By Mudit Jain
1. Laxmi Mittal – Born in 1950 to a poor family in Rajasthan, Laxmi Mittal is an Indian billionaire with a current net worth of $8.8 billion. He spent his childhood in a small house with his family with no electricity supply or clean drinking water. His father put in the hard yards and set up a steel company in Kolkata, but Mittal moved further and started his steel factory in Indonesia. He split with his sibling to start Mittal Steel, which he then merged with French company Arcelor in 2006. Since then, Laxmi Mittal has been serving as the chairman and CEO of the world’s biggest steel manufacturing company.
2. Roman Abramovich – Chelsea Football Club is one of the richest football clubs and, of course, so is its owner – Roman Abramovich. The Israeli-Russian businessman also owns stakes in steel giant Evraz and mining company Norilsk Nickel. and has a net worth of $12.1 billion. However, he was born into poverty and then orphaned at age 2. Raised by his uncle and his family, Abramovich started a small company in 1987, which he eventually merged with Gazprom for $13 billion. From then on he has never looked backed. He also owns the world’s second-largest yacht, the 533-foot Eclipse, which cost him nearly $400 million.
3. Howard Schultz – Former owner of basketball team Seattle SuperSonics, Howard Schultz served two successful tenures as the CEO of Starbucks. To pay for college, Schultz worked as a bartender and even sold his own blood. In the early 1980s he joined Starbucks, which had just a few stores . He saw the potential for the small brand to grow nationally. Unable to convince the company of his vision, he ended up leaving, only to acquire the brand in 1987. Thd company went public in 1992. By 2000, Starbucks had grown into a globally recognized brand with more than 3,500 stores and $2.2 billion in annual revenues.
4. Oprah Winfrey – Even after being born into a poor family, Oprah Winfrey had her goals set from a very early age. She won a scholarship to Tennessee State University and became the first African-American TV correspondent in her teenage years. In 1983, she moved to Chicago to be the presenter for the AM talk show, which is now popular as The Oprah Winfrey Show. Winfrey owns a cable channel, OWN, and has stakes in WW (Weight Watchers), a weight control company. Her net worth, according to Forbes, is $2.6 billion.
5. Larry Ellison – The founder, CTO and executive chairman of Oracle, Larry Ellison, was born to a single mother and raised by his uncle and aunt. Following his aunt’s death, he moved to California, and after doing odd jobs for about eight years, he finally founded his software company in 1977. Today, Oracle is one of the largest technology companies in the world and Ellison has a staggering net worth of $66.8 billion, according to Forbes.