Bootstrap Billionaires

Most of the 1,125 billionaires featured in Forbes’ 2008 list are rags to richest stories. They are self-made billionaires who have roughed it out. Good examples are - George Soros (World War II refugee), Kirk Kerkorian (son of watermelon seller), Roman Abramovich (orphaned at 4), LiKa-shing (sold plastic flowers at 15), Oprah Winfrey (lived on a pig farm). The only Indian in this famous list is Micky Jagtiani.

Jagtiani flunked out of accounting school in London and took up driving taxis and cleaning hotel rooms to pay the bills and support a-bottle-of-whiskey-a-day habit. He then lost his entire family to illness in the span of one year. Just 21 and alone in Bahrain with $6,000 of his and his family's savings, he took over the retail space his brother had leased before dying of cancer, and started selling baby products.This chain, famously called, Landmark, is now one of the most profit able retail groups in the Middle East.

J K Rowling is the only writer in the billionaire's list. She moved to Portugal after the death of her mother from multiple sclerosis. She returned to the U.K. as a single mother and lived on welfare while finishing her first Harry Potter story. Now one of the world's most successful authors, she published the seventh and final installment of the boy wizard series last year. For the first time ever, the tally of the world's billionaires crossed into four figures, reaching 1,125. Americans still occupy 469 of the list's slots, but that's down two percentage points from last year. In total, Forbes identified 226 new billionaires, 70% of whom come from the U.S., Russia, China and India.

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