Long before reaching the top of their careers, IPOs and billionaire lives, many of America’s best-known executives had the same pre-dawn wake-up time and the same stack of newspapers waiting on the sidewalk.
They all started in newspapers, whether biking their routes in the dark, throwing the latest edition on the porch or running after customers to collect payments.
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Warren Buffett made some of his first money distributing The Washington Post. Tim Cook woke up at 3 a.m. to deliver the Mobile Press Register in Alabama. This taught these future executives some of the values that took them to the top of their companies.
Newspaper delivery teaches “basic, sound business principles,” Ross Perot told the Associated Press in 1995, citing skills such as managing inventory, collecting payments and meeting schedules every day, rain or shine. The 1992 presidential candidate said he started delivering newspapers when he was around 12 years old and threw them from a horse in a sand-covered neighborhood.
Newspaper delivery is now a relic. The drop in print circulation and concerns about child labor transferred the function to adults and the postal service. But the executives who had this experience didn’t forget it — and many say that’s where they learned the essentials.
Here are five Fortune 500 executives — plus a few honorable mentions — who got their start distributing newspapers.
Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway
The “Oracle of Omaha” began delivering The Washington Post and the Washington Star at age 13. At 14, he already had several routes and was earning US$175 a month — more than some of his teachers, according to Buffett’s biography written by Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life.
Buffett, now 95, filed his first tax return that year, deducting his bicycle and watch as business expenses, he told PBS NewsHour in 2017. He says the job taught him lessons that remain valid over time.
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“You learn a lot about human nature when you deliver newspapers,” Buffett said. “For example, you learn that you have to pay for them every month—whether your customers pay you or not. You have to charge them.”
Buffett became one of the largest shareholders of the newspaper that he once threw on people’s doors — and said he even considered buying it when it went up for sale in 2013.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos now owns The Washington Post. Buffett retired as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of 2025 (he still serves as chairman). His net worth is estimated at US$141 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
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Tim Cook, Apple
Apple CEO Tim Cook (who will be replaced by John Ternus later this year) got his first job at age 11 or 12, delivering the Mobile Press Register in Robertsdale, Alabama. The newspaper ended its print edition in 2023.
“Delivering newspapers helped start my college education,” Cook, now 65, told The Wall Street Journal, referring to the fact that he was the first in his family to attend college.
After that, he “progressed to flipping burgers” at a local Tastee Freeze, earning $1.10 an hour, he told the Table Manners podcast. His net worth is estimated at US$3 billion, according to Forbes.
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Michael Dell, Dell Technologies
The future PC mogul sold subscriptions to the now-defunct Houston Post as a teenager and quietly created the model that would come to define Dell.
Instead of making cold calls, he analyzed marriage and new-resident records and sent direct mail to the most likely buyers, earning $18,000 in a year.
“It was an early lesson in direct marketing, for sure,” Dell said at SXSW in 2024.
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Walt Disney, The Walt Disney Co.
The future animator — and man who would go on to build one of the largest entertainment companies in the world — delivered the Kansas City Star and the Kansas City Times with his brother Roy Disney, from the age of 9 onwards.
“When I was 9 years old, my brother Roy and I were already entrepreneurs,” Disney said, according to a company file. “We had a newspaper route…delivering copies to a residential area every morning and night of the year, rain, shine or snow.”
They would wake up at 3:30 a.m., work until school time, and “do it all over again from 4 p.m. until dinnertime.”
Walt Disney died in 1966 and, at the time, had an estimated net worth of between US$100 million and US$150 million, which would be equivalent today to around US$1 billion to US$1.5 billion. He was founder and CEO of a company that became part of the Fortune 500.
Ross Perot, Electronic Data Systems
The Texas billionaire and two-time presidential candidate may have had the most cinematic route of all. As a boy in Texarkana, Perot built a Texarkana Gazette route from scratch in an area of town largely ignored by the newspaper—and rode it on horseback, traveling 20 miles a day, he told Fortune in 1968.
As he had created the territory himself, he negotiated to keep 70% of the subscription fees, instead of the standard 30%, and confronted the newspaper when it tried to reduce its stake later.
In 1962, Perot founded Electronic Data Systems, which became a Fortune 500 company. HP purchased EDS in 2008 for $13 billion. Perot died in 2019, with an estimated net worth of around $4 billion.
Honorable Mentions: Trash Bags, Late Shifts, and Big Macs
Not every CEO started out delivering newspapers.
Mark Cuban started at age 12 selling trash bags door to door to pay for basketball shoes, and Jeff Bezos worked the morning shift as a fast food cook at McDonald’s throughout high school.
Former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi worked the midnight to 5 a.m. shift as a receptionist in her Yale dorm because the pay was 50 cents an hour higher, and GM CEO Mary Barra started at the automaker itself at age 18 as a student intern inspecting fender panels on the assembly line.
Although they had different first jobs, they all shared similar lessons for professional life: show up, be on time, and be there every morning — even when there’s three feet of snow at 4 a.m.
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