From homeless to billionaire: the bizarre career of John Paul DeJoria
John Paul DeJoria now has several successful companies to his name, giving him a capital of 2.8 billion dollars. But this entrepreneur has certainly not always had a lot of money. In fact, at one point he even lived in a car with his two-year-old son and sold encyclopedias door-to-door.
In the podcast The Tim Ferriss Show, he says that the lessons he learned during this period of his life ultimately ensured his success.
The mega-entrepreneur was a homeless single father, but now lives in a 50 million house in Malibu, with all the toys a man could wish for; from beautiful cars to a private jet. How did this billionaire do that?
Living in a car
John Paul DeJoria ended up on the street, after the mother of his two-year-old son had run off with all the money they had in their bank account. “She left a note,” says John. “It said something like, ‘I can’t take being a mother anymore, he’ll be better off if he stays with you.’ The next day we were evicted from our house. Apparently they had already put up notes that we had to pay the rent, but they had torn it up and I hadn’t seen them.”
For a while he lived with his son in a car. They bought food by cleaning up empty Coke bottles in parking lots and handing them in for a…
