7. Phil Falcone

Phil Falcone is the founder of Harbinger Capital and LightSquared. Harbinger Capital is a private hedge fund and LightSquared is a company which develops wireless broadband communications network incorporated with satellite coverage across the United States.

He was one of the nine siblings of his family and grew up in a poor three-bedroom house in Chisholm, Minnesota. His father was a utility manager and his mother was a factory worker. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Harvard University in 1984.

Falcone was a talented hockey player and used to play college level hockey at Harvard. He also played professional hockey in Sweden with Malmo. His hockey life ended with a knee injury and he started his career on Wall Street as a junior junk-bond trader. 

Today he is highly successful, with a net worth of $2.2 billion. Though his life started from a three bedroom house but today he lives in a 27 room penthouse in Upper East Side of Manhattan. Falcone once said to House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform during a November 2008 hearing about hedge funds, “Not everyone who runs a hedge fund was born on 5th Avenue.”