Richest self-made person (male)

The richest self-made man – defined as having a Forbes self-made score of 9 or 10 – is Larry Ellison (USA), co-founder and long-time CEO of the Oracle Corporation, an enterprise software company. As of 9 October 2024, Ellison had a Forbes-estimated net worth of $211.6 bn (£161.5 bn).

He founded the company that would become the Oracle Corporation in 1977 as "Software Development Laboratories". Its focus was – as it has remained throughout its history – on enterprise-scale database systems. Although Oracle has never been a household name like Microsoft or Apple, it has long been one of the largest and most profitable companies in Silicon Valley.

The Forbes self-made index sorts the extremely rich according to the degree to which they were responsible for their wealth. A person with a self-made score of 1 would be someone who inherited their wealth and has not worked to increase it. A person with a self-made score of 10 is someone who grew up in poverty and overcame significant obstacles while building their fortune. An example of a billionaire with a self-made score of 1 is Christy Walton, who inherited her $16.8-bn fortune from her late husband John Walton, who himself inherited it from his father, Walmart founder Sam Walton. On the opposite end of the scale is someone like Oprah Winfrey, who was born to a poor family in rural Mississippi and worked her way up through the entertainment business to build her own media empire.

The largest group within the Forbes 400 (a list of the 400 wealthiest people in the United States) are people with a self-made score of 8, who make up around 36 percent of the people on the list. A score of 8 means that a person generated their wealth through their own business ventures, but came from a prosperous upper-middle-class family. Their family's resources supported their early entrepreneurial ventures, either financially or through business connections. A typical example of a person in this category is Bill Gates, whose parents were a prominent corporate lawyer and a banking executive, whose connections in the business world were able to get Microsoft introductions to important clients.