What Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and 13 other highly successful tech people were doing at age 25

By Jacquelyn Smith, Rachel Gillett and Brandt Ranj

What were the most successful people in tech doing when they were 25?

At the time, many were already founding or making deals with multimillion-dollar companies, or simply dreaming up how they could make their dent in the universe. 

In other words, it varied from tech titan to tech titan, and it all goes to show that there's no one path to success.

To underscore that point, we've compiled these snapshots to show you what they were up to at 25.

Steve Jobs took his company public and became a millionaire.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

By the end of its first day of trading in December 1980, Apple Computer had a market value of $1.2 billion, making its cofounders very rich men. Jobs, one of the three cofounders, was 25.

He later told biographer Walter Isaacson that he made a pledge at that time to never let money ruin his life.

Larry Ellison was working odd jobs as a programmer.

Oracle

After moving to Berkeley, California, at 22, the college dropout turned billionaire Oracle founder used what he picked up in college and taught himself about computer programming. He found odd technical jobs at places like Fireman's Fund, Wells Fargo, and AMPEX until finally landing at Amdahl Corporation, where he worked on the first IBM-compatible mainframe system.

Jeff Bezos had a cushy job in finance.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

At age 24, the future Amazon founder and CEO went to work at Bankers Trust developing revolutionary software for banking institutions at that time, according to the book "Jeff Bezos: The Founder of Amazon.com" by Ann Byers.

Two years later, Bezos became the company's youngest vice president. 

Elon Musk was running his first internet company.

REUTERS/Danny Moloshok

Before turning 25, Musk dropped out of his PhD program at Stanford to join the dot-com boom and launch his first internet company, Zip2, which provided business directories and maps, Ashlee Vance reports in "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future."

Compaq bought the company for $307 million four years later, and Musk used the money to launch his next startup venture, PayPal.