Who kept the equity is the market story. How they were trained is the founder story.
Forbes' real-time billionaires list this week, late September 2026: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Michael Dell, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, Larry Ellison, Steve Ballmer, Warren Buffett.
Nine of ten studied a STEM field at some point, finished or not. Buffett is the holdout. Business and economics, around tenth. Amancio Ortega, no university degree, sits just outside at eleven.
A decade ago the annual list was Gates, Ortega, Buffett, Carlos Slim, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Michael Bloomberg, Charles Koch, David Koch. Count honestly and STEM was already about eight of ten. The move from eight to nine is not a curriculum revolution. The people who own the compounding machines still came up speaking engineering.
What changed is which balance sheets compound, and who still owns them.
Software, cloud, chips, and AI created equity value a department store, a phone network, or a conglomerate could not match. The names that pushed Gates, Slim, Bloomberg, and the Kochs out of the top ten are mostly people who kept large stakes in those machines. Page, Brin, and Huang were not in the 2016 top ten. Musk went to the front. Ballmer never founded Microsoft, but he got paid in stock and never sold enough of it. Buffett did not get poorer. He got outpaced, then slipped back in when the tape moved.
That is the market half of the story. Leftover ownership in a business that scales without opening another store.
The founder half is less fashionable and more useful. The people who built those machines usually started in physics, CS, electrical engineering, applied math, biology. Not because a diploma is IP, but because STEM training teaches you to model systems, break them, and rebuild them under constraint. That is the same muscle you need to ship a product, read a cost curve, and know when the demo is lying.
I have watched founders treat the major as a costume for the deck, and I have watched other founders use it as the way they think. Only the second group keeps compounding when the narrative turns. Get more STEM in your education, not less. Learn to model systems before you learn to model a pitch. Keep ownership in the thing that compounds. The degree is not the moat. The training is how you build one.
Forbes moves with the tape. A bad week for Tesla or Nvidia reshuffles the order. Ortega, Bernard Arnault, and Buffett trade the tenth slot depending on the day. Underneath, the pattern holds: the top of the list is leftover equity in software and semiconductors, held by people who mostly learned to think like engineers first.
If you are underwriting those founders, look for the ones who can reason about the product in engineering terms and still own enough of the upside. Pass on STEM as a brand on slide two with no systems fluency underneath.
The list did not get smarter because of business school. It got richer because engineers kept the equity.