The vast majority of U.S. billionaires are founders who started companies or heirs who mostly lucked into their fortunes. A tiny subset got hired into jobs that catapulted them into the ranks of the world’s wealthiest.
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.
The richest person to become a billionaire as a non-founder executive is Bill Gates’ Harvard friend Steve Ballmer, who joined Microsoft in 1980 as employee No. 40 and ran the company as CEO from 2000 to 2014. The newest member of this elite group is chip company AMD CEO Lisa Su, who recently became a billionaire amid a runup in AMD’s share price. She is one of five women to make this list. Others include Arista Networks’ Jayshree Ullal, Meta’s former COO Sheryl Sandberg and Meg Whitman–who as the former CEO of eBay took the company from revenue of $5.7 million in 1998 to $5 billion in 2008–accumulated millions of shares in the process, and first became a billionaire in 2003.
Here are the 26 hired-hand billionaires:
| NAME | NET WORTH | COMPANY | TITLE | YEAR HIRED |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steve Ballmer | $120.5 bil | Microsoft | Former CEO | 1980 |
| Eric Schmidt | $20.7 bil | Former CEO & Chairman | 2001 | |
| Ramzi Musallam | $9 bil | Veritas Capital | CEO | 1997 |
| Charles Simonyi | $7.3 bil | Microsoft | Former Chief Software Architect | 1981 |
| Jonathan Gray | $7.3 bil | Blackstone | President, COO | 1992 |
| John Brown | $7.4 bil | Stryker Corp. | Former CEO | 1977 |
| Jeff Rothschild | $5.7 bil | Former Vice President | 2005 | |
| Jeff Skoll | $4.3 bil | EBay | Former President | 1995 |
| Hamilton”Tony” James | $4.1 bil | Blackstone | Former Executive Chairman | 2002 |
| Jayshree Ullal | $3.6 bil | Arista Networks | CEO & Chairperson | 2008 |
| Frank Slootman | $3.5 bil | Snowflake | CEO & Chairman | 2019 |
| J. Tomlinson Hill | $3.2 bil | Blackstone | Former Vice Chairman | 1993 |
| Meg Whitman | $3 bil | EBay | Former CEO | 1998 |
| Scott Shleifer | $2.5 bil | Tiger Global Management | Former head of private investments | 2003 |
| Tor Peterson | $2.4 bil | Glencore International | Former head of Coal Trading | 2011 |
| Tim Cook | $2.1 bil | Apple | CEO | 1998 |
| Paul Saville | $2.1 bil | NVR | Executive Chairman | 2005 |
| Jamie Dimon | $2 bil | JPMorganChase | CEO | 2004 |
| Scott Nuttall | $2 bil | KKR | Co-CEO | 1997 |
| Sheryl Sandberg | $2 bil | Meta | Former COO | 2008 |
| Joseph Bae | $1.8 bil | KKR | Co-CEO | 1996 |
| Safra Catz | $1.8 bil | Oracle | CEO | 2004 |
| Kenneth Hao | $1.5 bil | Silver Lake | Chairman | 2000 |
| Greg Mondre | $1.5 bil | Silver Lake | Co-CEO | 1999 |
| Lloyd Blankfein | $1.2 bil | Goldman Sachs | Former CEO | 1982 |
| Lisa Su | $1.1 bil | AMD | CEO | 2012 |
