While some of the planet's wealthiest people were born into fabulous privilege, others had far more humble beginnings. With this in mind, we reveal where six big-name billionaires, who are now among the top 20 richest people on the planet, spent their formative years.
Click or scroll to look back at where it all began...
Françoise Bettencourt was born on 10 July 1953 into an enormously wealthy family.
Her grandfather Eugène Schueller, a chemist who invented safe hair dye, founded L’Oréal back in 1909. Today, the L’Oréal group owns global brands including Maybelline, Lancôme, and Aesop, whose expensive hand soap adorns aspirational bathrooms everywhere.
After Schueller died in 1957, his daughter Liliane, Françoise's mother, became the company's largest individual shareholder and the world's richest woman.
Francoise grew up in this imposing home, built by her grandfather in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.
The home covers more than 10,764 square feet (1,000sqm) and, although this view from the sweeping garden would have us believe the home has a mere two storeys, it actually boasts five levels – including a 98-foot (30m) pool in the 'second basement'.
Françoise was brought up surrounded by extraordinary luxury. Eagle-eyed art lovers will notice Monet's The Path Through the Irises hanging behind Lilian and her husband André in this photo taken in their sitting room in 1988.
Works by Matisse, Picasso, and Léger hang throughout the elegant home, alongside sculpture by François Pompom and furniture by Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann.
After André died in 2007 and Liliane's death in 2017, writer and philanthropist Françoise inherited more than a third of the L’Oréal Group. With it, she became the world's richest woman, and in 2023, she was named the first woman with a net worth of $100 billion (£74bn).
Bettencourt, who has two sons and is married to businessman Jean-Pierre Meyers, has served on the L’Oréal board since 1997. In February 2025, she announced she was stepping down. However, she is still thought to be worth $81.6 billion (£61bn) and is the 20th richest person in the world, according to Forbes.
Born on 28 October 1955, Microsoft founder Bill Gates is worth around $108 billion (£79.7bn) and ranked 13th in Forbes' 2025 Billionaires list. The tech entrepreneur famously lives in Xanadu 2.0, his self-designed $127 million (£93.7m) home in Medina, Washington.
However, his childhood home looks fit for a millionaire at the very least...
He spent much of his childhood in this beautiful mid-century property in the tranquil Laurelhurst neighbourhood of Seattle.
Built in 1964, it was bought a year later by the Microsoft co-founder's father, Bill Sr, who lived in the four-bedroom property until his death in 2020 at the ripe old age of 94.
Several members of the Gates family ended up moving to Laurelhurst; there's even a road there named after Bill Jr's mother, Mary, who passed away in 1994.
A prodigy from the start, Gates was just 13 when he wrote his first software program.
His first home in Sand Point was severely damaged by the area's first recorded tornado, which struck in 1962 when Bill Jr was seven years old – the same year this photo was taken.
The twister tossed the carport over the house, ripping off parts of the roof before smashing into a neighbouring home, according to local newspaper The Seattle Times.
The 3,860-square-foot (358sqm) home sold in 2021 for $2.6 million (£1.9m) – and, with a location like this, it's easy to see why. Along with its breathtaking lake and mountain vistas, the property is filled with standout features. From a family room with floor-to-ceiling windows that flood the space with light, to a snug den, chef's kitchen, and master bedroom that leads out to a spacious terrace, the house more than earned its high price tag.
There's also plenty of additional outside space and even a court for playing pickleball, which has long been one of Bill Jr's favourite sports and his top way to unwind.
Investing legend Warren Buffett was born on 30 August 1930 into a middle-class family in Omaha, Nebraska, the city he has called home ever since.
Buffett has an estimated fortune of around $154 billion (£107bn) and appeared at number six in Forbes' 2025 Billionaires list, but he spent the first few years of his life in this one-and-a-half-storey Craftsman-style bungalow on Barker Avenue.
Warren's parents, future Congressman Howard and Leila Buffett, purchased this home not long after their wedding in 1925.
Like many Midwestern homes of the era, the charming clapboard property was built using a Sears kit.
The second of three children, the young Warren showed early entrepreneurial promise, selling chewing gum and Coca-Cola door-to-door when he was just six years old.
At 11, he got a job delivering newspapers before school, and in 1941, he invested his earnings in the stock market, buying three shares for himself and three for his sister. He made a slight profit – and the rest is history!
Buffett's three-bedroom childhood home (pictured) was listed via eBay in 2011, selling for $150,000 (around $215k/£159k today). The buyer then donated it to Girls Inc. of Omaha, a charity that supports girls and young women to reach their full potential.
Sponsored by Girls Inc.,19-year-old Morgan Mayers moved into Buffett's former home with her young son that same year, as reported by KETV NewsWatch7.
The Buffett family eventually moved to a five-bedroom home in Washington DC where Howard forged his political career. However, the former Berkshire Hathaway chairman and CEO has never been one for extravagance and excess. Despite his enormous net worth, he lives in a relatively modest dwelling just a mile from his first home.
Jeff Bezos was born on 12 January 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico to Jacklyn Gise and Ted Jørgensen, who were aged just 17 and 19, respectively. They divorced not long after and, in 1968, Jacklyn married Cuban immigrant Miguel Bezos, who adopted young Jeff that same year.
The Bezos family moved around a lot during the future billionaire's childhood, but they spent many a summer at Jeff's maternal grandfather's ranch outside Cotulla, Texas.
Lazy Gise Ranch ('Lazy G' for short) sprawls over 25,000 acres (10,117ha).
Remeniscing with his brother Mark during a Summit talk in 2017, the brothers shared some family snaps.
Jeff and his grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise, built this Sears kit home from scratch, which – along with building fences, fixing windmills, and suturing livestock – made a lasting impression and taught Jeff valuable life lessons.
Photographed here in 1967, aged three, it wasn't until over a decade later that young Jeff got his first job, working as a line cook in a McDonald’s in Albuquerque, where he earned just $2.69 (£1.98) an hour. The fast-paced job gave the budding entrepreneur an early insight into customer service and automation.
However, it was his time spent at his grandfather's ranch that the internet entrepreneur credits with making him resourceful and self-reliant.
His belief that “constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention", picked up from those working summers, is written into Amazon's DNA.
It was instrumental in making the site a huge success and its founder a huge fortune, which currently stands at a staggering $215 billion (£158bn), making him the third richest person in the world according to Forbes' 2025 list.
Born on 14 May 1984, Facebook co-founder, chairman, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg grew up in a fairly ordinary mid-century home in Dobbs Ferry, a sleepy town in Westchester County, New York.
Worth around $216 billion (£160bn), Zuckerberg was named the second-wealthiest person in the world, according to Forbes' 2025 Billionaires list. Intriguingly, his childhood home held hints of the tech whizz he'd later become...
The 1,226-square-foot (114sqm) family home stands on a quiet residential street 20 minutes or so north of Manhattan.
Given the incredible fortune their son would go on to make, the Zuckerberg parents, Edward and Karen, could have easily retired and decamped to a lavish mansion. However, they remained in their Dobbs Ferry home until selling it for $900,000 in 2013 – that's about $1.2 million (£889k) today.
Karen and Edward bought the house in 1981 and raised Mark there, along with his three sisters.
Mark moved out of the family home when he left for Harvard in 2002, before dropping out in 2004 and moving into a four-bedroom Palo Alto rental, where the Facebook team lived and worked.
But back to the family home...
Dentist Edward maintained his practice here in an office attached to the house, as we can see from the signs directing patients around the right side of the property.
Zuckerberg junior invented and installed a pre-AOL instant-messaging service, allowing the family to communicate quickly and easily between the home and office.
Elon Musk was born on 28 June 1971. The first child of Maye and Errol Musk, he spent his formative years in the upscale suburb of Waterkloof in Pretoria, South Africa.
Currently topping Forbes' 2025 world rich list, Musk has a fortune of around $342 billion (£253bn), but this is no rags-to-riches tale. Let's see where it all began...
Elon was born into a well-off family that resided comfortably in one of Waterkloof's largest homes.
His engineer father Errol is said to have part-owned an emerald mine in Zambia (though Elon denies this), while Maye worked as a successful model and dietitian.
A super-bright kid, Elon badgered his father for a computer at the age of six or seven and swiftly taught himself how to program it.
Decades later, this smiley youngster went on to found PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX, as well as head Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency.
The family home was built from whitewashed brick, with large sliding glass doors that opened out onto the garden. This shot, shared by Maye on X, shows Elon and his younger siblings Kimbal and Tosca in what appears to be their parents' bedroom sometime in the mid-1970s.
In 1989, Maye moved her children to her native Canada before Elon moved on to California to make his fortune.
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