The son of a poor Jewish family in London, he won a scholarship to the independent school Christ's Hospital and went on to the London School of Economics, graduating in 1952. After a short spell in a lowly job at the BBC selecting press cuttings for use in programmes, he secured a post as a junior member of the editorial staff of a weekly periodical, Truth, in 1953. Levin became a well-known broad...

Winfrey was born into a poor family in Mississippi, but this didn't stop her from winning a scholarship to Tennessee State University and becoming the first African-American TV correspondent in the state at the age of 19.In 1983, Winfrey moved to Chicago to work for an AM talk show that would later be called The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, to a single mother, Ellison was raised by his aunt and uncle in Chicago. After his aunt died, Ellison dropped out of college and moved to California to work odd jobs for the next eight years. He founded software development company Oracle in 1977, which is now one of the largest technology companies in the world.

Starbucks's Howard Schultz grew up in a housing complex for the poor. Schultz ended up winning a football scholarship to the University of Northern Michigan and went to work for Xerox after graduation. He then took over a coffee shop called Starbucks, which at the time had only 60 shops. Schultz became the company's CEO in 1987 and grew the coffee chain to more than 16,000 outlets worldwide.

Robert Herjavec and his family fled the communist regime in Croatia with one suit case and $20 in hand to live in Canada. At the time he spoke no English. They lived for 18 months in a friend's basement while they began rebuilding their new life in North America. Herjavec's first jobs were as a newspaper deliveryman and a waiter. These early experiences in customer service taught him the ins and o...

Raised by a single mother, she was one of three children who shared two absentee fathers. To pay the bills and send her children to Catholic school, Burns's mother, Olga, ran an at-home daycare center and took in ironing. Although Burns didn't have many advantages as a child, she attributes part of her success to city housing, access to a good education and cheap public transportation. A summer i...

Shad Khan is now one of the richest people in the world, but when he came to the U.S. from Pakistan, he spent his first night in a $2/night room at the University Y-YMCA and his first job was washing dishes for $1.20 an hour while attending the University of Illinois. Khan now owns Flex-n-Gate, one of the largest private companies in the U.S., the NFL's Jacksonville Jaguars, and Premier League soc...

Jin Sook Chang came to the U.S. in 1981 and worked as a hairdresser to make ends meet. In 1984, she and her husband Do Won used $11,000 in savings to open a 900 sq-foot clothing store in Los Angeles, initially called Fashion 21. Forever 21 is now a $4 billion teen retailer and employs 43,000 people in 800 stores across 48 countries

Don Won Chang and his wife Jin Sook came to the U.S. from Korea in 1981. He initially held three jobs at once, doing janitorial work, pumping gas and working in a coffee shop, while his wife was working as a hair dresser to make ends meet. The couple opened their first 900 sq-foot clothing store in 1984. They now own and run more than 480 Forever 21 stores.

The first few years of his life were spent living in a funeral home in New Haven, Conn. It was the cheapest place his parents could afford. They had arrived in the U.S. with five dollars, having fled Hungary during the 1956 revolution and settling in Vienna for a year before his father earned a scholarship to Yale.

Keane has spent three decades building relationships and immersing herself in the mechanics of finance while working her way up from a Citicorp call center to the top of an industry. Keane broke family tradition by pursuing a white-collar career. Her father was a retired New York police officer, had hoped his daughter would follow him into the field. Instead she enrolled at St. John’s Unive...