Overview
- Oprah Winfrey leads the new Self-Made 250, followed by Harold Hamm, David Stewart, Thomas Peterffy and LeBron James.
- The list includes only candidates who earned a 9 or 10 on Forbes’ Self-Made Score, which measures how far each person advanced from their starting point.
- Forbes staff searched more than a century of archives, queried AI tools ChatGPT and Gemini, and then had a panel of outside judges review the names.
- A USA Today analysis of the top 50 notes that 86% are billionaires and 92% are men.
- Forbes plans a companion historic ranking today, a members-only discussion on April 23, and a June celebration in Philadelphia.