Mark Cuban sold garbage bags.
When the Dallas Mavericks owner and entrepreneur asked his dad if he could get a new pair of expensive sneakers, his dad told him he could go get a job. So he did, selling garbage bags door-to-door.
Cuban was 12 at the time, and asked his dad how he was supposed to find a job. That's when one of his dad's friends stepped in. He said he had some garbage bags he needed to sell, so Cuban went door-to-door selling the bags for three dollars more than he paid for them.
Lloyd Blankfein sold snacks at Yankee Stadium.
As the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Blankfein is one of the most influential people on Wall Street.
But he worked his way up from the bottom. According to his biography "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World," Blankfein grew up in Brooklyn housing projects and worked his first job as a concession vendor at Yankee Stadium.
Richard Branson was an amateur bird breeder and arborist.
Branson, the billionaire founder of the Virgin Group, has worked for himself from day one.
At the age of 11, Branson says in a LinkedIn post, he and his best friend Nik Powell started breeding parakeets to sell as pets to their classmates. The birds started multiplying faster than they could sell them, so they then tried their hand in a different market.
As Christmas approached, they bought small fir trees and hoped to make a profit off them once they grew big — but rabbits destroyed the trees before they could grow, he writes.
Marissa Mayer was a grocery store clerk.
Mayer told Fortune that when she was 16, she took a summer job as a grocery store clerk at County Market in Wausau, Wisconsin.
She says it was there she saw first-hand the value of work ethic, and the job taught her a lot about family economics and the trade-offs people have to make in daily life.
Beth Comstock worked in a Rubbermaid factory.
Comstock is the CMO of General Electric and oversaw the creation of the Hulu streaming service.
But before she entered the professional world, she learned the value of hard work at a Rubbermaid factory that produced kitchenware.
In a LinkedIn post, she explains that she took the summer job after her freshman year of college as a break from academic work but found herself completely overwhelmed. She's still proud of learning how to work as a team to overcome the difficult months of labor.
Kat Cole was a star Hooters employee.
Before Cole became the president of Cinnabon, she worked at Hooters for 15 years, starting as a hostess at age 17 and eventually getting promoted to vice president by the time she was 26.
A star employee, at 19 she was asked by Hooters to go to Australia to help open a franchise location there, and she spent much of her early twenties training global employees and managers, Fortune reports.
Warren Buffett was a paper boy.
Buffett has been interested in making and saving money since he was a kid. Today, the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway is worth an estimated $61.2 billion currently, according to Forbes, making him one of the world's wealthiest people.
At the age of 13, Buffett spent his mornings delivering copies of the Washington Post, according to Bio. That same year, he invested $1,200 of his savings into 40 acres of farmland.
President Barack Obama scooped ice cream.
Even the leader of the free world once had a nonglamorous summer job.
As a teenager growing up in Honolulu, Obama got his first gig working the counter at Baskin-Robbins, Time reports.
Oprah Winfrey worked at a corner grocery store.
Winfrey's media empire made her the first female black billionaire — she's worth an estimated $3 billion today, according to Forbes. Before she made it to the top, she struggled her way out of a difficult, impoverished childhood.
When she was living with her dad in Nashville as a young teenager, she worked at a corner grocery store next to her dad's barber shop, Forbes reports.
Michael Dell washed dishes.
As founder and CEO of Dell Inc., Dell enjoyed a rise to power during the heyday of the personal computer. Today, Dell is worth an estimated $18.7 billion, according to Forbes.
But before he helped make PCs mainstream, Dell got his first job scrubbing dishes for a Chinese restaurant at the age of 12, Bio reports.
David Murdock pumped gas.
Murdock, the 91-year-old chairman and CEO of Dole Foods, turned the company into the world's largest producer and marketer of fruits and vegetables. He's worth an estimated $2.9 billion today, according to Forbes, but he grew up poor and dropped out of high school in the ninth grade.
After quitting school, Murdock worked at a gas station until he was drafted into the Army in 1943, Forbes reports.
Jacki Zehner sold hot dogs at hockey games.
Zehner is the CEO of the charity Women Moving Millions, and in 1996 she became the first female partner at Goldman Sachs.
She spent her early teens in Canada working the concession stand at games for her local farm team, the Kelowna Buckaroos. In a LinkedIn post, she says her time spent running a busy stand and making quick transactions proved to be perfect training for the Wall Street trading floor.
T. Boone Pickens delivered newspapers.
Pickens is the chairman of the hedge fund BP Capital Management. He showed his aggressive business savvy at a young age.
Like Buffett, Pickens was a paper boy. At the age of 12, he expanded his delivery route from 28 houses to 156 by taking over his competitor's routes, according to Forbes. He has said that this taught him the value of expanding business through acquisition.
Jeff Bezos worked the grill at McDonald's.
The founder and CEO of internet retail behemoth Amazon got his start working the grill at McDonald's during his summers as a teenager, according to the book "Golden Opportunity: Remarkable Careers That Began at McDonald's."
"The most challenging thing was keeping everything going at the right pace during a rush," Bezos said. "The manager at my McDonald's was excellent. He had a lot of teenagers working for him, and he kept us focused even while we had fun."
Donald Trump collected bottles.
Trump, the billionaire real estate mogul and animated television personality, grew up wealthy, but his father wanted him to learn the value of money.
As a kid, his dad would take him to construction sites and have him and his brother pick up empty soda bottles to redeem for cash, he tells Forbes. He says that he didn't make much, but it taught him to work for his money.
Michael Bloomberg was a parking lot attendant.
The former mayor of New York City is now worth an estimated $38.1 billion, according to Forbes, but he comes from a middle-class family.
As a student at Johns Hopkins University, he worked as a parking lot attendant to help pay his loans for tuition.
Madeline Albright sold bras.
Albright became the first female secretary of state, serving under President Bill Clinton. She made it into the US as a political refugee from Czechoslovakia, since her anti-Soviet family was in danger from her country's communist party, according to Bio.
She got her first job selling bras at a department store in Denver, she tells Forbes, and adds that she probably made next to nothing but learned how to deal with people in difficult situations.
Chuck Schwab sold walnuts and chickens.
Schwab founded the Charles Schwab Corporation, a brokerage and banking firm, and is today worth about $6 billion, according to Forbes. He tells Stanford's alumni magazine that he had the entrepreneurial spirit from a young age.
Schwab grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Sacramento, California, but wanted to make his own money. As a kid, he bagged and sold walnuts and raised chickens in his backyard, selling some and using others for eggs to sell.
