The debate around whether college is worth the time and money has been heating up.
As AI reshapes what it means to be a white-collar worker, and amid high tuition fees, some young people are rethinking the traditional path of graduating from college before entering the workforce.
By now, stories of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates dropping out of college before earning their degrees have become tech-industry folklore. However, the Meta and Microsoft founders aren’t the only influential executives who have risen to the top without finishing college.
The founders and CEOs of other tech companies — including a new generation of Gen Z AI talent — also left higher education to bet on the tech world.
Here are 21 tech executives who never got their college degrees.
Mark Zuckerberg — founder and CEO, Meta
Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta, studied psychology and computer science at Harvard but left without completing a degree.
In 2004, while a student at Harvard University, he launched “thefacebook.com,” which later became Facebook, but he dropped out during his sophomore year to move to Palo Alto and work on his company full-time.
“It’s sort of been this taboo thing to say, maybe not everyone needs to go to college because there’s, like, a lot of jobs that don’t require that,” Zuckerberg told comedian Theo Von in a 2025 interview. “But I think people are probably coming around to that opinion a little more now than maybe like 10 years ago.”
Zuckerberg received an honorary degree from Harvard in 2017.
Sam Altman — cofounder and CEO, OpenAI
Sam Altman studied computer science at Stanford University for two years before dropping out in 2005 at the age of 19.
He left to cofound location-sharing app Loopt, which was acquired in 2012 by Green Dot.
Altman became president of the startup accelerator Y Combinator in 2014. He cofounded OpenAI in 2015, alongside Elon Musk and other founders, and he became the CEO in 2019.
Altman said in an interview at the DevDay conference in 2025 that he is “envious of the current generation of 20-year-old dropouts.”
“The amount of stuff you can build, the opportunity in this space is so incredibly wide,” he said.
John and Patrick Collison — cofounders, Stripe
John and Patrick Collison grew up in Ireland. As teenagers, they hatched the idea for their first business, an online auction management company named Auctomatic.
The brothers sold Auctomatic in 2008 for $5 million, making them teen millionaires, The Guardian reported.
Patrick Collison enrolled at MIT in 2006, but dropped out to work on his business ventures, while John Collison started at Harvard in 2009 and dropped out a year later to work on their new payments company, Stripe.
The brothers launched Stripe in 2010. CNBC reported that it was valued at $159 billion earlier this year.
Mustafa Suleyman — CEO, Microsoft AI
Mustafa Suleyman grew up in London and studied philosophy and theology at Oxford University. He dropped out as the degree felt “abstract and impractical” to him.
After leaving university, Suleyman set up the Muslim Youth Helpline, a telephone counseling service, with a friend from university.
After working for several years in politics and consulting, Suleyman cofounded DeepMind in 2010.
In 2024, Suleyman became the executive vice president and CEO of the newly founded Microsoft AI.
Melanie Perkins — cofounder and CEO, Canva
Melanie Perkins grew up in Perth, Australia, and attended the University of Western Australia, where she came up with the idea of making design easier, she told Entrepreneur in 2019.
Perkins launched Fusion Books, a website that enables students to design their own yearbooks, with her then-boyfriend (and now-husband), Clifford Obrecht, in 2007.
She told the BBC that she decided to drop out of college, believing the concept could be applied to projects beyond yearbooks. Perkins began meeting investors in Silicon Valley in 2010.
In 2013, Perkins and Obrecht launched Canva. The company was valued at $42 billion in a 2025 employee share sale.
Daniel Ek — cofounder and executive chair, Spotify
Daniel Ek grew up in Sweden and enrolled at the country’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2002 to study engineering.
In an interview with Forbes in 2012, he said he lasted only eight weeks, when he found out his entire first year would be devoted to theoretical mathematics. He soon started taking gigs at various tech companies.
Ek cofounded Spotify in 2006, where he was the CEO until 2025. CNBC reported that he became a billionaire in 2018 when Spotify listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Larry Ellison — cofounder and CTO, Oracle
As a kid growing up in Chicago, Larry Ellison planned to attend medical school at USC, get married and have kids, and move to Los Angeles to work as a doctor.
However, that never happened. He tried to earn an undergraduate degree twice: once at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (for two years) and again at the University of Chicago (where he lasted one semester).
After dropping out a second time, Ellison moved to California amid the burgeoning tech scene, where he cofounded what later became Oracle in 1977.
He now serves as the company’s chief technology officer and, as of 2026, Forbes reported he remains one of the richest people in the world.
Alexandr Wang — founder and former CEO, Scale AI; chief AI officer, Meta
Born in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Alexandr Wang studied mathematics and computer science at MIT, according to his LinkedIn profile, before dropping out at 19 to launch Scale AI.
Forbes reported that Wang became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire in 2021, when he was 24. He held the title until he was overtaken by Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan in 2025.
He was the CEO of Scale AI until 2025, when Meta spent roughly $14.3 billion on a 49% nonvoting stake in the company. Wang has been the chief AI officer of Meta since 2025.
Jack Dorsey — cofounder and former CEO, Twitter; cofounder and CEO, Block
Jack Dorsey first enrolled at the University of Missouri-Rolla, but he transferred to NYU after two years.
In a 2011 interview with Wired, Dorsey said he came up with the idea for Twitter while at NYU, where he dropped out a semester short of graduating in 1999. He moved to the West Coast to work for a tech company and pursued other interests outside tech.
Dorsey went on to cofound Twitter, now known as X, which launched in 2006. He stepped down as its CEO in 2021.
He cofounded the financial technology company Square, now known as Block, in 2009, and is currently its CEO.
Evan Williams — cofounder and former CEO, Twitter
Evan Williams grew up in a small town in Nebraska and enrolled at the nearby University of Nebraska-Lincoln, as reported by the Omaha World-Herald.
However, he told The New York Times in 2009 that he felt college was a “waste of time,” and lasted only a year and a half.
Williams said in a 2009 Wall Street Journal interview that he then moved to Florida and bounced around various cities, doing freelance work and tech jobs.
Like his fellow cofounder, Dorsey, Williams became a billionaire following Twitter’s IPO. He is the cofounder of Obvious Ventures, a venture capital firm.
Steve Jobs — cofounder and former CEO, Apple
Steve Jobs attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon. The private university was “almost as expensive as Stanford,” he said in a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford, adding, “I couldn’t see the value in it.”
“So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK,” he said. “It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made.”
CNN reported that he dropped out after one semester, but he stayed in the area and attended classes that interested him.
One of those classes was calligraphy, taught by a Trappist monk named Robert Palladino, whom Jobs later credited with teaching him about typefaces that he added to the Mac personal computer he developed.
Jobs cofounded Apple in 1976 when he was 21.
Jan Koum — cofounder and former CEO, WhatsApp
Jan Koum enrolled in San Jose State University while also working as a security tester at Ernst & Young.
While on assignment for EY, Koum was brought on to help at Yahoo, where Forbes reported that he met an employee who would become his future WhatsApp cofounder, Brian Acton.
Koum switched jobs to become an infrastructure engineer at Yahoo, and was soon inundated with doing work on its servers.
He dropped out to devote his time to Yahoo, telling Forbes in 2014 that he “hated school anyway.”
Koum and Acton left Yahoo in 2007 and cofounded WhatsApp in 2009. It was sold to Facebook for $19 billion in 2014.
Dustin Moskovitz — cofounder, Facebook and Asana
Dustin Moskovitz studied computer science at Harvard, where he was roommates with Mark Zuckerberg.
Moskovitz volunteered to help Zuckerberg work on his new website and learned a coding language in “a couple of days” to be able to work, according to a lecture Zuckerberg gave in 2005.
Along with Zuckerberg, Moskovitz dropped out of Harvard to move to Palo Alto and work on Facebook full-time.
He left Facebook in 2008 and cofounded Asana, a work management platform, where he was the CEO until 2025. He still serves as the chair of its board of directors.
Travis Kalanick — cofounder and former CEO, Uber
Travis Kalanick, a California native, enrolled in UCLA to study computer engineering.
Through the school’s Computer Science Undergraduate Association, he met two classmates named Michael Todd and Vince Busam.
Kalanick worked with four other students out of Busam’s dorm room to develop a peer-to-peer search engine called Scour.
He dropped out of school in 1998 to work for Scour full-time, and survived by collecting unemployment as the company looked to secure funding.
Kalanick cofounded Uber in 2009. He was the CEO until 2017.
Arash Ferdowsi — cofounder, Dropbox
Arash Ferdowsi attended MIT, where he studied computer science and interned at Google as a software engineer for a summer.
In the summer of 2007, recent MIT graduate Drew Houston reached out to Ferdowsi to team up on an idea for a cloud storage service that later became Dropbox.
Inc. reported in 2011 that Ferdowsi dropped out of MIT in his last semester to commit himself fully to Dropbox, and worked with Houston from a small office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to build the platform.
He is now a prominent business-to-business startup investor.
Michael Dell — founder and CEO, Dell
Entrepreneur reported that Michael Dell attended the University of Texas in 1983 as a premed student, but by the end of his freshman year, he decided to drop out.
From his college dorm room, Dell founded the personal-computer company that would later become Dell. He told Business Insider in 2019 that in the first nine months, the company’s sales were $6 million, and the next year they were $33 million.
Forbes reported that as of 2026, Dell is the 13th richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of approximately $141 billion.
Bill Gates — cofounder, Microsoft
Bill Gates left Harvard in 1975 to cofound Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen. In an obituary Gates wrote for Allen in The Wall Street Journal in 2018, Gates said they had decided on the new venture in December 1974.
When Gates left school, he took it as an official leave of absence. He said in a 1976 interview that he did so to allow him to return to school “if things hadn’t worked out.”
Gates was the CEO of Microsoft from 1975 to 2000. He is the chair of the Gates Foundation, a philanthropic organization, and has donated billions to charity.
Paul Allen — cofounder, Microsoft
The late Paul Allen dropped out of Washington State University in 1974 after two years to work as a programmer in Boston, where his friend since grade school — Bill Gates — was attending Harvard, Vanity Fair reported.
The two childhood friends cofounded Microsoft. The BBC reported that Allen left Microsoft in 1983 after his first cancer diagnosis, but continued serving as a director.
Shayne Coplan — founder and CEO, Polymarket
Shayne Coplan dropped out of New York University, where he was studying computer science, during his freshman year.
Bloomberg reported that he began exploring prediction markets and building Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based prediction market that enables users to trade on the likelihood of future outcomes, such as election results and sports scores. It launched in 2020.
Bloomberg reported that in 2025, Intercontinental Exchange invested $2 billion in Polymarket, briefly making Coplan the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at 27.
Matt Mullenweg — founder and CEO, Automattic
Matt Mullenweg told the Houston Press in 2004 that he developed the open-source software for the blogging platform WordPress as a 19-year-old freshman at the University of Houston, where he was studying philosophy and political science.
By the start of his junior year, he wrote in a personal blog that he left college for a job at CNET in San Francisco.
He left the company in 2005, when he founded Automattic, which is behind WordPress.
Editor’s note: This story was first published in May 2019 and was most recently updated in July 2026.
Read the original article on Business Insider
The post 21 successful tech moguls who never graduated college appeared first on Business Insider.
