This really is unexpected. Not because it is a secret amongst billionaires, but because it is completely wrong.
Firstly, the obvious things these people have in common is the founding of a company and an extraordinary business acumen. Why would you think dropping out of college is correlated with success?
Second, these men (and they’re all men) have very public images, very successful PR teams with very rehearsed spins on their respective stories to help them appeal to the public. Their journey was not as glamourous as it appears.
Third, all of the billionaires you selected went to college and later dropped out. If that says anything, it’s that universities are fertile ground for innovation, entrepreneurship and early stage support.
Fourth, going back to the fact that these men have very public images, this is the first result when you Google “Tech Billionaires” and it looks like you went through the list and selected the first 8 people that had dropped out of college.
Last of all, if you only take one message from this response, let this be clear:
A far greater proportion of college graduates go on to become billionaires than dropouts do!
And the overwhelming majority of millionaires are graduates too! This applies to tech and every other sector. It applies to self made and inherited wealth. It applies to men and women. There is just no way to skew this fact.
Even with all of your selection biases in place here are 18 self made male tech billionaires that did not drop out of college:
- Jeff Bezos (Princeton) — Founder of Amazon
- Larry Page (Stanford) — Founder of Google
- Sergey Brin (Stanford) — Founder of Google
- Patrick Collison (MIT) — Founder of Stripe
- John Collison (Harvard) — Founder of Stripe
- Chris Sacca (University at Buffalo) — Venture Capitalist
- Jack Ma (Hangzhou) — Founder of Alibaba
- Elon Musk (Wharton) — Founder of Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX
- Travis Kalanick (UCL) — Founder of Uber
- Marc Benioff (USC) — Founder of Salesforce
- Brian Acton (Stanford) — Founder of WhatsApp
- Reid Hoffman (Stanford) — Founder of PayPal, LinkedIn
- Brian Chesky (RISD) — Founder of Airbnb
- Joe Gebbia (RISD) — Founder of Airbnb
- Drew Houston (MIT) — President of Y Combinator
- Marc Andreessen (University of Illinois) — Founder of Netscape, Opsware, Andreessen Horowitz
- Ben Horowitz (UCLA)— Founder of Opsware, Andreessen Horowitz
- Even Peter Thiel, the most public detractor of universities, founder of PayPal and Clarium, went to Stanford.
I’m sorry, I appreciate the romaticism of your idea but the data is very clear that University is extremely conducive to success in life.
