The Most Successful College Dropouts In History

Successful Entrepreneurs Who Were High School or College Dropouts

To celebrate us college dropouts I thought I would compile a list some of the top entrepreneurs who dropped out of college and then went on to make it big in the business world!

Top 30 College Drop Outs Who Made It Big In Business

Rank	Name	Business	Dropped Out At	Age	Networth
1	Henry Ford	Ford Motor Company	16	Dead	$188 Billion (in 2009 dollars)
2	Bill Gates	Microsoft	19	53	$76 Billion
3	Larry Ellison	Oracle	20	64	$48 Billion
4	Sheldon Adelson	Las Vegas Sands Corp.	19	77	$32 Billion
5	Larry Page	Google	Graduated University of Michigan	35	$31.2 Billion
6	Kirk Kerkorian	Tracinda	12	91	$4.5 Billion
7	Michael Dell	Dell	19	43	$17.5 Billion
8	Paul Allen	Microsoft	20	56	$15.9 Billion
9	David Geffen	Geffen Records	21	65	$6.1 Billion
10	Steve Jobs	Apple	18	53	$10.2 Billion
11	Richard Branson	Virgin	16	58	$5 Billion
12	Takafumi Horie	Livedoor	22	35	$3.6 Billion
13	Ralph Lauren	Ralph Lauren	20	69	$7.5 Billion
14	Subhash Chandra Goel	Zee TV	12	58	$3.5 Billion
15	Jerry Yang	Yahoo	Graduated Stanford	40	$2.1 Billion
16	Mark Zuckerberg	Facebook	19	23	$28.5 Million
17	Russell Simmons	DefJam	19	52	$340 Million
18	Matt Mullenweg	WordPress	18	25	$200 Million
19	Mahesh Murthy	Pinstorm & SeedFund	19	43	$200 Million
20	Jawed Karim	YouTube	21	30	$64 Million
21	Kevin Rose	Digg	21	31	$60 Million
22	Jared Isaacman	United Bank Card	17	26	$50 Million
23	Kevin Sproles	Volusion	18	26	$17 Million
24	Shawn Fanning	Napster	19	28	$7.5 Million
25	Scott Wainner	ResellerRatings	20	26	$7 Million
26	Rob Benwell	Blogging To The Bank	18	23	$5 Million
27	Graham Langdon	Entrecard	19	21	$3.2 Million
28	Kristopher Tate	Zooomr	17	20	$3 Million
29	Aaron Levie	Box.Net	20	23	$3 Million
30	Reed Caldwell	ServInt	19	32	$2.5 Million

An Inspiring List Of Entrepreneurs

Interesting and inspiring selection I think you will agree. Not all are complete dropouts – some actually have pretty impressive academic achievements to their name but alas the call of their Entrepreneurial Ventures took them to leave those studies and instead go on to create considerable wealth plus businesses that in some case have touched Billions of people.
Take for example Jerry Yang of Yahoo, who created Yahoo as a graduate student at Stanford University to monitor his personal interests in the early days of the Web. Yang’s official biography even contains the standing joke that he is “currently on a leave of absence from Stanford’s electrical engineering Ph.D. program,”
And there is of course Larry Page of Google – another Stanford doctoral program dropout.
One entrepreneur who in particular impressed me was Michael Dell – who started a computer company called PCs Limited while attending the University of Texas in Austin. It became so successful that Dell dropped out of school to operate it, and the company eventually became Dell, Inc, with revenues of $57.4 billion in 2007. In 2006, Dell and his wife gave a $50 million grant to the University which he attended but never graduated from.
One remarkable fact I noted when compiling this list, was the number of businesses that started of in a garage. Take for example the HP corporation which started life in a tiny 12×18 foot garage. And then there is also Google and Apple who started life in a garage.

And the Most Notable Young Entrepreneurs Of Recent Times?

Well it is Mark Zuckerberg of course.
Facebook Founder, Mark Zuckerberg has an estimated net worth of $28.5 billion and believed by some to be the wealthiest man younger than 25 in the USA. Mark Zuckerberg, like Bill Gates, is a Harvard dropout.
After launching Facebook school-wide from his dorm room at Harvard in February 2004, Zuckerberg began devoting more and more time to his program, gradually spreading it to other schools. By that summer, Zuckerberg and his roommate Dustin Moskovitz had released Facebook to nearly 30 schools, and the website was growing too popular to be run part-time.