Warren Buffet, CEO at Berkshire Hathaway
It’s hard to recall any self-made billionaire who is not a technocrat or an oil dealer. However, Warren Buffet who is popularly known as America’s most beloved business magnate makes that exception. He was listed first on the list of the world’s richest men in the year 2008 after beating Bill Gates who had been listed first from 1995 to 2007. Warren Buffet’s life experiences are full of inspiration and will certainly boost the morale of an aspiring entrepreneur. He was not a programming prodigy but was able to generate billions from savings he made as a child.
Even at 82 years old, Warren Buffet will always be remembered for his passion and skill in entrepreneurship. He pledged to donate 99% of his wealth to philanthropy with 83% of it going to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. Just for an insight, one of his most recent investments is the purchase of 66 million IBM shares which created news because the Berkshire Hathaway CEO had earlier said that he would not invest in technology.
Bill Gates, Microsoft Corporation
Bill Gates was the richest man in the world for 13 consecutive years. Although he resigned as Microsoft’s CEO, there is no doubt that he is one of those entrepreneurs who will always ring in peoples minds. Currently, he spends most of his time at the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and even less at Microsoft. After graduating from LakesideSchool in 1973, he enrolled at Havard in the same year and later dropped which allowed him time to co-found Microsoft with Paul
Allen. Just like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates has pledged to donate 95% of his fortune to philanthropy.
Larry Page, Google
When Larry Page invented PageRank together with Sergy Brin, they were both PhD students at StanfordUniversity. At the time, Larry was working on web crawler which would calculate the number of back links which pointed back to websites. He later discovered that the web would be a more meaningful place if he build a search engine which ranked pages
depending on the number of links which pointed back to a particular. His innovations formed the basis of founding Google which is today’s most reliable and popular search engine. Apart from the search engine, Google provides a wide range of products the most popular being YouTube, the Android OS and Gmail.
Larry Ellison, Oracle Corporation
Better known as the third richest man in America, Larry Ellison is the founder and CEO at Oracle Corporation. He specializes in database management systems although Oracle has been acquiring several high-tech computing companies including Sun Microsystems which licenses the popular programming language Java. Although Ellison donates to medical research and educational projects, he prefers to keep a low profile on his philanthropic activities since he believes
that philanthropy is a personal and private. He is currently worth $ 41 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg will forever be an iconic pioneer in social media networking. Just like Bill gates, he dropped out from HarvardUniversity in his sophomore year so that he had enough time to found, manage and develop Facebook. Today, he is the second richest billionaire under 40 while his website Facebook has more that 1 billion active users. Mark
Zuckerberg inclines his philanthropic efforts towards making better learning environments in schools around the world.
Peter Thiel, PayPal
Peter Thiel is the co-founder and former CEO at PayPal. He holds a B.A from StanfordUniversity and will always be credited as one of those people who were first to invest in the social networking website Facebook. When he founded PayPal, he was led by the passion to create an online payment system which would be far much convenient than the use of paper money. Evident from what he demonstrated by investing in Facebook when it was still in its infancy, Thiel believes in the power beheld by breakthrough technologies and is always donating to scientific research projects. One of his remarkable philanthropic projects is the founding of Break-out Labs which intends to fund scientific research projects.
Eric Schmidt, Executive chairman at Google
Even as a software engineer, Eric Schmidt is known for the role he has played to the success of several technology companies as the manager and CEO. He was the CEO at Novell Systems from the year 1997 to 2001 when Google hired him. From 2001 to 2011 he served as Google’s CEO and is one of those who take credit for the company’s success. Eric also sat on Apple’s board of directors although he later resigned after what was explained as conflict of interests and competition between the two technology companies. His worth is estimated at $ 7.5 billion which makes him the 138th richest person in the world. The legendry digital business executive makes substantial donations to the Google Philanthropic Arm.
Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder
Paul Allen is a long life friend of Bill Gates and the co-founder of Microsoft. Currently, he is the chairman at Vulcan inc. In 1974 he dropped out from WashingtonStateUniversity after which they partnered with gates to found Microsoft. He has played a great role t technological advancement and will always be remembered as one of those who pioneered the Personal Computer revolution. He makes his philanthropic contributions through the Paul G. Allen Family foundation which gives grants to cities. Currently, he is worth $ 15 billion.
Michael Dell, Founder and CEO at Dell Inc
Dell started putting together and selling kits for Personal computers as a freshman student at the University of Texas in Austin. He is the founder of Dell the computer manufacturing company which has severally been ranked as the world’s largest PC maker. In 1992, he became the youngest person at age 27 to have their company ranked among
Fortune’s 500 best. In 1999 Dell and his wife Susan founded the Michael and Susan Dell foundation which focuses on grants, child health, urban education and economic stability among other courses.
Tej Kohli, CEO at Grafix Softech and Ozone Real Estate
Tej Kohli who is the founder and CEO at Grafix Softech is another of those who inspire entrepreneurial enthusiasts the world over. After getting his B.Tech in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of technology he worked for five years in the industry at which time he discovered the niche. He began his business by overseeing the
development of payment gateway software at his company. Currently, Grafix Softech is a reputed E-commerce solutions provider and has generated Billions for him. He also oversees operations at the Tej Kohli foundation which plans to eradicate corneal blindness in India.
