10 Billionaires Without High-School Education

Mark Twain once said, "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." For most of us, formal education is critical to achieving success, but the following ten incredibly successful entrepreneurs heeded Twain's words and abandoned the schoolbooks to seize their opportunity for incredible fortune.

Amancio Ortega
Age: 79 Net
Worth: $71,5 Billion

The founder of Inditex, a fashion empire that includes brands Zara and Massimo Dutti, was born in abject poverty to a railroad worker and a housemaid.

He ditched the school at the age of 12 and started working for a shirtmaker as a delivery boy in La Coruna, and has made his first steps in the art of apparel making. Ortega never attended higher education and continued to work in the textile field into the early 1960s. After becoming manager of a local clothing shop, he discovered that only wealthy individuals could afford to purchase fine clothing and became even more determined to make quality clothes accessible to everyone. In 1963, at the age of 27, Amancio Ortega founded his own company called Confecciones Goa that made and sold fine bathrobes. In 1975 he launched fashion label Zara.

Today, Zara has 6,200 stores spread in 70 different countries. And the net worth of Amancio Ortega is about $71,5 Billion.

Li Ka-Shing
Age: 87
Net Worth: $31 Billion

He was 12 years old in 1940 when his family fled the Japanese invasion of China. Within three years of their arrival in Hong Kong, his father had died and he was forced to drop out of school and take up a job in order to provide for his family. He started working in a plastics trading company as a salesman selling plastic watchbands and belts. He worked hard, often working up to 16 hours a day and proved to be a capable salesman. In 1950 he started his own company, Cheung Kong Industries. Now Li Ka-Shing is one of the most powerful figures in Asia, his net worth is approximately $31 Billion. He is also a well-known philanthropist, his Li Ka-Shing Foundation, created in 1981, contributed about $500 million in the fields of health and education.

Francois Pinault
Age: 79
Net Worth: $15 Billion

It’s hard to believe that the third-richest man in France — with holdings like Gucci, Christie’s auctioneers, Samsonite, and Puma — quit high school in 1947 to work at his father’s lumber mill. Pinault has amassed an $8.7 billion fortune.

According to Forbes, the French businessman dropped out of his private high school in 1947 to work at his father’s lumber mill in part because his schoolmates made fun of his poor background.

Today, as the majority shareholder of fashion conglomerate PPR, the billionaire businessman owns high-end fashion houses including Gucci, Stella McCartney, Alexander McQueen, and Yves Saint Laurent. He also owns Christie’s Auction House and is currently worth around $12.9 billion, according to Forbes.

Richard Branson
Age: 65
Net Worth: $4,6 Billion

The Virgin Group founder is an international powerhouse currently worth about $4.9 billion, according to Forbes. Branson founded his first business, Student magazine, after dropping out of high school at 15 and has spoken out against the university system on his blog. Nearly 50 years after dropping out, he has overseen approximately 500 companies, with his brand currently somewhere between 200 and 300 of them.

Joe Lewis
Age: 78
Net Worth: $4,2 Billion

Lewis dropped out of high school at 15 to run his father’s catering business, Tavistock Banqueting, and is currently worth about $5.3 billion, according to Forbes. The businessman — who works from his yacht most of the year — owns a planned community in Lake Nona, near Orlando, which is now one of the fastest-growing developments in America and houses a medical city that includes the University of Central Florida College of Medicine and Health Sciences Campus, Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, the Orlando VA Medical Center, and a University of Florida Research and Academic Center. As the main investor in Tavistock Group, Lewis owns more than 200 companies, according to Forbes, including London Premiership soccer team Tottenham Hotspur (Spurs), a stake in U.K.’s largest pub operator, Mitchell’s & Butlers plc, and approximately 135 restaurants and various resorts throughout the world.

He also has a covetable art collection that includes works by Picasso, Matisse, Lucian Freud, and Francis Bacon.

Kirk Kerkorian
Age: 98
Net Worth: $3,6 Billion

This megaresort tycoon, who dropped out to pursue amateur boxing in the eighth grade, is now worth $3.1 billion. To financially help his Armenian-immigrant family, Kerkorian dropped out of school in the eighth grade and later would become a boxer called "Rifle Right Kerkorian." During World War II, Kerkorian worked for Britain's Royal Air Force. He eventually turned his interest to constructing many of Las Vegas' biggest resorts and hotels.

David H. Murdock
Age: 92
Net Worth: $2,4 Billion

The self-made billionaire businessman dropped out of high school in the ninth grade and worked at a gas station before being drafted into the Army in 1943, according to Forbes. After World War II, Murdock bought his first business, a Detroit diner, and sold it several months later for a $700 profit. Now, after a lifetime of buying, building and selling, he’s worth an estimated $2.9 billion, according to Forbes. The Dole Foods CEO took the company private in 2013 in a deal that valued the company at $1.6 billion.

At 92, Murdock is somewhat of a health nut — he told the New York Times he swore off red meat long ago and eats as many as 20 fruits and vegetables a day, going so far as to pulverize banana peels and orange rinds into the smoothies he drinks two to three times a day — and he says he wants to live forever.

Carl Lindner, Jr.
Age: 92
Net Worth: $2,2 Billion

This billionaire dropped out of high school to deliver milk for his family’s dairy. In 1940 used a $1,200 loan to open an ice cream shop with his sister and two brothers. In 1959 he left the business and started investing in savings and loans, and eventually insurance concerns, which he assembled under American Financial Group. In 1984 Lindner bought Chiquita Brands International (formerly United Foods) and ran it until 2001. The family dairy, called United Dairy Farmers, now has 200 ice cream parlours and convenience stores. Lindner’s current net worth $1.7 billion.

Ahmet Nazif Zorlu
Age: 70
Net Worth: $1,4 Billion

Zorlu Holding is one of the biggest corporate groups based in Istanbul, Turkey. Zorlu Group is active in the areas of textiles, white goods and electronics manufacturing, energy, and financial services. It owns Vestel, a private-label TV maker and distributor. It is responsible for the manufacture of a series of personal video recorders (PVRs) with codenames T810, T816, T825 among others. Its brand in the UK includes Goodmans, Digihome, Hitachi and Grundig.

Ahmed ditched the school at the age of 15 and had no regrets about it. He has made this decision because of his brother, who proposed to start their own business. It seems that the decision was right because that's how Zorlu Group was born.

James H. Clark
Age: 71
Net Worth: $1,1 Billion

The self-made billionaire American businessman and co-founder of Netscape dropped out of high school at 16 after getting into some trouble and joined the U.S. Navy, where he earned his high school equivalency degree, began learning about electronics, and made money on the side by loan-sharking cash to other recruits at interest rates of 40%, according to Forbes.

Considered the first Internet billionaire, Clark’s timely investments in companies like Apple, Facebook, and Twitter have earned him an estimated current worth of about 1.1 billion, according to Forbes. His philanthropic efforts include financially backing the Japanese dolphin hunting documentary, The Cove and pledging $60 million toward science research in 2013