From a 19-year-old college student to Asia's richest person, it pays wells to be born rich. : It’s not easy to make Forbes’ billionaires list. Some shoveled manure on their neighbors’ farms or slept in cars to get their start. Scores of others got a leg up from middle- or upper-class parents. But plenty of the planet’s super-rich took the shortest route to billions: they were born with them. Roughly a third of the 2,781 people on the 2024 World’s Billionaires ranking inherited their vast wealth, or at least a big chunk of it, by Forbes’ calculations.