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Americans are obsessed with Top Ten lists as well as with money.  What better way to satisfy their cravings than to combine the two?  While fortunes may rise and fall from one year to the next, the list of the ten richest Americans—as measured by Forbes magazine—has remained fairly stable for quite some time.  No matter what sort of business may have caused them to reach this state of extreme financial well being—technology, retail sales, manufacturing, or energy—the common denominator is entrepreneurship.  Other than inheriting money from your relatives, there is no better way to accumulate personal wealth than by starting a business, making it successful, and watching it grow beyond all expectations.  Here are the rankings for 2009:

1) Bill Gates — $40.0 billion
As one of the founders of the personal computer age, the Gates story has been retold so many times that it has almost become a cliché.  At the age of thirteen he was already programming computers, and he continued his interest in technology while a student at Harvard.  Before this, most computers were mainframe dinosaurs whose memory banks took up entire rooms.  Prior to graduation, Gates left college to found Microsoft along with Paul Allen (who was on the Top Ten list as recently as 2006), which eventually struck a terrific deal with IBM.  Gates convinced the computer giant to allow him to keep the licensing rights for the MS-DOS operating system Microsoft had designed to run IBM’s first foray into personal computing.  Every PC loaded with MS-DOS—in other words, every PC on the market—put a licensing fee into the Gates coffers.  This generated millions of dollars a year for the company and its owners.  Once the Windows operating system came to the market, the riches poured in at an even faster rate.

2) Warren Buffett — $37.0 billion
Known as “The Sage of Omaha,” Buffett accumulated his fortune during many years of wise investing.  After earning a Master’s degree in economics from Columbia Business School, he worked as a stockbroker before starting his own company a few years later.  He formed a limited partnership with family members and friends, devoting countless hours to analyzing the marketplace and its influences on the value of companies.  By sticking to three principals—identifying undervalued corporations, recognizing which events might eventually affect those values, and teaming up with stockholders to change a company’s direction—he was able to achieve 30 percent annual growth in an era when 10 percent was the average.  Buffett continued to see his wealth increase by buying entire companies in a wide range of industries, thereby reducing the risk that even a serious market downturn would negatively affect his broader holdings.

3) Larry Ellison — $22.5 billion
After several false starts in several different fields, Ellison started his own company along with two former business associates.  A chance reading of a research paper written by a former IBM executive showed Ellison a concept he believed had considerable commercial value.  By convincing the CIA that his “relational database” was applicable to their needs, he and his partners eventually turned Oracle Corp. into the world’s largest database provider.  Nearly every major U.S. corporation relies on Oracle products to keep track of data, and the company has continued its dominance by buying out many of its competitors.

4–7)  Jim, Alice, Christy and Robson Walton — $17.8 to $17.6 billion each
The offspring of Sam Walton have, year after year, appeared on this Top Ten List.  Thus is proven the adage that it pays to be born into wealth.  But the children of the founder of Wal-Mart have continued to build the business their father started back in the 1950s in a field—retail sales—that is oftentimes a tough place to show a profit.  Walton’s philosophy of “a large selection at low prices” is the model all retail chains try to emulate, most with far less success.

8)  Michael Bloomberg — $16.0 billion
Known more for his role as the mayor of New York City, Bloomberg started his business career on Wall Street as a stockbroker in the late 1960s.  He quickly recognized that the future of the industry would be driven by technology, and he started Bloomberg LP to help force the financial sector into the electronic age.  By bringing together buyers and sellers in an innovative way, the company that offers its financial news and information services to more than 250,000 paid subscribers boasts nearly 10,000 employees in 130 cities worldwide.

9–10)  Charles and David Koch — $14.0 billion each
Fred Koch, Sr., started his own chemical engineering company not long after graduating from MIT.  He then invented a more efficient method of turning heavy oil into gasoline and traveled to the Soviet Union during the late 1920s, when that country’s oil fields were just beginning to produce.  During and after WWII, his company acquired a number of refining businesses and continued to solidify its hold on that aspect of the energy industry.  His sons followed him into the business: Charles studied general engineering and followed that up with an advanced degree in nuclear engineering, while David elected chemical engineering.  Koch Industries has continued to be a pioneer in the energy field, having also branched out into commodities such as coal, paper, cement, and similar products.

What did these ten richest Americans have in common?  They either started or inherited their business.  Buy a Business or Buy a Franchise today – we have 100s of Franchise Opportunites and over 32,000 Businesses for Sale!