Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the McDonald’s fry cook? Before Warren Buffett, Alibaba’s Jack Ma and more self-made entrepreneurs made their billions, they worked odd jobs just like the rest of us

We might know them today for the billions of dollars in their bank accounts, but the richest people on the planet weren’t all born into wealth. In fact, many of these powerful businessmen were once people you might have once easily crossed paths with on the street – newspaper boys, cashiers and salesmen.

Self-made billionaire and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had a summer job at McDonald’s when he was 16. Even though he was just a fry cook, he still saw it as an opportunity to learn. He has since confessed to being fascinated by the various automatic services at the fast food chain, such as fries being raised out of oil automatically, and gained apparently inspirational insight into customer service.

Virgin Group founder Richard Branson dropped out of boarding school in England due to struggles with dyslexia. He proved his business chops at the age of 16 by founding a culture magazine called Student Magazine, printing 50,000 copies and selling US$8,000 worth of advertisements during its first run in 1966. He has even said that it was his dyslexia that helped him shape the Virgin empire and told Forbes that he “wouldn’t have it any other way”.