Billionaires and How They Made It
By: Erin Carlyle, a Special to Overdrive
Want to be a billionaire? You may want to consider which of the many paths to wealth–ballet flats? real estate in China? the next Facebook?–could be most likely to land you a spot on the Forbes Billionaires List. To give you some ideas, we poured through the wealth database to come up with the industries that give you the best chances. The No. 1 wealth-producing industry: Investments, which made 148 billionaires including George Soros, Carl Icahn and newcomers Seth Klarman and Isabel dos Santos. Investments is a catch-all category we use here at Forbes to categorize the wealth created by hedge fund managers, people who play stockbroker with the family money, and the titans of investing who make moves like snapping up steel assets out of bankruptcy court.