Where business leaders and entrepreneurs grew up and lived

Andrew Carnegie1835–1848

📍 2 Moodie Street, Dunfermline KY12 7PL, Scotland

I was born in Dunfermline, Scotland in 1835, the son of a hand-loom weaver, and my earliest memories are of the clatter of the loom in our cottage and the smell of linen. Dunfermline was a…

Aristotle Onassis1906–1922

📍 Smyrna, Izmir, Turkey

I was born Aristotle Socrates Onassis in Smyrna — now Izmir — in what was then the Ottoman Empire in 1906, into a prosperous Greek merchant family. Smyrna was one of the great cosmopolitan…

Bill Gates1955–1973

📍 7308 44th Avenue NE, Seattle, WA 98115, USA

William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle in October 1955 and grew up in the city's comfortable north-east neighbourhoods, first in View Ridge and then in Laurelhurst, the son of Bill…

Craig Kielburger1982–2000

📍 Thornhill, Ontario, Canada

Craig Kielburger was born in Toronto in December 1982 and grew up in Thornhill, a suburb north of the city, with his parents, both teachers, and his older brother, Marc. In April 1995, when…

Elon Musk1971–1989

📍 Pretoria, South Africa

Elon Reeve Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in June 1971, the eldest child of Errol Musk, an engineer, and Maye Musk, a model and dietitian from Canada. He grew up in Pretoria…

Estée Lauder1908–1946

📍 106-29 Corona Avenue, Corona, Queens, New York, NY 11368, USA

I was born Josephine Esther Mentzer in Corona, Queens, New York in 1908, the daughter of Max Mentzer, a Hungarian immigrant hardware store owner, and Rose Schotz Rosenthal, a Czech…

George Washington Vanderbilt II1895–1914

📍 1 Lodge Street, Asheville, NC 28803, USA

I found the Blue Ridge mountains when I was searching for something impossible to name — solitude, perhaps, or scale. Frederick Olmsted laid out three thousand acres of managed forestry and…

Gordon Ramsay1971–1987

📍 Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, UK

Gordon Ramsay was born in Johnstone, near Glasgow, in November 1966, and his family moved often during his childhood because of his father's restless search for work, before settling in…

Henry Ford1863–1876

📍 Corner of Ford Road and Greenfield Road, Dearborn, Michigan 48126, USA

I was born on a farm near Dearborn, Michigan in 1863, the eldest of six children of William Ford, an Irish immigrant farmer, and Mary Litogot Ford. The farm gave me a practical education in…

Jack Ma1964–1999

📍 Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China

Jack Ma grew up in Hangzhou, the old capital of the Southern Song dynasty on West Lake, and as a boy he practised his English by guiding foreign tourists around the city for free. He has…

Jack O'Neill1959–2017

📍 Pleasure Point, Santa Cruz, CA 95062, USA

In 1959 I moved my family from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, and opened a Surf Shop at Cowell Beach. I had been surfing the cold waters of Ocean Beach in San Francisco, where I started…

Jay-Z1969–1990

📍 Marcy Houses, Brooklyn, NY 11206, USA

Shawn Corey Carter was born in Brooklyn in December 1969 and grew up in the Marcy Houses, a large public housing project of brick towers in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the youngest of four children…

Jeff Bezos1964–1982

📍 Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA

Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in January 1964. His mother, Jacklyn, was seventeen, and her marriage to his biological father, Ted Jorgensen, soon ended…

John D. Rockefeller1884–1937

📍 200 Lake Road, Pocantico Hills, Sleepy Hollow, New York 10591, USA

Kykuit — the Rockefeller family estate in Sleepy Hollow, New York — was the home I built and lived in for much of my adult life, a stone house on a hill above the Hudson River with views…

Kim Kardashian1980–1998

📍 Beverly Hills, California, USA

Kim Kardashian was born in 1980 and grew up in Beverly Hills, the second of four children of the lawyer and businessman Robert Kardashian and Kris Jenner. The family home was a 1950s house…

Mark Zuckerberg1984–2004

📍 Dobbs Ferry, New York, USA

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York, in May 1984, and grew up in Dobbs Ferry, a small town on the Hudson River in Westchester County, in a Jewish family. His father…

Martha Stewart1944–1959

📍 Nutley, New Jersey, USA

Martha Stewart was born Martha Helen Kostyra in Jersey City, New Jersey, in August 1941, the second of six children of Polish-American parents, Edward and Martha Kostyra, and when she was…

Mary Seacole1805–1850

📍 East Street, Kingston, Jamaica

I was born in Kingston, the daughter of a Scottish soldier and a free Jamaican woman, a doctress who healed with Creole and African herbal medicine. My mother ran Blundell Hall, a boarding…

MrBeast1998–2016

📍 Greenville, North Carolina, USA

Jimmy Donaldson, known as MrBeast, was born in Wichita, Kansas, in May 1998, and after some early moves, he grew up mainly in Greenville, North Carolina, a university and farming city in…

Muhammad Yunus1940–1957

📍 Chittagong, Bangladesh

Muhammad Yunus was born in 1940 in the village of Bathua, near Hathazari, outside Chittagong, the third of fourteen children, nine of whom survived. When he was a small boy, the family…

Oskar Schindler1939–1945

📍 Schindler Factory, Lipowa 4, Kraków, Poland

I was a German industrialist and member of the Nazi party who came to Kraków in 1939 to make his fortune from the war, and who left it in 1945 having spent that fortune saving the lives of…

Richard Branson1950–1966

📍 Shamley Green, Surrey, United Kingdom

Richard Charles Nicholas Branson was born in London in July 1950 and grew up in Shamley Green, a village in the Surrey Hills, the son of Edward Branson, a barrister, and Eve, a former…

Sam Walton1918–1940

📍 Kingfisher, Oklahoma, USA

I was born in Kingfisher, Oklahoma in 1918, the son of Thomas Gibson Walton and Nancy Lee Lawrence. Oklahoma in the 1920s was struggling — my father worked various jobs, we moved…

Steve Jobs1976–1977

📍 2066 Crist Drive, Los Altos, California, USA

My parents' garage at 2066 Crist Drive in Los Altos, California is where Apple Computer Company was founded in 1976 — Steve Wozniak and I working on the first Apple computers on the…

Thomas Edison1847–1868

📍 Edison birthplace, Milan, Ohio, USA

I was born in Milan, Ohio on the 11th of February 1847, the seventh and last child of Samuel Edison, a Canadian political exile, and Nancy Elliott Edison, a former schoolteacher. Milan was…

Walt Disney1901–1911

📍 Marceline, Missouri, USA

I grew up in Marceline, Missouri — a small town on the Santa Fe Railroad in the middle of the country — from ages four to eight, and those four years were the most formative of my life. The…

Warren Buffett1930–1958

📍 2501 North 53rd Street, Omaha, NE 68104, USA

Warren Edward Buffett was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in August 1930, the only son of Howard Buffett, a stockbroker who later served in Congress, and Leila Stahl. He was fascinated by numbers…

William Randolph Hearst1919–1947

📍 750 Hearst Castle Road, San Simeon, CA 93452, USA

The hill above San Simeon was bare when I began; over twenty-eight years I raised the most remarkable private residence in America. Architects call it eclectic — I call it everything I…