Income of 10 richest teachers in the world I Richest Teachers
Not all of the world's billionaires walked straight into founding their startups-many had long and successful careers before they took a leap towards entrepreneurship. Here are five former professors who used a teaching career as a jumping board to entrepreneurship and a seat in the billionaires’ club.
Jack Ma
China
Global Rank: 21 Age: 54
Net worth: $39.6 B
Born in Hangzhou, China’s richest man’s passion for English started from childhood. For nine years Ma rode his bicycle over 100km at a time, offering foreign tourists tours of the city in exchange for English lessons. It was one of these tourists who nicknamed him “Jack” due to the difficulty in correctly pronouncing the Chinese name, “Ma Yun”.
After graduating from Hangzhou Teacher’s Institute in 1988, Ma was rejected from Harvard University, KFC and the police force. He was eventually hired as an English teacher at a local university for $12 a month. Noticing a gap in the market for an e-commerce platform to support small businesses, Ma quit his teaching career to launch the country’s biggest tech company, Alibaba, from his apartment in 1999.
The rags-to-riches entrepreneur plans to return to his teaching roots, alongside focusing on the charitable Jack Ma Foundation and retaining his membership on Alibaba’s board until 2020.
Jim Simons
U.S.
Global Rank: 44 Age: 80
Net worth: $21.5 B
Upon receiving his doctorate in mathematics from the University of California at only 23-years-old, Simons-the founder of Renaissance Technologies-went on to teach the subject at MIT and Harvard.
The award-winning mathematician and Cold War code breaker built “Monemetrics” in 1978-a hedge fund that used quantitative analysis to interpret data. Fast forward to 2019, and the renamed Renaissance Technologies has made Simons the world’s highest-earning hedge fund manager. From the scientific research-based Simons Foundation to Math for America designed for training STEM teachers, the entrepreneur spends his time strongly advocating for math education and philanthropy.
David Shaw
U.S.
Global Rank: 209 Age: 68
Net worth: $7 B
A former computer science professor at Columbia University, Shaw was also the VP of Technology at Morgan Stanley before founding the money-making quantitative hedge fund firm, D.E. Shaw in 1988.
The billionaire still considers himself to be a computer scientist first and foremost. Despite applying quantitative and computational techniques to the investment management process in the financial sector, Shaw found greater fulfillment and better use of his potential in the lab.
When approaching his 50th birthday in 2002, he made his passion for the biochemical and biophysical tangible through the launch of D.E. Shaw Research, a computational biochemistry research firm. Shaw’s appointment by President Clinton to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology remains one of his top accolades.
David Cheriton
Canada
Global Rank: 298 Age: 68
Net worth: $6.6 B
Cheriton originally applied to study both music and math, but was rejected from the former, leading him to pursue math at the University of British Columbia in 1973. He went on to achieve a Masters and a PhD in computer science from the University of Waterloo.
Known as “Professor Billionaire”, Cheriton began his computer science teaching career as an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, before moving to Stanford University in 1981.
A systems and networking expert, the academic founded the Distributed Systems Group at Stanford and has been a technical advisor to IBM and Cisco Systems. The researcher, teacher and philanthropist is inspired by technology innovation and has funded over 20 companies, including investing seed money for Google.
Henry Samueli
U.S.
Global Rank: 452 Age: 64
Net worth: $4.6 B
Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Broadcom Group, Samueli grew up in the family’s tiny liquor store in East Los Angeles. He earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from UCLA.
Despite the engineering school’s policy against hiring its own graduates, Dean Wazzan offered Samueli a full-time professorship in 1985, because of his incomparable passion and commitment to students.
His research in broadband communications circuits and digital signal processing during his time as a teacher at UCLA led Samueli to co-found Broadcom Corporation in 1991, with PhD student Henry Nicholas. When Broadcom Corporation went public in 1998, the former professor immediately donated $30 million of his fortune to UCLA, funding the School of Engineering and Applied Science.