Mistakes Made By These Top Billionaires

When we talk about mistakes, we simply just cannot get away from them. But, constant failures and mistakes that we make are the best way to learn. Even Albert Einstein once said:

People who have made no mistakes are those that have not done anything new

Someone who has not done anything new means those who can't be bothered to get back up when falling and improve themselves from time to time. People with fixed mindsets are very dangerous especially if they want to become an entrepreneur.


We can definitely learn a lot from failures in life since we can always look back on the past and find room for any sort of improvement in order to enhance our capability. Even the rich themselves went through a pretty rough hill before becoming successful Billionaires as we can see today.

Now let's have a look at some of the Billionaires who have made mistakes in the past and what we can possibly learn from their mistakes.

1. Warren Buffet

Warren Buffet is well-known for being a living legend as the best investor in the world. But even the best investor also cannot escape from the mistakes he made in the past when he bought his very own company, Berkshire Hathaway.

He made a mistake in which he bought the company at a really high price since the price of the shares was manipulated by the owner of the company. He was really furious by the situation in which he decided to buy the whole shares of the company and fired the owner of the company, Seabury Stanton.

Warren later shut down the operation of the textile company since it was not making any profit in the year the 1980s. He still did not change the name to Berkshire Hathaway until today to remind himself of the investment mistakes that he once did.

2. Bill Gates

Who doesn't know this man when he is the founder of the biggest tech company in the world, Microsoft. Bill Gates once told that his biggest mistake when establishing Microsoft was to not build its own operating system for smartphones like Android.

This is all because Bill didn't think that smartphones will be the future to replace computers and his thought was proven wrong. As we can see today, pretty much everyone will have a smartphone in their hand since it was more convenient as well as easy to carry around in comparison with a computer.

In contrast, Google and Apple have built their own operating system for smartphones which as we can see today is a huge success. This has led to Microsoft losing control of the smartphone market worth $400 Billion USD.

3. Jack Ma

All of us have heard of the biggest e-commerce company in China, Alibaba, and its founder Jack Ma. He is considered the richest man in Asia with a staggering net worth of $42.5 billion USD. He managed to set up Alibaba at his own apartment in 1999. 

The irony is the fact that one of his biggest mistakes was establishing Alibaba itself. Jack Ma was too focused on building up his own company to the extent that he had no time for himself to enjoy life.

He thought of all his past actions and Jack Ma decided to take a break from all the work and officially retired in 2018. Alibaba's new CEO is Daniel Zhang but Jack Ma still remained the company's president. 

4. Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg once made the big mistake of getting involved in a scandal of a data leak involving the personal information of Facebook users in the year 2018 by Cambridge Analytica.

Facebook was accused of using the personal information of Facebook users during the election campaign in the United States which can be seen as Donald Trump managed to get the win to become the president of the United States.

Due to this conflict, Facebook's shares have taken a hit which also results in an impact on Mark's own net worth. He admitted that he should have taken a more aggressive move to counteract this problem.

5. Elon Musk

He is also known as the king of tech since he is the founder and CEO of two popular companies in the United States which are Tesla and Space X. One of the mistakes made by Elon was the fact that he did not put his full attention on Tesla at the start of its establishment in the year 2004 until 2008. 

He was at that time too focused on Space X which was a company involved in space discovery established in the year 2002. 

There was later an economic crisis in the year 2008 and Elon decided to become the CEO of Tesla and that company managed to stay on the path of becoming the best automotive company in the industry.

6. Ratan Tata

This man is a Billionaire and an industrialist from India. Ratan is the owner of the biggest vehicle company in India which is Tata.

The biggest mistake that he did in his business was when he introduced the Nano car. This car was considered one of the main cars for Indian people but was thought to be a cheap car.

This resulted in a bad impression of the company in the eye of the Indian people themselves and instead, he should have named the car as an affordable car.

Indian people were too scared to buy the car because of the fear of them being called poor due to the name of the car itself. Thus, the promotion of the car was a complete failure.

Reflect yourself

Regardless of all the mistakes that you have done in your life, one thing that is crucial will be to never give up and keep on trying. Don't simply look at these Billionaires thinking that they were born to be successful.  

All of them went through failure after another before becoming successful as we can see today. We might not be successful today but who knows in the future.

What is the worst mistake that you have made in your life?

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Source: The Economic Times