How do you become a billionaire?
Short answer
Most billionaires built a company that solved a big problem and kept ownership of it while it grew. About 65% of the 2026 Forbes list is self-made. The people we interviewed describe the same path in different words: pick a big problem, build a team, and stay at it for decades.
The numbers
- About 65% of billionaires on the 2026 Forbes list are self-made (Forbes World's Billionaires 2026 via businesstats.com/sources-of-wealth-of-global-billionaires).
What Billionaires Told Us
“I also have a bottled water business and a large packaging business, together about a billion dollars in revenue and 4,000 people. Those are the businesses I built starting in 1979.”