Immigrant Story: Thomas Peterffy
Thomas Peterffy. Photo by Matt Furman for Forbes.
Thomas Peterffy was born in the basement of a Budapest hospital on Sept. 30, 1944. His mother had been moved there because of a Soviet air raid. After the Soviets liberated Hungary from Nazi occupation, Hungary became a satellite state, laboring under a different kind of oppression: communism. Peterffy and his family, descended from nobles, lost everything. "We were basically prisoners there," he says. As a young man Peterffy dreamed about being free from that prison--in America.
At the age of 20 he hatched an escape plan. At the time Hungarians were allowed short-term visas to visit family in West Germany, and he took advantage of this. When his visa expired, like millions who have immigrated to the U.S. illegally in recent years, he didn't go back home. Instead he left for the U.S. Peterffy landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City in December 1965. He had no money and spoke no English. He had a single suitcase, which contained a change of clothes, a surveying handbook, a slide rule and a painting of an ancestor.
Peterffy went to Spanish Harlem, where other Hungarian immigrants had formed a small community, moving from one dingy apartment to another. He was happy, if not a bit afraid. "It was a big deal to leave home and my culture and my language," he says. "But I believed that in America, I could truly reap what I sowed and that the measure of a man was his ability and determination to succeed. This was the land of boundless opportunity."
Indeed it was. He got a job as a draftsman in a surveying firm. When his firm bought a computer, "nobody knew how to program it, so I volunteered to try," he says. He caught on quickly and soon had a job as a programmer for a small Wall Street consulting firm, where he built trading models.
By the late 1970s Peterffy had saved $200,000 and founded a company that pioneered electronic stock trades, executing them before the exchanges were even digitized. In the 1990s he began to concentrate on the sell side of the business, founding Interactive Brokers Group, which has a market cap of $14 billion. Peterffy, 72, is now worth an estimated $12.6 billion.
Thomas Peterffy embodies the American Dream. So does Google founder Sergey Brin ($37.5 billion). And eBay founder Pierre Omidyar ($8.1 billion). And Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk ($11.6 billion). And Rupert Murdoch, George Soros, Jerry Yang, Micky Arison, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Jan Koum, Jeff Skoll, Jorge Perez, Peter Thiel. As well as a couple dozen others who also immigrated to this country, earned U.S. citizenship--and then a spot on The Forbes 400.
Precisely 42 slots on The Forbes 400 belong to naturalized citizens who immigrated to America. That's 10.5% of the list, a huge overperformance considering that naturalized citizens make up only 6% of the U.S. population. (If you add noncitizens, about 13% of American residents are foreign born, but there is also a slew of noncitizen billionaires, such as Chobani Yogurt king Hamdi Ulukaya and WeWork founder Adam Neumann, who by dint of their passports don't qualify for the 400 but still live, and create jobs, in the U.S.)
For all the political bombast about immigrants being an economic drain or a security threat, the pace of economic hypersuccess among immigrants is increasing. Go back ten years and the number of immigrants on The Forbes 400 was 35. Twenty years ago it was 26 and 30 years ago 20. Not only is the American Dream thriving, as measured by the yardstick of entrepreneurial success, The Forbes 400, but it's also never been stronger. The combined net worth of those 42 immigrant fortunes is $248 billion.
According to the Kauffman Foundation, immigrants are nearly twice as likely to start a new business than native-born Americans. The Partnership for a New American Economy, a nonpartisan group formed by Forbes 400 members Murdoch and Michael Bloomberg, reports that immigrants started 28% of all new businesses in the U.S. in 2011, employ one out of every ten American workers at privately owned businesses and generate $775 billion in revenue. Some of these businesses are small, of course, like restaurants and auto repair shops. But others aren't: The National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan research group, says that 44 of the 87 American tech companies valued at $1 billion or more were founded by immigrants, many of whom now rank among the richest people in America.
NONE OF THIS SHOULD be a surprise. Thanks to technology, it's never been easier to start a business of significance. And America's perpetual entrepreneur class, for nearly a quarter-millennium, has been made up of immigrants.