What Billionaires Have In Common

By Queuebot in Money & Finance on Apr 9, 2009 at 4:39 pm

What do billionaires have in common besides a lot of money? Forbes magazine decided to find out, and did an in depth analysis of the 657 self made billionaires on their list from a few months ago. Amongst the things they analyzed are the billionaire’s parents, education, job, and social standings.

Some of the surprising common traits they found are:

September Birthdays

Of the 380 self-made American tycoons who have appeared on the Forbes list of the World’s Billionaires in the past three years, 42 were born in September–more than in any other month. Maybe that’s because September is the month the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans is published.

Tech Titans Who Dropped Out of College

Forget everything your guidance counselor told you: You don’t have to go to college to be successful. More than 20% of the self-made American moguls on the most recent list of the World’s Billionaires never finished college. Many of them made their fortunes in tech. Among them: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, (Oracle) and Theodore Waitt (Gateway).

Skull and Bones

Several current and former billionaires rounded out their Yale careers as members of Skull and Bones, the secret society portrayed with enigmatic relish by Hollywood in movies like The Skulls and W. Among those who were inducted: investor Edward Lampert, Blackstone co-founder Steven Schwarzman and FedEx founder Frederick Smith.

Link – via forbes

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.

Tags: billionaires, September, Skull and Bones

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Miss Cellania
Apr 9th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
More people are born in September than any other month. You’d probably find the same stats with a non-billionaire population. After all, it’s COLD in January!
Lauch
Apr 9th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
Check out Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliars” for a bunch of interesting facts about billionaires and normal folks who are successful. Most pro hockey players, for example, are born in the first three months of the year.

Well worth the read!
Johnny Cat
Apr 9th, 2009 at 8:41 pm
Ah, Miss C beat me to it. But I’ll add that new year’s is a factor, too.
Susan
Apr 9th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
Funny how they mention that a lot of them dropped out of college, and yet “Got an MBA from a top-tier school” is also on the list…
Yonk
Apr 10th, 2009 at 12:33 am
How about flipping the script, and saying that you need college to become a “self made american mogul” …”according to forbes magazine 80% of billionaire moguls graduated college”
seems like much more startling a statistic eh?
Hoax
Apr 10th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Who taught the author statistics? 8 of 68 worked at Goldman/Sachs–So what. I’ll bet 90% ate grilled cheese as a kid. Seems just as plausible that dairy is the source of their success.
marlene
Aug 22nd, 2009 at 5:14 am
I wonder what their religion is, or are they too arrogant to believe in the Almighty?
idani27
Oct 11th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Does it mean that Australia (and other Southern hemisphere countries) have most of its population born in March?!?
Mizz
Oct 21st, 2009 at 12:01 pm
The most people are born in September, but the general population doesn’t have a ratio of 40/300 born in September. It’s a telling statistical characteristic of the billionaire group. Also, the ‘dropout’ thing is misleading. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were from highly educated and wealthy families, and both were destined to attend high-tier colleges, but dropped out when they saw the fortune to be made. It wasn’t like they were just clueless and unable to attend college for grades or money. A far greater opportunity pulled them aside. Their parents and schools hooked them up with thousands of hours of computer time, which was prohibitively expensive in those days. But their parents and they saw that it was an inevitable wave of the future, so they bought their kids computer time. Not that ‘any idiot’ could do the same, but it’s not that they were exceptional that made them exceptionally successful. It’s the exceptions that were made for them. If their parents had sponsored a dozen other kids to get 10,000 hours of computer time, those dozen people would probably be wealthy today.

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