Twenty One Billionaires Who Started With Nothing
Sheldon Adelson
Age: 77
"Sheldon Adelson grew up the son of a cab driver in Boston's rough Dorchester neighborhood. He started selling newspapers at the age of 12 and later dropped out of college to become a court reporter. According to The New York Times, Adelson sold toiletry kits to motels and tried mortgage brokering, then struck it rich when he founded Comdex, an annual computer trade show. He went on to build Las Vegas hotels around conventions, rather than casinos?not that he left the casinos out. At the end of 2006, The Times has estimated, Adelson's net worth had grown by about $1 million an hour for two straight years."
Carl Berg
Age: 73
"At the age of 10, Carl Berg's father died and his schoolteacher mother was left to raise him alone in rural New Mexico. To pay his way through college, Berg repaired vending machines at day and worked as a clerk at what Berg called "the best hotel in town" at night. Berg took the hotel job with the goal of meeting someone that would give him a job in investment banking. "My theory worked fine," Berg says and explained that he eventually approached a regular who turned out to be the largest home builder in the country. The man offered Berg a job in the local office. "I would call all the time and raise hell about way they were running the home office," Berg says. "When I got ready to graduate college, he said 'Berg, if you're ready, you can come run the mortgage company.'" Eventually, Berg used the skills he learned in the mortgage business to make a real estate fortune in Silicon Valley. From there, he branched out into venture capital, a business he continues today. "The way I'm approaching it is, I'm trying to give someone else the opportunity that I had," Berg says. "I do everything I can to make the company succeed." Today, Berg is chairman and chief executive of Cupertino (Calif.)-based Mission West Properties (MSW), a giant real estate investment trust."
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So, suffice to say that I really enjoy the truth.
