Samuel Moore Walton was born on March 29, 1918, in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, and grew up during the Great Depression in a family that scraped by as his father worked in farm-loan and mortgage finance, work that sometimes meant repossessing farms from families who could not pay. From boyhood Sam contributed to the household, milking the family cow and bottling the surplus to sell, delivering newspapers on multiple routes, and selling magazine subscriptions — habits of thrift and hustle that never left him. He worked his way through the University of Missouri and, after graduating with an economics degree in 1940, took a job as a management trainee with the retailer J.C. Penney at $75 a month, where he first absorbed the discipline of running a store.
After Army service during World War II, Walton borrowed money — including a $20,000 loan from his father-in-law — and in 1945 bought a single Ben Franklin variety-store franchise in Newport, Arkansas. He turned it into the top-performing store in its region by relentlessly cutting prices, buying cleverly, and obsessing over what made customers come back. When his landlord refused to renew the lease and effectively forced him out, Walton started over in 1950 in the small town of Bentonville, Arkansas, opening Walton’s 5&10 and building a chain of variety stores across the rural mid-South.
Walton’s real insight was that big discount stores could thrive in the small towns that established retailers ignored. On July 2, 1962, at age 44, he opened the first Walmart Discount City in Rogers, Arkansas. The formula — everyday low prices, high volume, thin margins, and ruthless control of costs and distribution — spread store by store across the region and then the country. Wal-Mart Stores was incorporated in 1969 and went public in 1970, and the proceeds and rising stock funded explosive expansion.
By the 1980s Walmart was one of the fastest-growing companies in America, and from 1982 to 1988 Forbes named Sam Walton the richest person in the country. He kept living relatively plainly — driving an old pickup, working the stores, leading employee cheers — until he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in March 1992 and died of cancer weeks later, on April 5, 1992. Through the company stock he had carefully kept in family hands, his heirs became the richest family in America; but Sam’s own story is the one that began with a Depression childhood and a single franchised five-and-dime.
Aristotle Socrates Onassis was born on January 20, 1906, into the prosperous Greek community of Smyrna (modern İzmir), then a cosmopolitan Ottoman port. That world was annihilated in September 1922, when Turkish forces retook the city at the close of the Greco-Turkish War and the Greek and Armenian quarters burned in what Greeks remember as the Catastrophe of Smyrna. The Onassis family’s businesses and property were lost, his father was imprisoned, and several relatives — three uncles, an aunt, her husband, and their daughter — died in a church fire at Akhisar. Barely sixteen, Aristotle escaped, and in 1923 he sailed to Argentina on a Nansen passport with only about $250 to his name.
In Buenos Aires he took a night job as a telephone operator with the British United River Plate Telephone Company, using the lines to sharpen his English and absorb how business was done, while studying commerce on the side. He then built an import business in Oriental (Turkish-style) tobacco, reportedly earning around $100,000 in commissions within a couple of years and taking Argentine citizenship in 1929. The tobacco trade made his first real money and taught him how goods moved across oceans. In the depths of the Great Depression he made the move that defined him: in 1932 he bought six idle Canadian National freighters for roughly $20,000 each — a fraction of their value — gambling that shipping would recover. It did.
From that counter-cyclical bet Onassis built one of the largest privately held shipping fleets in the world, eventually exceeding seventy vessels. He was an early and aggressive builder of oil tankers — his Ariston, delivered in 1938, was the largest tanker afloat — and then of the giant ‘supertankers’ that carried Middle Eastern crude to a booming postwar West. He ran a whaling fleet, founded the national airline Olympic Airways in 1957, and for a time controlled the company that operated Monte Carlo’s casino and resorts. By the 1950s and 1960s he was routinely described as the world’s richest shipowner.
Onassis became as famous for his life as for his fleet — his private Aegean island of Skorpios, his yacht the Christina, his long affair with the opera star Maria Callas, and his 1968 marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy, widow of the assassinated U.S. president. The glamour sat atop genuine self-invention: a stateless teenage refugee who arrived with a couple of hundred dollars and died in 1975 with an estate valued at over $500 million. The end was shadowed by grief — the 1973 death of his only son, Alexander, in a plane crash broke him — and his empire did not long survive him intact.
Josephine Esther Mentzer was born on July 1, 1908, above the family’s life in working-class Corona, Queens, the daughter of Hungarian and Czech Jewish immigrants who ran a hardware store and feed business. There was no money for luxury and no inherited fortune; what she absorbed instead was the daily grind of retail — minding the counter, learning what made customers buy, and discovering that she loved selling. The decisive influence of her girlhood was her uncle, John Schotz, a chemist who came to live with the family and concocted skin creams in a makeshift lab. The teenager became his apprentice, learning to make and, more importantly, to demonstrate the creams she would one day sell as her own.
For years she sold those creams the hard way — face to face, in beauty salons and hair parlors, applying them to women’s skin while she talked. That tactile, demonstrate-and-touch method became the seed of a marketing philosophy that would reshape an industry. In 1946 she and her husband, Joseph Lauter — they had adjusted the spelling to Lauder — formally founded Estée Lauder Cosmetics with a handful of products, mixing them in a former restaurant kitchen. Two years later she talked her way into a landmark order from Saks Fifth Avenue, and the modern company was born.
From that beginning Lauder built one of the largest and most profitable cosmetics companies in the world, kept tightly under family control until it went public in 1995. She pioneered the free-sample and ‘gift with purchase’ techniques now universal in the industry, launched the blockbuster fragrance Youth Dew in 1953, and added brands including Aramis and the dermatologist-positioned Clinique. By the time she died in 2004 her name fronted a global empire, and she was the only woman named to Time magazine’s 1998 list of the twenty most influential business geniuses of the twentieth century.
Hers is a rise from genuine immigrant modesty to vast fortune built almost entirely on salesmanship, persistence, and an instinct for how women wished to feel — a fortune made one demonstration, one sample, one counter at a time.
Ray Kroc was born on October 5, 1902, in Oak Park, Illinois, the son of a Western Union telegraph clerk of Czech descent. He left school early, lied about his age to drive a Red Cross ambulance in the First World War, and then spent more than three decades as a working salesman — playing piano in nightclubs and on the radio, selling paper cups for the Lily-Tulip Cup Company, and finally hawking a five-spindle milkshake machine called the Prince Castle Multimixer. By the early 1950s he was past fifty, in uncertain health, and far from rich.
In 1954 the route of a salesman who would not quit carried Kroc to San Bernardino, California, where two brothers — Richard (‘Dick’) and Maurice (‘Mac’) McDonald — were running a single hamburger stand that had ordered an improbable eight of his Multimixers. What he found there was not just a busy drive-in but a system: the brothers had stripped the menu, mechanized the kitchen, and built what they called the Speedee Service System, a method that turned out fifteen-cent hamburgers with assembly-line speed. Kroc, then 52, saw what the brothers had not fully exploited — that the system itself could be copied across the country.
Kroc did not invent McDonald’s. He bought the right to franchise it, opened his own first outlet in Des Plaines, Illinois, on April 15, 1955, and over the next quarter-century built the McDonald’s Corporation into the largest restaurant company in the world. His genius lay in standardization, relentless quality control, and — through his finance man Harry Sonneborn — a real-estate model that made the company a landlord as much as a hamburger seller. It was a rise from middling, near-broke obscurity to a fortune of several hundred million dollars, achieved almost entirely after the age of fifty.
It was also a hard-edged story, and an honest account has to say so. In 1961 Kroc bought out the McDonald brothers for $2.7 million, taking outright the name, the system, and the Speedee idea they had built. A handshake side-agreement for a continuing royalty was never written into the contract, and the brothers maintained for the rest of their lives that they never received it. Kroc then opened a company McDonald’s near the brothers’ own remaining restaurant — which, having lost the rights to their own surname, they were forced to rename — and competed it into the ground. The empire was genuinely self-made; it was built, in part, on the men whose name it carries.
Li Ka-shing was born on July 29, 1928, in Chaozhou (Chiu Chow), in Guangdong province in southern China, into a family of schoolteachers of modest means. When Japan invaded, the family fled as refugees to Hong Kong around 1940, arriving with little. His father, a teacher, contracted tuberculosis and died a few years later, and Li — the eldest son, still a boy of about fifteen — left school to support his mother and younger siblings, taking work in a plastics trading firm where he rose quickly from menial labor to salesman.
In 1950, at about twenty-two, Li used his savings and borrowed money to start his own small manufacturer, which he named Cheung Kong (Yangtze River) Industries. The firm’s breakthrough was plastic flowers, cheap and lifelike imitations he learned to make after studying Italian techniques; they became a hit in the postwar West, and the export profits gave Li his first real capital. From that foundation he made the pivot that built the fortune: he poured manufacturing profits into Hong Kong real estate, buying property and land when prices were depressed — including during the unrest of the late 1960s — and holding for the long rise that followed.
Cheung Kong Holdings went public in 1972, and in 1979 Li made the move that announced him as a major force: he acquired control of Hutchison Whampoa, one of the great British-run trading houses, or ‘hongs,’ becoming the first ethnic Chinese to take over such a colonial-era conglomerate. Over the following decades he expanded across ports, retail, telecommunications, energy, and utilities on several continents, earning the nickname ‘Superman’ for his deal-making. He became, for years running, the richest man in Asia, with a fortune Forbes has placed in the tens of billions of dollars.
Li is a living person, and the public record of his rise is unusually well documented. He retired from the chairmanship of his companies — restructured into CK Hutchison Holdings and CK Asset Holdings — in May 2018 at the age of 89, handing control to his elder son, Victor Li. Through the Li Ka Shing Foundation, which he established in 1980 and has called his ‘third son,’ he has given billions of dollars to education and medical causes, most prominently founding and funding Shantou University in his home province. His story is the archetypal postwar Hong Kong rise from refugee poverty to global wealth.