America is about to celebrate a milestone birthday.
250 years.
To commemorate the occasion, Forbes compiled and released a list of the 250 Greatest Living Self-Made Americans.
In the list is a familiar face to longtime WWE fans, as “The Final Boss” cracked the top 100.
Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson was listed at No. 70 on the list of 250 Greatest Living Self-Made Americans, with Oprah Winfrey, Harold Hamm, David Steward, Thomas Peterffy and LeBron James rounding out the top five.
Regarding The Rock’s spot on the list, Forbes wrote, “The Rock named his production company Seven Bucks as a reminder of a bleak time: cut from the Canadian Football League, he arrived broke in Tampa with ‘a five, a one and change.‘”
The article explains the list as follows:
To identify these revolutionaries, we first mined Forbes’ 109-year-deep archive for classic tales of entrepreneurial capitalism. Then we asked our current crop of beat reporters for their ideas. We canvassed AI, running hundreds of queries through both ChatGPT and Gemini. While we put a heavy emphasis on rags-to-riches billionaires, we also included pioneering scientists, Supreme Court justices and others whose “wealth” is measured in influence and impact, not just dollar signs.
Next, we ran names past a panel of expert judges: DeAngela Burns-Wallace, CEO of the Kauffman Foundation; Keith Dunleavy, Founder, Inovalon; Rich Karlgaard, Former Publisher, Forbes; Steven Klinsky, Founder and CEO, New Mountain Capital; Jim McKelvey, cofounder of Block (formerly Square); and Ryan Rippel, CEO of NextLadder Ventures.
An invaluable resource was Forbes’ Self-Made Score, a 1-to-10 ranking that quantifies the “distance traveled” by each individual—separating those who started with nothing from those with a big head start. Only those ranking nine or ten made the cut. The final ranking encompasses financial success, obstacles overcome and enduring impact.
