The 26 Greatest Self-Made Americans of All Time

No inheritance, no connections, no head start worth mentioning. Every one of them built it.

1. 1
   Benjamin Franklin

   Tenth son of a candlemaker, apprenticed at twelve, and the man who wrote the template for the American success story.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Dolly Parton

   One of twelve children in a one-room Tennessee cabin, now a songwriting institution.
   882pts
3. 3
   Jan Koum

   Arrived from Ukraine at sixteen, lived on food stamps with his mother, and co-founded WhatsApp, sold to Facebook for $19 billion in 2014.
   882pts
4. 4
   Milton S. Hershey

   Left school after the fourth grade, went broke with candy shops in Philadelphia and New York, then built Hershey's chocolate and a town around it.
   852pts
5. 5
   Booker T. Washington

   Born into slavery, walked hundreds of miles to school, and founded Tuskegee.
   727pts
6. 6
   Oprah Winfrey

   Raised in rural Mississippi poverty and built a media company from a talk show.
   713pts
7. 7
   Andrew Carnegie

   Arrived from Scotland at thirteen, worked in a cotton mill, then built the steel industry.
   713pts
8. 8
   Alexander Hamilton

   Orphaned clerk from the Caribbean island of Nevis who reached New York on money raised by locals and became the first Secretary of the Treasury.
   713pts
9. 9
   Jay-Z

   Grew up in Brooklyn's Marcy Houses, started his own label when no major would sign him, and became hip-hop's first billionaire.
   713pts
10. 10
    Henry Ford

    Farm boy and machine-shop apprentice who put the country on wheels.
    713pts
11. 11
    Steve Jobs

    Adopted son of a machinist who dropped out of college and co-founded Apple in a garage.
    629pts
12. 12
    Thomas Edison

    Newspaper boy on the railroad with three months of school who ended up with over a thousand patents.
    629pts
13. 13
    Walt Disney

    Went bankrupt in Kansas City before building the studio and the parks.
    629pts
14. 14
    Cornelius Vanderbilt

    Left school at eleven to ferry passengers across New York Harbor and built the steamship and railroad empire that made him America's richest man.
    629pts
15. 15
    Colonel Sanders

    Drifted through dozens of jobs, then at sixty-two began franchising the fried chicken recipe from his Kentucky roadside cafe into KFC.
    629pts
16. 16
    Estée Lauder

    Daughter of immigrant shopkeepers in Queens who sold her uncle's skin creams in beauty salons and built one of the world's largest cosmetics companies.
    629pts
17. 17
    John D. Rockefeller

    Bookkeeper's clerk at sixteen who assembled Standard Oil out of a single refinery.
    533pts
18. 18
    Madam C.J. Walker

    Daughter of enslaved parents who built a hair-care business and became a self-made millionaire.
    533pts
19. 19
    Frederick Douglass

    Taught himself to read while enslaved and became the country's foremost orator.
    533pts
20. 20
    Levi Strauss

    Bavarian immigrant who sold dry goods to Gold Rush miners in San Francisco and patented riveted blue jeans with Jacob Davis in 1873.
    533pts
21. 21
    Abraham Lincoln

    Born in a Kentucky log cabin with about a year of formal schooling in total.
    420pts
22. 22
    Larry Ellison

    Adopted as a baby and twice a college dropout, he co-founded Oracle in 1977 and built it into the database giant behind corporate computing.
    420pts
23. 23
    Ralph Lauren

    Son of immigrants in the Bronx who started out selling neckties and built Polo Ralph Lauren into a global fashion house.
    420pts
24. 24
    Howard Schultz

    Grew up in Brooklyn public housing, was the first in his family to go to college, and turned Starbucks into a global coffeehouse chain.
    286pts
25. 25
    Sam Walton

    Ran one variety store in Arkansas before turning it into the largest retailer on earth.
    286pts
26. 26
    George Washington Carver

    Born into slavery in Missouri, he worked his way through school and became the Tuskegee scientist whose crop research remade Southern farming.
    0pts

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