These Executives Became Billionaires While Working For Others

Forbes Topline

Forbes

Business News, Business, News, Entrepreneurship

4.8 • 6 Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2024

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Think of a typical billionaire and it’s likely to be someone who falls into one of two camps: founders or cofounders–like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos—or heirs, like Jacqueline Mars, granddaughter of the founder of candy company Mars, maker of M&Ms and Snickers bars; and Thomas Pritzker, whose predecessors founded the Hyatt Hotels chain he runs as CEO. Roughly 69% of the nearly 760 U.S. billionaires listed by Forbes fall into the first category, while just more than 27% inherited a great fortune. Altogether nearly 97% of American billionaires land in these two groups. A third category is the rarest: those who are neither founders nor heirs. Call them hired-hand billionaires–or corporate-ladder billionaires. Forbes has found just 26 people who were hired as executives–sometimes as junior employees, sometimes as CEOs–who became billionaires. These ultra-wealthy executives work or worked at just 20 companies, nearly all of which are technology or private equity firms. Among the more notable are Apple CEO Tim Cook, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Jonathan Gray, who was hired at Blackstone in 1992 fresh out of college and was named the firm’s president and Chief Operating Officer in 2018. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2024/02/07/hired-hand-billionaires-tim-cook-steve-ballmer-lisa-su-these-executives-amassed-10-figure-fortunes-while-working-for-others/?sh=62961eb04f47 Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes: http://forbes.com Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	The vast majority of US billionaires are either founders who started companies or heirs who mostly locked into their fortunes
0:07.0	But a tiny subset got hired into jobs that catapulted them into the ranks of the world's wealthiest.
0:13.4	Hi everyone, I'm Rose Marie Miller here with Carrie Dolein,
0:19.6	an assistant managing editor here at Forbes.
0:22.4	Thank you so much for joining me today, Carrie.
0:24.6	Thank you, Rosemary.
0:27.0	Absolutely.
0:28.0	So Carrie, what is a hired-hand billionaire and how many did Forbes
0:31.9	this reporting find?
0:34.0	Yeah, by hired hand what we mean is someone who was not a founder or a co-founder of a company and did not inherit their
0:42.2	wealth and so this would be and did not inherit their wealth.
0:43.0	And so this would be somebody who got hired at a company,
0:48.0	sometimes as a junior employee, sometimes even as a CEO,
0:52.0	usually got equity in the company,
0:55.0	and that equity has, you know, and by equity I mean a stake,
1:00.0	shares of stock in the company,
1:02.0	and that equity has grown to make them worth a billion dollars
1:06.4	and more.
1:07.7	We found just 26 hired-hand billionaires in the United States out of about 760 American billionaires.
1:17.0	And so how many about what percent of the Forbes billionaires list are founders and what percent are heirs?
1:24.0	Yeah, so it's almost 70 percent, 69 percent are founders or co-founders,
1:29.0	entrepreneurs of some sort and another 27% are heirs.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Forbes, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Forbes and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.