Our parents encourage us to finish schooling so we could have a better life in the future. This has been the pattern of heritage being passed on from generation to generation. There is no doubt that studying would help everyone to fight illiteracy, and achieve the kind of life that everyone dreams. However, according to history, there are people who never finished any degree, and even skipped classes just because they have other things that they want to pursue in life. Who would have thought that these people would one day exceed not just comfortable life, but would even be part of the top 10 school dropout billionaires in the world? Get to know the path, struggles, and success that they trudged in order to reach the state of being known, popular, and enjoying the abundance of life.
10. Puthan Neduvakkatt Chenthamaraksha Menon
He is commonly known as PNC Menon who founded the Sobha Developers Limited, where he also serves as Chairman Emeritus. He holds the fifth position as the richest Indian who is a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council that has a total asset of $1.25 billion. His mindset is a natural heritage that he acquired from his father who was also a businessman. Despite that he lost his father at an early age, and dropped from his college course at Sree Kerala Varma College, he sustained himself by putting an interior decoration business. He is one of the trending topics in the business world now after he expressed his desire to donate to charity, half of his wealth, but it’s innate to him to be involved in philanthropic works, and he has been donating to different charity institutions for years.
9. Subhash Chandra
This 62-year old media mogul in India has a total net worth of $2.9 billion. He got that title when he launched the channel Zee TV in 1992 that became the private news channel later on. He received various award in the entrepreneurship, and has been consistent in Forbes list of richest people in the world. He ceased to attend school when he was 12 years old, but at age 19, he was already in rice trading, and even managed his own vegetable oils. He experienced all the hardships and toils in life since he also grew up in a small village in India. In fact, his family had incurred huge amount of debts that put him to a situation that he had to drop from his college course and started working. After he moved to Mumbai, he established a business related to packaging unit making laminated tubes, which in turn became the world’s largest producer of tubes, which is popularly known today as Essel Propack.
8. Shahid Balwa
He is another billionaire from India who is included in the top 10 youngest billionaires in the world today. He dropped out from college and chose to run the hotel business of his family. His family moved to Mumbai where they established a restaurant business. This is also where the hotel business of family begun. Shahid natural passion in business opened a wonderful partnership with Vinod Goenka from the DB Realty and DB Etisalat a known telecom outfit. From that time forward, the fortune of his earnings increased in the field of real estate, which placed him to one of self-made billionaires in the world.
7. Vinod Goenka
He is the partner of Shahid Balwa in the DB Realty, who is also included in this list of dropout billionaires. He became known in the real estate development, where he gets the abundance of his life, and the luxuries that he enjoys along with his family and kids. He is from Mumbai, but he chose to stop attending school and instead help his father in the small construction company that he owns. Through his efforts, this small company did expand and it has grown into a Dynamic Group that also handles dairy business. His partnership with Balwa’s Realty did boost their family’s business.
6. Gautam Adani
This is the 16th richest 50-year old billionaire from India and rank number 437 in Forbes list of Billionaires. He owns the Adani Group that focuses in coal trading, power generation, coal mining, gas distribution, oil & gas exploration, and multi-modal logistics. He has seven siblings, and the turn of events in his life took place when his family moved to Gujarat in order to find better livelihood. Within the short span of time, his father’s business has grown, but Gautam Adani moved to Mumbai, where he played his luck by opening an innings, where he humbly worked as a diamond sorter, then two years after he founded a diamond brokerage business with a trading set-up. In just a year, he earned a million, and this happened during the 80s. His successful path continued where he had other sorts of opportunities to expand and acquire businesses.
5. Michael Dell
Known to be the CEO and the very name behind Dell computers and laptops all over the world, Michael Dell has been named as the 41st richest person in the world. He even has a net worth of over $1.9 billion. Even before the days when the Dell name was famous in the computing world, he had already been selling upgrade kits being used for computers in his college days at the University of Texas in Austin, even though he is taking a pre-medical course. For someone taking up medical courses, he was even able to bag a deal of being a licensed vendor of computers, even if he did not have his own computer store. In May 1984, the Dell Computer Store was well on its way, making hundreds of thousands of dollars with PC upgrades, components, accessories, and more, with his schooling ended up hanging due to his business success.
4. Lawrence Ellison
Larry Ellison is the co-founder and current CEO of the worldwide enterprise software producer and networking solutions provider, Oracle Corporation. To date, he is the third richest man in the world, having a net worth of over $41 billion, already including his stocks ownership of the company. He lived a life of sorrow, being given away by his real mother to his aunt and uncle for adoption, when he was only nine months old, being sick with pneumonia. When he was in college, he was not able to finish his second year due to his adoptive mother’s death, not taking up his final exams during the said school year. During one summer after that event, he was able to attend the University of Chicago where he encountered computer design and began from there, focusing on his career instead of his education.
3. Steve Jobs
A celebrated innovator and genius, taking the name of Apple Inc to its prime state, Steven Paul “Steve” Jobs took the computer age in a revolution that became a benchmark of its many competitors where technologies like graphical user interfaces, the mouse, and even smartphones have been a staple in the computer world. He also became the co-founder of the famous animation studios, Pixar. It was during in his leadership in Apple that the names iMac, iPod, iPhone, the iPad, iTunes, The App Store, and even Apple Retail Stores came into light, all coming from his visionary ideals of pioneering a generation that changed the face of computing and mobile interaction forever. When he entered Reed College in Oregon, his parents Paul and Clara could not afford such expensive education. He decided to drop school due to such costs and he lived a life that depended on returning coke bottles for money, and eating free food in a temple. But who could even imagine that such a brilliant mind took toll of such challenges in life?
2. Mark Zuckerberg
The name of Mark Zuckerberg is now associated with the world-famous social networking site, Facebook, although there are five of them that first discovered the site in Harvard. He is actually the current CEO and chairman of Facebook Inc, and his personal net worth of over $9.4 billion. Being excited with the results of his programming in creating the Harvard-exclusive social network called HarvardConnection.com, he dropped out of class in his quest to perfect the existing codes, and develop the mainframe of the other program into a system that is exclusively his, with Facebook.
1. Bill Gates
Just like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates is also a student at Harvard University that decided to drop out of school in his desire to creating a company of his own, together with Paul Allen, knowing that their success was on the way with the successful release of the MITS Altair 8800, while working at Honeywell. The implementation of MITS only indicated that with the partnership in place, they could create their own systems and face the market with new offerings in mind. This was the time when Microsoft was created, with the promise of changing the face of computing for good. Due to his business, he was consistently named as one of the richest people in the world, even being the wealthiest for so many years since 1995.
