon lies not in this ranking but in longer-term data. Of the 965 individual Nobel Prize laureates between 1901 and 2025, at least 220 were Jewish or had at least one Jewish parent, representing 22% of the total, roughly 110 times their demographic weight. In the Nobel Prize in Economics, the proportion reaches 40%; in Medicine, 26%; and in Physics, 24%. 

The interesting question is not whether the phenomenon exists—it has been documented for over a century, in dozens of disciplines—but what explains it. And here, the most robust answer in academic literature connects directly to the topic of this article: education. 

The economists’ thesis 

In The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish In History, 70-1492, economists Maristella Botticini ( Bocconi ) and Zvi Eckstein proposed the explanation that is now the most cited, and which won the National Jewish Book Award of 2012. 

His argument begins in 70 CE, when the destruction of the Second Temple left Judaism without sacrificial worship and without a priesthood. The rabbinic leadership replaced sacrifice with the study of the Torah text and instituted a rule unprecedented in the ancient world: every Jewish father was required to teach his son to read the Torah, with instruction beginning at the age of five or six. 

In an agrarian world where literacy was extremely rare, this created a nearly universally literate population. And it was expensive. Botticini and Eckstein document a fact that dismantles much of the romantic narrative: most people were unwilling to pay that price. 

A large part of the community abandoned Judaism between the 2nd and 7th centuries, precisely because the educational obligation was unsustainable for a peasant. Those who remained were, by definition, a self-selected group that had invested in human capital. 

The historical irony is complete. Knowing how to read was absolutely useless for plowing a field. It was a ruinous investment for centuries. But when the cities of the Islamic world and later of Europe developed, that literacy became a decisive comparative advantage in trade, credit, administration, and medicine—highly profitable professions for which almost no one else had the skills. 

The community urbanized and changed its occupations. Education was not a strategy for enrichment; it was a religious obligation that turned out to have a gigantic economic return a millennium later. 

The asset that cannot be confiscated 

This cause is compounded by a second, brutal one. For much of the Christian Middle Ages, Jews were excluded from land ownership and from craft guilds. And they suffered successive expulsions: England in 1290, France several times in the 14th century, Spain in 1492. 

An expulsion teaches a financial lesson with a clarity no master’s degree can match: land is confiscated, business seized, house lost; knowledge, network, language, and reputation travel with you. When a group of people internalizes for twenty generations that the only non-confiscatable asset is the one inside their head, it produces a culture obsessed with intangible, portable, and scalable capital. 

Which is, literally, the definition of software. 

The disagreement method 

There is a third element, less quantifiable but difficult to ignore for anyone who has ever seen a Talmudic study hall. The Talmud is not studied by reading: it is studied by discussing, in pairs— chavruta —attacking the text and attacking the interpretation of one’s partner. And the canonical text preserves in writing the minority opinions alongside the majority ones, including those that were defeated. 

It’s formal training in questioning the authority of a sacred text while still venerating it, in arguing for the sake of it, and in tolerating sustained disagreement. It’s not a bad description of what a startup does to an established industry. 

What needs to be said precisely 

Three warnings, because this terrain lends itself to abuse. 

First: the explanation is historical and cultural, not biological. There is a minority body of literature that postulates a genetic selection of cognitive abilities in the Ashkenazi population; it is methodologically highly debated and lacks acceptance in mainstream population genetics. And the distinction is not merely cosmetic: if the mechanism is cultural, it is transmissible. A family of any origin can adopt this preference. If it were biological, the fact would be a useless curiosity. It is precisely because it is cultural that it is relevant for a reader who wants to educate their children. 

Second: the same overrepresentation appears in physics, medicine, mathematics, classical music, chess, literature, and comedy. Such a widespread pattern points unequivocally to accumulated human capital and rules out any business-specific advantages or conspiratorial interpretations. No one has seriously suggested the existence of a hidden scheme to win chess championships. 

Third, and most important for our purpose: the operative factor is not ethnicity, but upbringing. A home that treats education as part of one’s identity and not as a mere formality, plus an outsider’s position that forces one to compete by someone else’s rules. Jensen Huang comes from a Confucian tradition that also sanctified examination and study for two thousand years. Bezos was raised by a Cuban exile. And at the opposite end of the spectrum is Amancio Ortega, the son of a railway worker, who left school at fourteen and built the tenth largest fortune in the world. 

Judaism is the best-documented, longest-running, and most measurable case of this configuration—two thousand years of data—and that’s why it serves as a case study. It’s not a passport. 

VIII. The paradox of university students who dropped out 

No anecdote has caused more harm to more young people than that of the founders who left the university. 

The facts first. Six of the ten dropped out of school: Gates and Zuckerberg left Harvard; Dell left medical school at the University of Texas; Ellison dropped out of two universities, Illinois and Chicago; Page and Brin left their computer science PhDs at Stanford; Musk lasted two days in his, also at Stanford. 

Now for the nuance: they left elite institutions to pursue an opportunity that was already working. Page and Brin didn’t abandon their PhDs to find themselves; they left because their search engine was already running on Stanford’s servers and was overloading the campus network. Zuckerberg left Harvard when Facebook had already spread to dozens of universities. Gates left Harvard with a contract signed with MITS. 

And in the other half of the list, the qualifications are solid and comprehensive. Jensen Huang has a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford. Bezos graduated from Princeton with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. Ballmer earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and economics from Harvard. Musk earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania. Carlos Slim, who was on this list for years, taught algebra at UNAM before going into business. 

The honest interpretation isn’t “university is useless.” It’s that the degree isn’t the most valuable asset; technical training and networking are, and that at a certain point the opportunity cost of staying outweighs the opportunity cost of leaving. 

Distinguishing between these two things separates someone who quits with an ongoing business from someone who quits with just an idea. 

IX. They were all on the verge of bankruptcy

This is probably the most useful section of this article, because it debunks the myth of linear growth in all ten cases. 

Elon Musk ended 2008 with three failed Falcon 1 launches, SpaceX without the money for a fourth, and Tesla weeks away from bankruptcy. Years earlier, he had been ousted as CEO of the company that would become PayPal while he was traveling. 

Jensen Huang almost liquidated Nvidia in 1996. He bet on the wrong graphics architecture with the NV1 chip, failed commercially, laid off more than half the staff, and was left with enough cash for nine months. 

Larry Ellison saw Oracle fall 80% in 1990 after an improper revenue recognition scandal that nearly brought the company down. 

Jeff Bezos watched Amazon lose more than 90% of its value in the dot-com crash, and then burned through hundreds of millions on the Fire Phone and Amazon Auctions. 

Mark Zuckerberg has burned through tens of billions in the metaverse, in addition to a decade of regulatory privacy crises. Michael 

Dell had to take its company private in 2013 because the declining business was beyond repair under quarterly scrutiny. 

Steve Ballmer missed out on the mobile phone completely and almost entirely amortized Nokia. 

The pattern isn’t that they were right. It’s that none of their mistakes compromised control over the main asset. Surviving and retaining ownership matters more than being right. 

A founder who gets everything right but loses control of his company doesn’t appear on this list; one who makes mistakes for thirty years but maintains 40% does. 

X. Did they receive their fortune or did they create it?

The ten of them created it, in the strictest technical sense. None of them inherited a company or significant wealth. It is significant that Bernard Arnault, the only one on the recent historical list who did start with a financial advantage—he used fifteen million dollars from his father’s construction business to buy Christian Dior—is no longer in the top ten. 

But self-made doesn’t mean “without advantages,” and to claim otherwise is dishonest. The accurate formulation is that they created their fortune, but they inherited the conditions that made it possible. 

Larry Page’s father was a computer science professor at Michigan State, and his house had computers when almost no other house had them. 

Michael Dell’s father was an orthodontist and his mother was a stockbroker. 

Zuckerberg’s parents were a dentist and a psychiatrist, and they paid for a private programming tutor for him in high school. 

Ballmer’s father was an executive at Ford. 

Warren Buffett’s father was a U.S. congressman. Gates studied at Lakeside, one of the few high schools in the country with a computer terminal in 1968. 

None of them were rich. They all had early access to technology, higher education, and a safety net that allowed them to take risks without falling into the abyss. That’s a huge advantage, and it’s different from an inheritance. 

The only genuine exception is Amancio Ortega. The son of a railway worker, he left school at fourteen to work as a delivery boy in a shirt shop in A Coruña. If you’re looking for a true story of social mobility from the very bottom, it’s his, not Zuckerberg’s. 

Seven Lessons and a Closing

1. Extreme wealth comes from ownership, never from income. The right question isn’t how much they earn, but what they own. 
2. You need an asset that scales without you. If you have to be present for value to be generated, there’s an insurmountable arithmetic ceiling. 
3. Concentration creates, diversification preserves. Know what game you’re playing before applying someone else’s rules. 
4. The realistic timeframe is twenty to forty years. Anything promising less deserves automatic suspicion. 
5. The employee equity route exists and is the most accessible. Steve Ballmer is the only person on this list who didn’t found anything: he joined Microsoft in 1980 as employee number 30 and accepted equity instead of a high salary. Today he’s worth $155 billion. It’s not about “working hard at a good company”; it’s about owning a stake in a very early-stage company. It’s the most practical lesson on the entire list, and almost no one explains it well. 
6. Survive. All ten made catastrophic mistakes. None of them made the mistake of losing control. 
7. And if you have children, the most powerful thing you can pass on to them isn’t money. It’s a home where education is part of their identity, not just a formality. That’s the only lesson from this article, which draws on two thousand years of data. 

This list is the most biased sample that exists on the face of the earth. Ten people, selected from the 3,428 billionaires that Forbes identified in its annual list of March 2026, who in turn come from eight billion inhabitants. 

For every Elon Musk, there are thousands of equally capable, equally hardworking founders with equally sound ideas who failed for reasons beyond their control: a funding round that closed six months early, a better-capitalized competitor, regulatory changes, a partner who left, illness. Extracting a replicable method from just ten survivors is a basic statistical error, and it’s the business of an entire industry. 

What can honestly be gleaned from these ten cases is not a recipe, but a framework. How money actually works at that scale, what levers drive it, and which are merely decorative. This framework is real and useful, even if you never reach this level—and you almost certainly won’t, just as someone who studies the biomechanics of sprinters will never run the 100 meters in under ten seconds. 

Knowing how the machine works and aspiring to be the machine are two different things. The first can be learned. The second depends, to a degree no one likes to admit, on luck

Wealth data and ranking composition: Forbes, as of September 1, 2026. World Jewish population data: Israel Central Bureau of Statistics and Jewish Agency for Israel, 2025–2026. Nobel Prize laureate data: cumulative counts 1901–2025. Historical context on literacy and human capital: Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein, The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492, Princeton University Press, 2012.

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