“Started with nothing” is one of business journalism’s favorite phrases. It compresses childhood, education, family help, geography, discrimination, luck, timing and access to capital into a dramatic origin story. A better question is: how far did someone actually have to climb?
Forbes itself stopped treating “self-made” as one binary category
Forbes uses a 1-to-10 self-made scale. Lower scores indicate inherited wealth; scores from 6 upward represent increasing degrees of self-made success. A 10 is reserved for people who grew up poor or lower-middle-class and also overcame major obstacles.
That framework is still subjective, but it is more informative than pretending every founder began from the same starting line.
Very different routes can all end in extreme wealth
Oprah Winfrey
Forbes gives her its highest self-made score, citing childhood poverty and severe adversity before she built a media empire.
Tyler Perry
Forbes’ 2026 Self-Made 250 highlights his period of homelessness before his plays, film library and studio turned into a major entertainment business.
LeBron James
The 2026 list points to childhood housing instability before a professional sports career became the base for a broader business empire.
Harold Hamm
Forbes describes him as the 13th child of sharecroppers who later started a trucking business serving oilfields before drilling his first well.
Rihanna
Forbes’ self-made methodology places her among the rare score-10 examples because of a poor upbringing and the distance traveled before music and business wealth.
Middle-class founders
Many other “self-made” billionaires did not grow up poor. They still created their fortunes, but with a different starting set of resources and constraints.
Success is individual; opportunity is structural
Starting poor does not make success inevitable, and starting comfortable does not mean a later company built itself. The useful lesson is not to rank suffering. It is to separate inherited financial advantage, family stability, education, networks and sheer entrepreneurial execution rather than flattening all of them into one phrase.