Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
Entrepreneurs' life stories have the power to captivate just about anyone. Whether you are reading of how Rockefeller built his gigantic fortune, how Richard Branson built the Virgin empire, or even how controversial Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich rose from a lowly orphanage in a backwater town to command a business empire worth some $14 billion, all these stories are nothing short of breathtaking. However, since last century, the traditional tale of rags to riches has taken a new, digital twist. You could argue that, in the whole of human history, nothing has quite changed the way we accumulate wealth quite so dramatically as the Internet. In the space of the last few years, we have seen Bill Gates and Steve Jobs break through and become IT multibillionaires, but they are being hotly pursued by a whole gang of newly-minted Internet businesspeople that have struck gold on the net almost as dramatically as Pa Clampett from the American TV Show, "The Beverly Hillbillies".