00:00 The vast majority of US billionaires are either founders who started companies or heirs who
00:05 mostly lucked into their fortunes, but a tiny subset got hired into jobs that catapulted
00:10 them into the ranks of the world's wealthiest.
00:16 Hi everyone, I'm Rosemary Miller here with Keri Dolan, an assistant managing editor here
00:21 at Forbes.
00:22 Thank you so much for joining me today, Keri.
00:25 Thank you, Rosemary.
00:27 Absolutely.
00:28 So Keri, what is a hired hand billionaire and how many did Forbes' reporting find?
00:35 By hired hand, what we mean is someone who was not a founder or co-founder of a company
00:40 and did not inherit their wealth.
00:44 And so this would be somebody who got hired at a company, sometimes as a junior employee,
00:50 sometimes even as a CEO, usually got equity in the company and by equity I mean a stake,
01:00 shares of stock in the company, and that equity has grown to make them worth a billion dollars
01:06 or more.
01:07 Oh, wow.
01:08 We found just 26 hired hand billionaires in the United States out of about 760 American
01:15 billionaires.
01:17 So how many, about what percent of the Forbes billionaires list are founders and what percent
01:23 are heirs?
01:24 Yeah, so it's almost 70%, 69% are founders or co-founders, entrepreneurs of some sort
01:31 and another 27% are heirs.
01:34 And in that 20% or 7% of heirs, there are some who are not just sitting home or hanging
01:41 out on their yachts.
01:42 There are people who actually are running businesses that maybe they inherited or they're
01:45 starting new businesses with money that they inherited.
01:49 But it's so it's basically about 3% of all US billionaires are hired hand billionaires.
01:56 Wow.
01:57 So what industries do these billionaires work in?
02:00 Most of them are in tech.
02:02 Some are in finance, including private equity.
02:05 Companies that have helped some of these people become billionaires include Google, Facebook
02:12 and private equity firms like KKR and Silver Lake.
02:16 So who is the richest hired hand billionaire?
02:21 Steve Ballmer.
02:23 So Steve met Bill Gates at Harvard before Bill dropped out of Harvard.
02:28 He joined Microsoft as employee number 40 and he ran the company as CEO from 2000 to
02:37 2014.
02:39 And he's sort of since left Microsoft and bought the LA Clippers basketball team and
02:44 is a very active philanthropist.
02:48 Steve Ballmer is worth $120 billion at last count and makes him one of the 10 richest
02:53 people in the world.
02:56 And who are a few well-known billionaires who are hired hands?
03:00 Yeah, there's a bunch.
03:02 Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Eric Schmidt, the former
03:10 CEO of Google and former chairman of Google, Lloyd Blankfein, the former CEO of Goldman
03:16 Sachs, to name a few.
03:18 And how many women made this list?
03:20 And is there anyone our audience would actually know of?
03:23 Yeah, five women made this list of 26 hired hand billionaires.
03:29 And I think I'd say, depending how closely you follow business, I'd say they're all fairly
03:34 familiar names, maybe some more than others.
03:36 Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Facebook, now Meta.
03:41 She joined when Facebook was a much, much smaller company and got equity along the way.
03:46 Lisa Su, the CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, AMD, the semiconductor firm.
03:52 She became CEO in 2014.
03:55 Meg Whitman, who was the CEO of eBay.
03:58 She joined eBay when it was tiny and really helped it grow.
04:01 And that's really where her fortune comes from.
04:03 She later went on to be the CEO of Hewlett Packard.
04:06 Safra Katz, the CEO of Oracle Software Company.
04:10 And the last, Jayshree Ullal, the CEO of Arista Networks, which is a networking company.
04:15 Well, Carrie, is there anything interesting that stood out to you while you were compiling
04:20 this list?
04:21 Yeah, I mean, to me, it's just, it's kind of really amazing that these people can get
04:30 a fortune of a billion dollars not being a founder.
04:34 Because as we talked about, nearly 70% of the folks who are billionaires in the United
04:41 States are founders or co-founders of a company.
04:44 So to be able to get in the door at a company and get enough stock in the company that you
04:51 could then turn that stock into a billion dollar fortune.
04:54 You know, and most of these people are also selling it along the way, so they're not having
04:58 their whole nest egg in, let's say, Sheryl Sandberg doesn't have 100% Facebook stock
05:03 in her portfolio.
05:06 But it's really quite a rare thing.
05:09 And I've known this over the years, editing the billionaires list as I have in the past,
05:15 about this class of people, but we've never really taken the time to add up how many people
05:20 were hired hand billionaires.
05:21 So it was a really interesting exercise.
05:22 Well, thank you so much for joining me today.
05:26 Thanks for having me.
05:27 Absolutely.
05:28 Thank you.
05:29 [END]
Comments