Billionaire Dropouts at Pennylicious.

Do you need school to succeed? These billionaires certainly didn't - check out the Billionaire Dropout list at Pennylicious.

You may not know him, but Stanley Ho is worth $6.5 billion and has one very interesting life story:

Stanley Ho is called the King of Gambling for a good reason: he controlled the casino business in Macau for over 35 years because of a government-granted monopoly.

Like many of his colleagues in this list, Ho’s early childhood was tough. Although his family was wealthy at one point, his father lost a lot of money in a stock market crash and went bankrupt. His father abandoned him and his elder brothers committed suicide, leaving Ho and his mother impoverished.

This really made Ho one tough guy: once, he was in charge of a trade at sea when the ship was attacked by pirates, who then shot dead his partners. Ho was holding the money (the equivalent of several million dollars today), so naturally, the pirates rushed him. Undeterred, Ho got hold of a gun, shot a few people, gained control of the ship, and beat back the pirates!

Although Ho was a poor student, he is now the wealthiest man in Macau with $6.5 billion to his name. In fact, his company accounts for one-third of Macau’s GDP! Not bad at all for someone who dropped out of college.

A few on the list are well known for dropping out (like Bill Gates), but other names may surprise you: Link

While you're at it, check out a couple of interesting posts on Pennylicious, Neatorama's sister blog on the weird and interesting things about money.


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It is a mistake to "credit" Bill Gates with "dropping out" of Harvard. He did not. He was expelled from Harvard for improperly using the school's computer systems for personal business. He was warned multiple times and eventually expelled. The only evidence I have for this story is Prof. Fischer. Fischer taught an Intro to Communications class to me when I was in High School at Boston College. He was at Harvard during the tenure of Gates and claimed to be personally familiar with the situation invloving the library computers.
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