Biggest Businesses Run by College Dropouts

Bangalore: Ever wonder where the chief executives of some of the world's most successful companies went to college? Well, don't tell your kids, but some CEOs never graduated college?and some never even bothered to apply reports Kaitlyn Bigica for CNBC.

These CEOs made it to the top without a college degree and defied the idea that to be successful you don't have to have a degree.

Michael Dell:

The founder and CEO of Dell expanded his company with the idea that "technology is about enabling human potential." In 1992, he became the youngest chief executive to earn a ranking on Fortune magazine's "Fortune 500" list. His staff also grew from a one-man operation to 100,000 employees in just eight years.

Today, the company provides information-technology services for global corporations, governments, health care providers, small and medium businesses, education institutions, and home computing users.

Bill Gates:

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft , enrolled at Harvard as a freshman in 1973. Gates, who lived down the hall from Microsoft's current chief executive, Steve Ballmer, created BASIC, a programming language for the first microcomputer, during his first year of college.


Gates dropped out of Harvard in his junior year to concentrate all his efforts on a company he called Micro-soft with his childhood friend Paul Allen. As if founding Microsoft wasn't enough, Gates went on to found Corbis , one of the world largest resources of visual information. He also earned a seat on the board of directors for Berkshire Hathaway .

Paul Allen:

Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates, his childhood friend, is another chief executive who never got a college degree. According to Allen's memoir, "Idea Man," Allen was inspired to write a coding language when he saw the Altair 8800 computer on the cover of a Popular Electronics magazine.


Today, Allen has a multibillion-dollar investment portfolio, which includes multiple technology and media companies, along with a major real estate redevelopment in Seattle.

Mark Zukerberg:

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, showed an early interest in computers. As a child, he created early communication tools and games from his bedroom. In high school, he created an MP3 program and soon received offers from AOL and Microsoft , which he ignored.


After being accepted at Harvard University, Zuckerberg built a program called Facemash, which showed pictures of students and allowed their peers to vote on who was more attractive.

Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard before graduating to put all of his focus on the social networking site, which could be worth as much as $100 billion.

Steve Jobs:

When he was 12, Steve Jobs, the former chief executive of Apple , called Bill Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett Packard , after finding his number in the phonebook. When Hewlett answered, Jobs said, "Hi I'm Steve Jobs. I'm twelve years old and I'm a student in high school. I want to make a frequency counter. I was wondering if you had any spare parts I can have?"


Hewlett gave Jobs the spare parts and hired him that summer to work on the assembly line at his company. During this time, Jobs formed a friendship with Stephen Wozniak, a soon-to-be dropout from the University of California at Berkley.

Jobs enrolled at Reed College after high school, but he later dropped out. He connected once again with Wozniak and the pair quit their jobs to start production on a computer in Jobs' garage.