4 Low-Profile Billionaires: How They Made Their Fortunes
Written by
Nicole Spector
Edited by
Molly Sullivan
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Were you to walk up to a stranger on the street and ask them to name a billionaire, they’d likely name one of the five following moguls: President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates. They’re among the most high-profile billionaires, and they’re constantly in the news. But there are more than 3,000 billionaires in the world. Most aren’t mega celebrities — but that doesn’t mean the stories of how they reached the summit of wealth aren’t fascinating and inspiring.
Consider the following four billionaires who are largely self-made. How did they amass their fortunes and what lessons can we learn from them?
Judy Faulkner
- Net worth: $7.8 billion
Judy Faulkner, a math wiz and computer science genius, has a familiar tech billionaire origin story. She launched a startup from her basement. Back then, in 1979, the company, a medical record software provider, was called Human Services Computing. Today, it’s called Epic Systems, and it is valued at $5.7 billion. Faulkner is not only self-made, she’s self-insulated in the sense that she doesn’t entertain offers from outside investors eager to get their hands on her company. And after all these years, Epic Systems is still privately held.
Headquartered in Verona, Wisconsin, Epic, which was designed to look like the hyper-vivid fairytale Land of Oz, employs around 14,000 people (nearly the entire city’s population, it would seem; no wonder the city’s median income is over six figures). The company’s products are used by top-tier healthcare organizations including Cedars-Sinai, NYU Langone Health and Beth Israel Lahey Health. Faulkner, now 81 years old, hasn’t announced plans to retire.
John Tu
- Net worth: $15.3 billion
John Tu amassed his fortune largely through tech entrepreneurship. He started out in electrical engineering, working for Motorola in Wiesbaden, Germany. Tu’s success story isn’t of the overnight variety. When he first arrived in the U.S. in 1971, he worked in a gift shop in Arizona selling tchotchkes from Taiwan, where he lived as a child. Next, he became a landlord, and that business enabled him to realize his dream of being in the computer business.
Tu co-founded Camintonn, a memory solutions provider, with David Sun in 1982. In 1986, they sold the company for $6 million — a fortune that was mostly lost in the 1987 stock market crash. The pair rebounded by co-founding a new memory solutions provider, Kingston Technology, 80% of which they sold to Softbank Corp of Japan in 1996 for $15 billion. But the story doesn’t end there. Tu and Sun bought the 80% stake back in 1999 — for one-third of the original price, according to the LA Times.
Diane Hendricks
- Net worth: $22.3 billion
Diane Hendricks has the ultimate American rags-to-riches tale to tell. She grew up on a dairy farm in Osseo, Wisconsin, with eight siblings. She got to know, in an up close and personal way, the importance — and intense demands — of hard work. And she figured out early on that a different kind of hard work was her calling. She wanted to be an entrepreneur in the business world.
She and her husband, Ken Hendricks, co-founded ABC Supply, a roofing supply company, in 1982. Under Diane’s leadership, the company went from regional to national and today has hundreds of locations in the U.S. Ken died in 2007 and since then, Diane is the sole owner of the privately held company — the seventh largest in Wisconsin.
Gianluigi Aponte
- Net worth: $38.3 billion
It’s not every day that you hear of a Neapolitan sea captain becoming a self-made billionaire, but it happens, or so it did with Gianluigi Aponte. With his wife, Rafaela Aponte-Diamant, Aponte, who is often described by media outlets as “secretive,” founded MSC: Global Container Shipping Company in 1970. When they began, they had just one shipping vessel that towed cargo between Europe and the U.S. Today, MSC operates 900 vessels.
A defining moment in Aponte’s wealth accumulation happened in 1995, when Aponte acquired the shipping company SNAV. He went on to acquire a few other shipping companies, becoming one of the most formidable tycoons in the space. And, like the companies of the other billionaires highlighted here, MSC remains privately held.
Net worths are accurate as of June 3, 2025.
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