20 Self-Made Millionaires From History Who Started With Almost Nothing

Thomas Edison was in school for only three months when a teacher told his mother he was “addled.” At twelve, he sold newspapers on the railroad to support chemistry experiments in his basement. He eventually opened a research laboratory in Menlo Park, invented the phonograph, and created a commercially viable light bulb. It’s said that he lost his hearing because a conductor slapped him on the ear. Medically speaking, historians attribute his deafness to a bout of scarlet fever during childhood, which left him susceptible to mastoiditis, an infection of the bones behind the ear. He died in 1931, worth more than $12 million.

After his father, a traveling fraud, abandoned the family, John D. Rockefeller was brought up largely by his mother. When he was 16, Rockefeller secured a clerical position in Cleveland that paid him $50 for the first three months, or about fifty cents a day. In 1870, he co-founded Standard Oil, which at one point controlled more than 90 percent of US oil refining. Following the government-ordered breakup of Standard Oil, his shares in the newly independent companies soared in value, and by October 1916 he was the first documented nominal billionaire.

At sixteen, Henry Ford walked away from his family farm in Michigan to become an apprentice machinist in Detroit, earning just $2.50 a week, less than his room and board cost him, and making up the difference by repairing clocks at night. So his first job was technically costing him money. His first two companies went bust before he founded Ford Motor Company in 1903. He didn’t invent the car or the assembly line. But in 1913, he perfected the moving assembly line for cars, cutting costs enough to sell to nearly everyone.

Coco Chanel was born in a poorhouse hospice in France in 1883. When her mother died and her father deserted her, she was sent at age 11 to live in an Augustinian convent orphanage, where she learned to sew from the nuns. Later, she would tell people that she had actually lived with wealthy aunts, a tale that was not true. She ended up working in a Paris hat shop in 1910, then created Chanel No. 5 in 1921.

Born in a one-room weaver’s cottage in Scotland, Andrew Carnegie emigrated to Pennsylvania as a boy. He started work at a cotton mill at age twelve for $1.20 a week, working as a bobbin boy, changing the spools of thread on the machinery. He later taught himself telegraphy and moved into iron, oil, and rail. In 1901, he sold Carnegie Steel to financier J.P. Morgan for $480 million and made $225 to $250 million personally. He spent his later years giving much of it away.

Orphaned by age seven, married and widowed by twenty, Sarah Breedlove earned $1.50 per day as a washerwoman. And when a scalp disease stripped her of her hair, she formulated her own products, took the name Madam C.J. Walker, and enlisted thousands of Black women as door-to-door salespeople. When she died in 1919, her estate was valued at between $600,000 and $700,000, representing tens of millions of dollars in today’s money. Many assumed she’d invented the hot comb. And yet she hadn’t. What she had done, instead, was create the ultimate sales machine.

After being forced to leave school in the 10th grade to work in the Alabama coal mines for $3.10 a day, A.G. Gaston, the grandson of enslaved people, saw widows of deceased miners scraping together money to pay for funerals. In response, he established a Black-run burial insurance company in 1923 that eventually led to the creation of banks and other businesses, and made him a multi-millionaire by the 1950s. During the 1963 Birmingham campaign, a major civil rights campaign against segregation in the city, he promised $160,000 in bail to free hundreds of demonstrators arrested during the protests, including Martin Luther King Jr.

Cornelius Vanderbilt was raised in poverty by his nearly illiterate parents in Staten Island. Having dropped out of school at eleven, Vanderbilt, according to family legend, borrowed $100 from his mother at sixteen to buy a sailboat, paying her back by plowing an eight-acre field before starting a ferry business, though an 1853 magazine profile suggests the boat may have actually belonged to his father. So even one of America’s most famous rags-to-riches origin stories comes with an asterisk. The entrepreneur would eventually expand into steamships and the New York Central Railroad. Upon his death in 1877, Vanderbilt would be worth roughly $100 million.

A.P. Giannini was the son of Italian immigrants whose father was killed over a $1 debt. He left school at 13 to make money growing and selling produce. In 1904, he set up the Bank of Italy to help the poor, working-class immigrants that the big banks ignored. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake trapped other banks’ funds in vaults left too hot to open by fires from the rubble, Giannini carried his own money out of the bank in a produce wagon and handed out loans from a plank table set up on the wharf. That’s about as far from modern online banking as you can get.

Lazar Meir, aka Louis B. Mayer, was forced to flee Russia with his family during a wave of anti-Jewish pogroms (violent attacks on Jewish communities) in the Russian Empire. He dropped out of school at age 12 to work collecting junk metal. He bought a failing theater in Massachusetts in 1907 and built it into a theater company, then used its profit to launch a film production company. In 1924, he merged that company into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Even though he was the studio boss, he never directed any films himself, leaving that up to filmmakers and production executives like Irving Thalberg. Mayer became the first American executive known to earn more than $1 million per year in 1937.

Son of a poor, alcoholic German butcher, John Jacob Astor arrived in Baltimore in 1783 with less than $25 and seven flutes to sell. Seven flutes is an oddly specific amount of startup capital, but it worked. He bought up raw furs at a discount, then turned the American Fur Company into a monopoly, reinvesting the profits in Manhattan real estate. By the time of his death in 1848, his estate of about $20 million made him the richest man in the country.

In 1896, Helena Rubinstein escaped an arranged marriage in Kraków and fled to Australia with no money and no English. She turned a lanolin-based face cream she’d modified into a global cosmetics empire of her own, with salons around the world. When she sold her US business to investment bank Lehman Brothers in 1928, she received $7.3 million for the deal. But when the stock market crash of 1929 sent the value tumbling, she bought back the same shares for less than a million dollars. Sell high, buy low, and in this case, buy your own company back.

The son of a destitute German Jewish peddler, Julius Rosenwald quit high school at 16 to serve an apprenticeship in tailoring. In 1895 he borrowed $75,000 to buy into Sears, Roebuck, a mail order company founded by a man named Richard Sears, and reorganized its disordered production process and unmanageable customer service system, turning the company into an empire valued at several hundred million dollars. Then he built 5,357 schools for Black students in 15 Southern states under Jim Crow, the system of racial segregation enforced across much of the American South.

James Cash Penney was the son of a poor farmer and unpaid minister. At eight years old, his dad ordered him to buy his own clothes. In 1895, he clerked for $2.27 a month in a dry-goods store selling clothing and household textiles. By 1902, he had opened “The Golden Rule Store” in Kemmerer, Wyoming. He sold goods at fixed cash prices, without credit or haggling as usual, and later turned that formula into 1,000 J.C. Penney stores. “Cash” was his real middle name. Some people really do arrive pre-branded.

Annie Turnbo Malone was born the 10th of 11 children to parents who had been enslaved. Both died while she was a child, and she grew up in the care of her elder sister. She created hair products for Black women and established Poro College in 1918. Her sales-agent network briefly included Sarah Breedlove, the woman introduced earlier, who later married Charles Joseph Walker and became known as Madam C.J. Walker. In 1924, she reported a net worth of $14 million. She is regarded as one of the wealthiest self-made women of the period.

Stephen Girard, blind in one eye from infancy and abused as a child, became a cabin boy at age 14. After being left stranded and penniless in Philadelphia when the British blockaded the port in 1776, he created a shipping empire and started his own bank. In 1813, when the U.S. Treasury was almost bankrupt, Girard personally covered more than 80% of a $10 million government loan that nobody else had bought. That contribution alone accounted for nearly half of the full $16 million loan raised to finance the War of 1812. When he died in 1831, his estate was valued at $7.5 million.

George Eastman’s father died when George was only seven. The family struggled financially, and at age 14, George left school to work in an insurance company, then a bank, while his mother took in boarders to help support them. At night, Eastman experimented with chemicals at home, developing photographic equipment while he earned just $3 a week. His after-work hobby was literally developing into a business. In 1888, he invented paper-backed roll film and created Eastman Kodak, eventually becoming a man worth more than $100 million.

Frank Woolworth was born on a struggling potato farm in New York State and apprenticed as a dry-goods clerk, working for free for three months in order to understand the business. He tried opening a five-cent store in Utica, NY, which failed after a few months. The second time was the charm, with his Lancaster, PA, five-and-dime in 1879, which he expanded into a chain of more than 1,000 locations. He spent $13.5 million to construct the Woolworth Building skyscraper in 1913, paying all cash. No mortgage required.

Elizabeth Arden, whose real name was Florence Nightingale Graham, was the daughter of poor Canadian tenant farmers. She came to New York with nothing in 1908. In 1910, she opened her Fifth Avenue “Red Door” salon, introduced more scientific methods of applying cosmetics, and created one of the most famous luxury businesses in the world. For decades, she and Helena Rubinstein, the other great cosmetics maker, competed. By her death in 1966, her fortune was estimated at $60 million.

After dropping out of school in fourth grade and being raised by an unstable father in poverty, Milton Hershey went bankrupt in Philadelphia in 1882 and once more in New York in 1886, until he succeeded with the Lancaster Caramel Company (which he sold for $1 million in 1900). After that, he developed a method of producing milk chocolate on a mass scale and established the Hershey Chocolate Corporation. In 1918, he gave his entire controlling stock interest to a trust dedicated to an orphanage he had helped found.

This content was created with the help of AI.