10 Billionaires Like Oprah Winfrey Who Grew Up Poor (2023)

You don’t have to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth to achieve great things in life — though it certainly helps. Still, many of today’s billionaires had very humble beginnings. Growing up poor didn’t stop these CEOs, celebrities and business experts from reaching the pinnacle of success — and it shouldn’t stop you, either.

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Whether you’re in need of some inspiration to start your own business, or you want to learn how to become a billionaire, take a look at how these famous folks made it to the top.

Family wealth isn’t the secret to this billionaire and media maven’s unparalleled success. Now worth an estimated $2.5 billion, according to Forbes, Oprah Winfrey was born to a teenage single mother in Mississippi. In an interview with Barbara Walters, she talked about not having running water or electricity growing up.

By focusing on school, participating in beauty pageants and then working at a radio station, Winfrey was able to enter the media world. She got her big break in television as a host for the local Baltimore talk show, “People Are Talking.” Later came “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” which entered national syndication in 1986.

In a 2001 taping of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” Winfrey shared some tips on making the shift to a wealth mindset.

“The whole idea, I think, of having wealth is not letting wealth use you but you use it,” she said. “Being a person who has come from an outhouse, and very poor circumstances, I can assure you that the more money you get, it really doesn’t change you — unless you are the kind of person who is defined by money.”

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Howard Schultz helped Starbucks become the company it is today. However, this successful businessman, who boasts a net worth of $3.9 billion, wasn’t born into wealth.

In an interview with Dr. Mukund Rajan of the Group Executive Council, Schultz discussed his childhood and what it was like growing up with less.

“When I was 7 years old, I experienced something that deeply affected me that I carry with me every single day,” he said. “And that is the scar and the shame of being a poor kid living in government-subsidized housing.”

Schultz said his father became a “broken man” after working in many dead-end jobs that offered neither money nor respect. But, this hardship seemed to motivate Schultz to become a success.

“I never dreamed I would be in a position one day to be part of a company where I would have authority — let alone build a company,” Schultz said. “What I’ve tried to do is build the kind of company that my father never got a chance to work for.”

Schultz joined Starbucks in 1981 and worked his way to the top. He retired from the company in 2018 but in April 2022, he returned as interim CEO and a member of the company’s board of directors.

Known for its polo shirts and high-end attire, the Ralph Lauren fashion brand is easily recognizable. But did you know that there was a time when the iconic fashion designer couldn’t even afford new clothes?

“As a kid, I was always into clothes, but I didn’t have the money to buy them,” Lauren told fellow billionaire Oprah Winfrey in a 2002 interview. “When I’d get my brothers’ hand-me-downs, there was an energy in me that made me say, ‘I want to get my own things, to make my own statement.’ Somewhere along the line, that energy — coupled with my exposure, through movies, to a world I hadn’t known — turned into something.”

That “something” is now a world-famous fashion brand, and he has a personal net worth of $6.9 billion.

Oracle co-founder, chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison was born in New York City but grew up in a lower-middle-class community on the South Side of Chicago.

“I’ll never complain again about living in a bad neighborhood, after moving from the Lower East Side of Manhattan to a still-worse neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago,” said Ellison in an interview posted on the Academy of Achievement website. “After my ninth month, I kept my mouth shut about the neighborhood.”

A 1997 Vanity Fair profile on Ellison described his childhood home as a “cramped walk-up apartment.” According to the article, Ellison was raised by his great-aunt and great-uncle, who was once successful in real estate but lost everything in the Depression.

Although he came from modest beginnings, Ellison is now a multibillionaire worth $97.3 billion, per Forbes.

“Everyone who works hard, and maybe a little cleverly, has the opportunity to make almost anything possible,” said Ellison in the Academy of Achievement interview. “That’s the American Dream, that anything here is possible.”

Self-made billionaire businessman and investor Kenneth Langone, who helped create Home Depot, had humble beginnings.

In a 2013 interview with OneWire, posted on Business Insider, Langone said he had a “charmed life” as a child — but not because of his material possessions. In fact, his mother was a cafeteria worker. Still, Langone enjoyed unconditional love, which later helped him get over his failures and not let them bring him down.

“When you’re in the risk-taking business at the level that I am, not everything you’re going to do is going to work,” he said. “Where you really lose is when it doesn’t work, and you start being abusive to yourself in terms of your qualities and your abilities.”

Today, Langone has a net worth of $5.8 billion, according to Forbes. And, he’s proud of that fact, he said in an interview for “Street Smart” on Bloomberg.

“I worked like hell to become part of the 1%,” he said.

The former chairman of Dole Food Products, David Murdock was raised in Wayne, Ohio, the son of a traveling salesman father and a mother who did other people’s laundry and scrubbed their floors to bolster her husband’s unsteady income. Dyslexic and mocked at school because of his poor grades, he dropped out at 14 and set out on his own, he told The New York Times Magazine in 2011. He got a job at a gas station and lived in a room on site. While he couldn’t succeed in school, he decided to learn on his own, reading biographies of famous people, along with the works of William Shakespeare and Socrates.

He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943, and when he was discharged at age 22, he had no money and slept in a park in Detroit until he met a man who worked at a loan company who wanted to aid the homeless veteran. The man helped him acquire $1,200 to buy a diner, which Murdock sold 18 months later for a $700 profit. Murdock spent $75 on a car and headed west, landing in Phoenix, where he bought cheap land and built affordable homes for other westward migrants after World War II.

“I was building as fast as I could break ground,” he told The Times. “Bang, bang, bang: I could hardly get a house finished before it was sold.”

His construction business spread and he used the profits to buy stock, eventually parlaying his earnings into becoming the largest shareholder in Occidental Petroleum. He eventually took over Dole after acquiring its parent company in 1985.

Now 99, he left the board of Dole in 2021 as part of a merger. Forbes pegged his net worth at $2.2 billion.

While he has a net worth of $1.5 billion today, Alan Gerry grew up in Liberty, New York, during the Depression. A frozen food distributor, Gerry’s father often struggled to feed the family on his salary.

Gerry later dropped out of high school to serve in the Marines during World War II. He used his GI Bill benefits to become trained in television repair and, in 1956, he invested $1,500 to start a cable company in his hometown. Decades later, his business evolved into 64 cable systems in 18 states. He sold the company to Time Warner in 1996 for a reported $2.7 billion — including $900 million in personal profit.

Gerry used the money to start his venture capital fund Granite Associates and has continued to give back to the community where he was raised, including building the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts.

“You grow up in a country and see that now so much has evaporated around you,” said Gerry in a 2011 interview with the Times Herald-Record. “So, you try to keep your eyes open and see what needs help.”

Founding high-end tequila company Patrón Spirits Co. and haircare company Paul Mitchell Systems turned John Paul DeJoria into a mogul with a net worth of $2.8 billion. In a 2011 interview with Forbes, DeJoria — who was once in foster care — discussed growing up poor in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

“We didn’t know that we were really going through tough times, because everybody was going through the same thing,” he said. “I remember once in junior high school, on a Friday, my mom came home from work and said to my brother and I, ‘You know, between us, we have only 27 cents, but we have food in the refrigerator, we have our little garden out back and we’re happy, so we are rich.'”

A true rags-to-riches story, he was homeless twice before joining forces with Paul Mitchell in 1980 to create the billion-dollar haircare brand. He now uses his fortune to give back, and he even was named Variety’s 2017 Philanthropist of the Year.

The youngest of 13 kids, Harold Hamm was raised by Oklahoma sharecroppers, who put him to work picking cotton barefoot as a child. The founder, chairman and CEO of oil company Continental Resources now has a net worth of $17.2 billion, but at age 16 he had to take a job at a gas station to support his loved ones.

Despite his family’s financial struggles, in a 2014 interview with Forbes, Hamm revealed that he drew inspiration from fellow Enid, Oklahoma, residents. One was a local potter who spoke to Hamm and his classmates at a school assembly.

“He had this lump of clay that he was slapping like a baby,” Hamm said. “It was clear that he did well because that was his passion, his art, and the message was that all of us could do well if we followed our passion in life.”

In a 2013 interview with the London-based Daily Mail, J.K. Rowling shared her struggles as a single parent, before the Harry Potter books turned her into the world’s highest-paid author.

“I remember 20 years ago not eating so my daughter would eat,” she said. “I remember nights when there was literally no money.”

Those days are long past, as the author earned $95 million between June 2016 and June 2017, according to Forbes. Now a philanthropist, Rowling enjoys giving back so much that an estimated $160 million in charitable giving contributed to her fall from billionaire status in 2012.

Today, Rowling’s fortune is back up to $1 billion, according to Celebrity Net Worth.

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Jami Farkas and Sabah Karimi contributed to the reporting of this article.

Net worth figures are according to Forbes, unless otherwise noted.