Starbucks' Howard Schultz grew up in a housing complex for the poor.
Net worth: $2 billion (as of Sept. 2013)
As the world's leading coffee retailer, this global giant has more than 19,000 stores in 62 countries and serves over 40 million customers a week. At the helm of Starbucks' success is CEO Howard Schultz, the man who took the company from six small stores in the 1980s to the recognizable brand it is today.
Howard Schultz grew up in a housing project in Canarsie, Brooklyn. After graduating from Canarsie High School in 1971, he took the job of a salesperson for Xerox Corporation. In 1979, he became a general manager for Swedish drip coffee maker manufacturer, Hammarplast. In 1981, Schultz visited a client of Hammarplast, a growing coffee-bean shop called Starbucks Coffee Company in Seattle which he joined as the Director of Marketing a year later. He persuaded Starbucks owners to offer traditional espresso beverages in addition to the whole bean coffee, leaf teas and spices they had long offered. However, the owners refused to roll it out company-wide, saying they didn't want to get into the restaurant business. Frustrated, Schultz started his own coffee shop named Il Giornale (after a newspaper in Milan) in 1985. Two years later, the original Starbucks management decided to focus on Peet's Coffee & Tea and sold its Starbucks retail unit to Schultz and Il Giornale for $3.8 million. Schultz renamed Il Giornale with the Starbucks name and aggressively expanded Starbucks' reach across the United States.
