Think of a typical billionaire and it's likely to be someone who falls into one of two camps: founders or cofounders-like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos-or heirs, like Jacqueline Mars, granddaughter of the founder of candy company Mars, maker of M&Ms and Snickers bars; and Thomas Pritzker, whose predecessors founded the Hyatt Hotels chain he runs as CEO.
Roughly 69% of the nearly 760 U.S. billionaires listed by Forbes fall into the first category, while just more than 27% inherited a great fortune. Altogether nearly 97% of American billionaires land in these two groups.
A third category is the rarest: those who are neither founders nor heirs. Call them hired-hand billionaires-or corporate-ladder billionaires. Forbes has found just 26 people who were hired as executives-sometimes as junior employees, sometimes as CEOs-who became billionaires. These ultra-wealthy executives work or worked at just 20 companies, nearly all of which are technology or private equity firms. Among the more notable are Apple CEO Tim Cook, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Jonathan Gray, who was hired at Blackstone in 1992 fresh out of college and was named the firm's president and Chief Operating Officer in 2018.
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