Valhalla Island

On face value my university degree seems and feels worthless. I’ve already learnt, have real world experience with and have a job doing what I’m being taught. The majority of my lecturers are simply graduates of my degree just a few years ahead and the content is outdated — “don’t use serif type on screen” used to be applicable but we’re now in an era where a device dedicated to reading sets type in a serif face. Anyway, I thought it’d be interesting to see how many of the world’s richest people are also university graduates, this is the top 20.

Disclaimer: The majority of this “research” is entirely taken from Wikipedia, trust it as much as you trust Wikipedia. Net worth is listed in US Dollars.

#	Name	Net Worth	Graduate	Institution	Notes
1	Warren Buffet	62 billion		Columbia University	Also attended the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Nebraska
2	Carlos Slim Helú	60 billion		National Autonomous University of Mexico
3	Bill Gates	58 billion			Attended Harvard but dropped out
4	Lakshmi Mittal	45 billion		St. Xavier’s College
5	Mukesh Ambani	43 billion		University of Mumbai	Also holds an MBA from Stanford Business School
6	Anil Ambani	42 billion		University of Mumbai	Also holds an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania
7	Ingvar Kamprad	31 billion
8	Kushal Pal Singh	30 billion		Meerut College	Also an alumnus of the Indian Military Academy
9	Oleg Deripaska	28 billion		M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University	Also holds an economics degree from Plekhanov Academy of Economics
10	Karl Albrecht	27 billion			Extremely limited information, from the information I could find, I’m guessing no
11	Li Ka-shing	26.5 billion			Left school at 15
12	Sheldon Adelson	26 billion
13	Bernard Arnault	25.5 billion		École Polytechnique
14	Lawrence Ellison	25 billion			Dropped out of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Chicago
15	Roman Abramovich	23.5 billion		Moscow State Law Academy	Earned by correspondence
16	Theo Albrecht	23 billion
17	Liliane Bettencourt	22.9 billion			Inherited L’Oréal from her father
18	Alexei Mordashov	21.2 billion		Leningrad Engineering-Economical Institute	Also holds an MBA from Northumbria University
19	Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud	21 billion		Menlo College	Also holds a Masters degree from Syracuse University and an honorary PhD from the University of Exeter
20	Mikhail Fridman	20.8 billion		Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys

12 out of 20 or 60% of the world’s richest people are university graduates. Just as you can’t conclude that the lack of a university degree guarantees you’ll be unsuccessful, you can’t conclude that having a degree guarantees success. It’s important to note that billions of dollars (or money at all) does not equate to success or happiness, it’s just the only thing we have available to measure.