Elon Musk
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks at an event in Hawthorne, California April 30, 2015. Photo by Reuters |
With a net worth of $342 billion, Elon Musk is the richest individual on Forbes’ World’s Billionaires List this year.
The cofounder of seven companies, including electric car producer Tesla and spacecraft maker SpaceX, started his education at Queen’s University, Canada, before shifting to the University of Pennsylvania, one of eight Ivy League institutions, where he studied business and physics.
He later enrolled at Stanford University for a PhD in energy physics.
University of Pennsylvania was ranked at the 11th place in the QS World University Rankings 2025, while Stanford University was placed at the 6th position.
Musk, however, has expressed an unconventional view on higher education, saying that a college degree is “overrated,” according to one of his posts on social media platform X last year.
“I think the value of a college education is somewhat overweighted. Too many people spend four years, accumulate a ton of debt and often don’t have useful skills that they can apply afterwards.”
The billionaire added that he had much respect for labor workers, saying that a four-year college degree is not a prerequisite for a successful career.
Mark Zuckerberg
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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg speaks in San Jose, California, U.S., April 18, 2017. Photo by Reuters |
The second richest man in the world, Mark Zuckerberg, is known to be a drop-out of the esteemed Harvard University, an Ivy League school which was placed fourth in the QS World University Rankings 2025.
Zuckerberg started his classes at Harvard in 2002 with a focus on psychology and computer science. Personal projects at the school helped lay the ground for what would later become social media behemoth Facebook.
Speaking about the role of a college education, Zuckerberg has attributed his success to the personal connections he made on campus.
Who you spend time with in college is “the most important decision” you could make on campus, he said in an interview in 2022. The Facebook founder then added that “you become the people you surround yourself with.”
Jeff Bezos
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Jeff Bezos, president and CEO of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, speaks at the Economic Club of Washington DC’s “Milestone Celebration Dinner” in Washington, U.S., September 13, 2018. Photo by Reuters |
In the third place of the global billionaire list is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos with a net worth of $215 billion.
He earned degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from from Ivy League’s Princeton University, which is ranked 22nd in the world.
Before Jeff Bezos started selling books online, he studied physics at Princeton University in the 1980s.
Although he ranked among the top 25 students in his honors program, Bezos felt he lacked the brilliance to excel in physics. Consequently, he switched his major to electrical engineering and computer science, a decision that profoundly shaped his future.
“I looked around the room and it was clear to me that there were three people in the class who were much, much better at [physics] than I was, and it was much, much easier for them,” Bezos told Wired in 1999.
He decided to take another approach with a focus on starting his own business and in 1995 launched Amazon as an online bookseller. The company now has a market value of $1.78 trillion.
Larry Ellison
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Co-founder and Chief Executive of Oracle Corporation, Larry Ellison introduces the company’s latest SPARC servers at Oracle Conference Center in Redwood Shores, California March 26, 2013. Photo by Reuters |
Co-founder and Chief Executive of Oracle Corporation, Larry Ellison introduces the company’s latest SPARC servers at Oracle Conference Center in Redwood Shores, California March 26, 2013.
The chairman of software giant Oracle, Larry Ellison, is the fourth richest person in the world with a wealth of $192 billion.
The billionaire attended the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois but quit both institutions before completing his degree.
While many people close to Ellison urged him to become a doctor, he could not force himself to study something that did not interest him, which was the reason for the dropout, he told college students in a speech in 2016.
During his 20s, he was constantly exploring new ventures and frequently switching jobs. This experimentation led him to co-develop a groundbreaking database, hailed as a pivotal technology at the start of the information era.
He co-founded Oracle and transformed it into one of the globe’s leading tech giants.
“Every day I learned something new and interesting – something I did not know the day before – I liked that,” he said.
“I had found a place in the world,” he said, noting that his family finally forgave him for not finishing medical school, and no one ever accused him of lacking ambition again.
Bernard Arnault
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LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault attends the Viva Technology conference in Paris, France, June 15, 2017. Photo by Reuters |
With a net worth of $178 billion, French billionaire Bernard Arnault is the chairman and CEO of luxury fashion giant LVMH Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy and oversees an empire of 75 fashion and cosmetics brands.
He graduated with a bachelor of arts and science from École Polytechnique de Paris, the 34th university in the world.
Arnault values the experiences of his higher education.
“My studies at École Polytechnique have given me an analytical and synthesis capacity,” he said in a talk at the school in 2017, adding that the education allowed him to analyze any challenges he faced in a factual and detailed way.
