Typically, the road to billionaire status is a long shot. It takes years of hard work, consistency, and intelligent investing. Thankfully, technology has shrunk the timeline. Some self-made billionaires, among the world’s wealthiest people, almost made their fortune overnight.
Most of these billionaires work in the fast-growing technology sector. While it may take decades for some to become billionaires, others have done so in as little as four years. Here is a list of self-made billionaires who made their first billions within four years.
David Filo – Yahoo!
David Filo is a software developer who wrote his server application in the pc language C, formerly called webpages by Yahoo!. He co-founded Yahoo! with Jerry Yang. The company started as a website but quickly increased into different areas and is now a significant online brand. He made his first billion dollars in 1998. This resulted from his foresight and hard work when building the foundation of Yahoo!.
Jerry Yang – Yahoo!
When he was ten years old, Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo!, was born in Taiwan and migrated to San Jose, California. Yahoo! was an immediate success in its first year of beginning, with hundreds of thousands of visits by the end of its first year. After swiftly generating a $2 million investment, it went public in 1996. The company was worth billions by the dot-com bubble burst, making Yang a billionaire only a few years after the company was created.
Li Weiwei – Online games
Li Weiwei, commonly known as Li Yifei, is the founder of Wuhu Shunrong Sanqi Interactive Entertainment Network Technology, a Chinese company. Before Weiwei converted the company into a network gaming company, it produced the most effective vehicle parts, mainly plastic fuel tanks for automobiles. They sell items both in China and abroad.
With the popularity of numerous microtransaction-fueled mobiles and online games, he expands the company into community gaming. After the expansion, the firm notably evolved to the factor wherein it delivered millions of dollars in sales. He became a billionaire after restructuring the company to concentrate on gaming.
Mark Cuban – Broadcast.com
Mark Cuban made his first billion dollars by taking benefit of the dot-com boom. After schooling, he worked in specific locations and at a Dallas-based software retailer. However, his first effort at entrepreneurship was with a company named MicroSolutions. He sold the company for around $2 million. His most successful endeavor, however, was with Audionet in 1995. This was later called Broadcast.com.
It expanded to have hundreds of staff in 4 years, with millions of dollars in sales every year. After four years with Broadcast.com, Yahoo! bought it for $5.7 billion in equity, making Cuban a billionaire.
Jeff Bezos – Amazon
As of early 2022, Jeff Bezos, the creator of Amazon, was worth over $184.5 billion. After graduating from Princeton and working in different locations along Wall Street, he was based on Amazon. The firm was created in 1994 to sell books. It swiftly moved into different industries and began supplying many items.
Through this, Bezos rose to become a millionaire from a company he began in his garage. Four years after the firm was created, his net worth was $1 billion. Today, he is the second richest man in the world.
Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook
If you use Facebook, the odds are you have heard this name. While in school, he met his co-founders. Zuckerberg is the quintessential “accidental billionaire.” This is because he was only attempting to increase a social platform for students without the intention of creating money. Zuckerberg was valued at $79.7 billion in early 2022, making him one of the world’s wealthiest people. Also, his net worth barely surpassed one billion dollars in 2008.
Jan Koum felt compelled to enter the burgeoning Internet technology sector. As a result, he went to San Jose State University to study programming. In 2009, he created WhatsApp Inc. The app is now a prominent mobile texting network that still attracted the attention of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, who desired to form a partnership with Koum.
Mark Zuckerberg finally bought the company for $19 billion, making Koum a billionaire. Koum’s fortune is bolstered by his ownership of billions of dollars in Facebook stock.