Edited By Alex Knapp and Michael Noer, Forbes Staff

No less an icon than the Statue of Liberty celebrates America’s 50 million foreign-born residents, welcoming the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Lady Liberty is herself foreign-born, an 1885 gift to the nation from France, and a reminder that this is a place where people come to build a new life for themselves and their children. In that spirit, for the country’s 250th anniversary, we have ranked America’s 250 greatest living immigrants.

America’s Most Successful Immigrants

#1. Arnold Schwarzenegger, 78 • Austria 🇦🇹

Schwarzenegger was already a champion bodybuilder when he came to the U.S. in 1968 to conquer other fields: The billionaire is a real estate mogul, a movie star and served two terms as California’s governor. He loves his adopted land, once saying: “There is one label I hold above all else: American.”

#2. Elon Musk, 54 • South Africa 🇿🇦

The world’s richest-ever person grew up in Pretoria, South Africa, where he taught himself to code. He became a U.S. citizen in 2002, the same year he founded SpaceX.

#3. Sergey Brin, 52 • Russia 🇷🇺

The Google cofounder arrived in the U.S. at age 6 with his family as Soviet refugees escaping persecution of Jews. Brin stepped away from Google in 2019 but became active again four years later to spearhead its AI efforts.

#4. Jensen Huang, 63 • Taiwan 🇹🇼

Nvidia’s CEO told his employees in a memo last year that “the miracle of Nvidia—built by all of you, and by brilliant colleagues around the world, would not be possible without immigration.”

#5. Rupert Murdoch, 95 • Australia 🇦🇺

The media mogul arrived in the States in 1973 and has had a profound impact on American business, culture and politics through his ownership of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and Fox News.

#6. Peter Thiel, 58 • Germany 🇩🇪

Silicon Valley’s philosopher king came to the U.S. as an infant from Germany before earning undergraduate and law degrees at Stanford, after which he cofounded PayPal.

#7. Thomas Peterffy, 81 • Hungary 🇭🇺

The electronic-trading pioneer and founder of Interactive Brokers arrived in New York at 21, a penniless descendant of aristocrats who lost their wealth to communism.

#8. Lisa Su, 56 • Taiwan 🇹🇼

AMD’s CEO immigrated with her parents when she was 3. When she took the chief executive job in 2014, many on Wall Street considered AMD “uninvestable.” She turned it into an AI powerhouse—and became a billionaire in the process.

#9. Vlad Tenev, 39 • Bulgaria 🇧🇬

Tenev came to America when he was just 5; he met his Robinhood cofounder, Baiju Bhatt—an American born to immigrant parents—while attending Stanford.

#10. Wolfgang Puck, 76 • Austria 🇦🇹

The celebrity chef was a pioneer of “California cuisine” in the 1980s with his West Hollywood restaurant Spago; he leveraged his culinary fame into dozens of fine-dining and fast-casual restaurants, then frozen dinners and cookware.

#11. Shahid Khan, 75 • Pakistan 🇵🇰

With $500 in his pocket, Khan arrived in Illinois to get his engineering degree. After winning a lawsuit against his former employer, Flex-N-Gate, he bought the company and made it the cornerstone of an auto parts empire. He also owns the Jacksonville Jaguars, and hosts naturalization ceremonies for new citizens at the team’s stadium.

#12. Jan Koum, 50 • Ukraine 🇺🇦

The WhatsApp founder and his mother came to the United States in 1992 as refugees, living in a small two-bedroom apartment and relying on food stamps.

#13. Ryan Reynolds, 49 • Canada 🇨🇦

He has funneled his Hollywood dollars into multiple ventures, including Aviation Gin and Mint Mobile, which were acquired by Diageo and T-Mobile, respectively.

#14. Vinod Khosla, 71 • India 🇮🇳

Khosla came to the U.S. in 1976 and cofounded Sun Microsystems in 1982 before becoming one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capitalists.

#15. Isaac Perlmutter, 83 • Israel 🇮🇱

A veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, Perlmutter arrived in New York in 1967 after fighting in the Six-Day War. In 1998, the distressed-asset investor beat Carl Icahn to buy Marvel out of bankruptcy. Eleven years later, he sold it to Disney for $4 billion.

#16. George Soros, 95 • Hungary 🇭🇺

The currency trader who broke the British pound in 1992 later became an influential philanthropist. His Open Society Foundations have distributed more than $24 billion to causes such as human rights and public health.

#17. Patrick Soon-Shiong, 73 • South Africa 🇿🇦

The medical doctor who invented the cancer drug Abraxane was born to Chinese parents in South Africa and came to the U.S. in 1980. He owns the Los Angeles Times.

#18. Miriam Adelson, 80 • Israel 🇮🇱

Adelson, who is a trained doctor, arrived in 1986 to research addiction. She became a citizen in 1991, the same year she married casino magnate Sheldon Adelson (d. 2021).

#19. Lorne Michaels, 81 • Canada 🇨🇦

In 1968, Michaels moved to Hollywood to write for the variety TV show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. Seven years later, he premiered Saturday Night Live.

#20. Melania Trump, 56 • Slovenia 🇸🇮

She is the first naturalized citizen to become First Lady of the United States.

#21. Linus Torvalds, 56 • Finland 🇫🇮

Torvalds was already nerd-famous for having invented Linux when he immigrated to the United States in 1997. The open source pioneer later developed Git, used by software developers worldwide to track changes to code.

#22. Tony Xu, 41 • China 🇨🇳

The China-born Xu spent his childhood washing dishes in the restaurant where his mother worked as a waitress. After earning an MBA from Stanford, he cofounded DoorDash in 2013, revolutionizing the food-delivery landscape.

#23. Paul Graham, 61 • United Kingdom 🇬🇧

Graham arrived as a child in 1968, and in 2005 he cofounded Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s legendary startup accelerator, which has been instrumental in building companies including Airbnb and Stripe.

#24. Katalin Kariko, 71 • Hungary 🇭🇺

Before she won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for her work on mRNA vaccines, she came to the U.S. in 1985 from Hungary with about $1,200 stuffed inside a teddy bear for safekeeping.

#25. Yo-Yo Ma, 70 • France 🇫🇷

Born in Paris to Chinese parents, the world’s most famous classical musician performed for President John F. Kennedy as a child and has since won 20 Grammys.

#26. Mortimer Zuckerman, 88 • Canada 🇨🇦

The real-estate baron stepped away from his company Boston Properties nearly a decade ago but still serves as editor-in-chief of U.S. News and World Report, which he bought in 1984.

#27. Naval Ravikant, 51 • India 🇮🇳

The cofounder of investment platform AngelList made early bets on Uber, Twitter and delivery service Postmates, which Uber acquired for $2.7 billion in 2020.

#28. Max Levchin, 51 • Ukraine 🇺🇦

The fintech entrepreneur came to the U.S. as a refugee before cofounding PayPal. He’s now chairman and CEO of “buy now, pay later” service Affirm.

#29. Noubar Afeyan, 63 • Lebanon 🇱🇧

Afeyan came to the United States to study biochemical engineering. He stayed to become an investor, whose firm Flagship Pioneering has launched more than 70 healthcare companies.

#30. Min Kao, 77 • Taiwan 🇹🇼

He’s the “Min” in GPS and fitness wearable giant Garmin.

#31. Hemant Taneja, 50 • India 🇮🇳

Among the General Catalyst founder’s investments are Stripe, social media platform Snap and defense firm Andruil.

#32. Jeff Skoll, 61 • Canada 🇨🇦

After serving as eBay’s first employee and president, he founded Participant Media, which produced socially motivated films like Syriana and An Inconvenient Truth before shutting down in 2024.

#33. Michael Polsky, 76 • Russia 🇷🇺

After selling his natural gas business in 2001, his renewable energy ventures made him a billionaire.

#34. Mario Capecchi, 88 • Italy 🇮🇹

His invention of “knockout mice,” which allow researchers to genetically fine-tune the animals to study disease, earned him the 2007 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

#35. Daphne Koller, 57 • Israel 🇮🇱

Koller is one of America’s richest self-made women thanks to first cofounding digital education company Coursera in 2012 with Andrew Ng (#122) and then AI-powered biotech company Insitro in 2018.

#36. Eric Kandel, 96 • Austria 🇦🇹

His discoveries of how the brain stores memories earned him a Nobel prize in 2000 and laid the foundation for his company Memory Pharmaceuticals, which is now a subsidiary of Roche.

#37. Jony Ive, 59 • United Kingdom 🇬🇧

He designed the iMac, iPod, iPad and iPhone.

#38. Roald Hoffmann, 88 • Poland 🇵🇱

As a child, Hoffmann was smuggled out of Poland to escape the Nazis. He immigrated to America and won the Nobel Prize in 1981 for discovering how to use quantum mechanics to predict chemical reactions. He’s also written several volumes of poetry and his plays have been performed around the world.

#39. Igor Olenicoff, 83 • Russia 🇷🇺

Olenicoff was born in the Soviet Union and raised in Iran before coming to the United States, where his real estate development business made him a billionaire.

#40. Kamal Ghaffarian, 67 • Iran 🇮🇷

Ghaffarian came to the United States during its bicentennial year of 1976; 48 years later his company Intuitive Machines landed the first American spacecraft on the Moon since the Apollo program.

#41. Feng Zhang, 44 • China 🇨🇳

A pioneer of gene-editing technology CRISPR, his company Beam Therapeutics currently has drugs in clinical trials to cure genetic diseases like sickle cell anemia.

#42. Peggy Cherng, 78 • Myanmar 🇲🇲

She used her engineering prowess to turn she and her husband’s fast-food chain Panda Express into an American staple.

#43. Andrew Cherng, 78 • China 🇨🇳

In 1973, Cherng opened a Chinese restaurant called Panda Inn in Pasadena, California, which he and his wife Peggy later turned into Panda Express.

#44. Sanjay Mehrotra, 67 • India 🇮🇳

The CEO of Micron rode the computer memory boom to a trillion-dollar valuation as of early June. Prior to that, he founded memory chip giant Sandisk, which was acquired by Western Digital for $19 billion in 2016.

#45. C. Dean Metropoulos, 80 • Greece 🇬🇷

The distressed-asset investor has saved iconic American brands like Hostess, Chef Boyardee and Pabst Blue Ribbon.

#46. Yann LeCun, 65 • France 🇫🇷

His research into neural networks paved the way for the modern AI boom. After years at Meta, the “Godfather of AI” struck out on his own in December 2025, raising more than $1 billion for his AI startup.

#47. Sebastian Thrun, 58 • Germany 🇩🇪

Thrun was the CEO of Google X, the company’s moonshot division, spearheading projects like self-driving cars and Google Glass before cofounding digital education startup Udacity in 2011.

#48. Pierre Omidyar, 58 • France 🇫🇷

The eBay founder also owns stakes in resort properties around the world.

#49. Michael Moritz, 72 • United Kingdom 🇬🇧

The former Time magazine journalist turned venture capitalist is a billionaire thanks to early bets on the likes of PayPal, Google and YouTube.

#50. Neil Young, 80 • Canada 🇨🇦

The folk-rock legend drove across the border in a hearse in 1966 to start his music career.

#51. John Tu, 84 • China 🇨🇳

Tu and his Kingston Technology cofounder David Sun have made their company a dominant player in computer memory without taking any outside investment.

#52. Eren Ozmen, 67 • Turkey 🇹🇷

Eren Ozmen came to the United States to get her MBA. In 1994, she and her husband Fatih bought Sierra Nevada Corp and built it into a defense aerospace powerhouse.

#53. Fatih Ozmen, 68 • Turkey 🇹🇷

Fatih Ozmen was an engineer at Sierra Nevada Corporation before he and his wife bought the company.

#54. Haim Saban, 81 • Egypt 🇪🇬

Saban was born in Egypt, raised in Israel and lived in France before settling in the United States where he created the Power Rangers franchise, which sold to Disney in 2001 as part of the acquisition of Fox Family. He rebought Power Rangers in 2010 for around $60 million, then sold it again to Hasbro in 2018 for $522 million.

#55. Sundar Pichai, 53 • India 🇮🇳

Pichai joined Google in 2004 to lead development of its Chrome browser. Its success helped him rise all the way to CEO in 2015.

#56. Arieh Warshel, 85 • Israel 🇮🇱

Warshel pioneered the use of computer simulations for complex chemical and biological systems, revolutionizing drug discovery. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in 2013.

#57. Herriot Tabuteau, 54 • Haiti 🇭🇹

The billionaire founder of Axsome Therapeutics holds more than 200 patents on potential medicines for diseases like depression and Alzheimer’s.

#58. Adam Foroughi, 45 • Iran 🇮🇷

Foroughi built a career as a derivatives trader and launched several businesses before cofounding Applovin, a publicly traded AI-powered ad platform that had $5.5 billion in 2025 revenue.

#59. Abhijit Banerjee, 65 • India 🇮🇳

Banerjee is the cofounder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), which tests economic policy with randomized controlled trials. He........

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