Meta founder and CEO is one of the most famous college dropouts.Bloomberg/Getty ImagesTech leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates famously dropped out of college.A new generation of college dropouts is building billion-dollar AI companies.These 21 tech founders and executives never graduated from college.The debate around whether college is worth the time and money has been heating up.As AI reshapes what it means to be a white-collar worker, and amid high tuition fees, some young people are rethinking the traditional path of graduating from college before entering the workforce.By now, stories of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates dropping out of college before earning their degrees have become tech-industry folklore. However, the Meta and Microsoft founders aren't the only influential executives who have risen to the top without finishing college.The founders and CEOs of other tech companies — including a new generation of Gen Z AI talent — also left higher education to bet on the tech world.Here are 21 tech executives who never got their college degrees.Mark Zuckerberg — founder and CEO, MetaZuckerberg is pictured wearing the Ray-Ban Meta glasses.Bloomberg/Getty ImagesZuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta, studied psychology and computer science at Harvard but left without completing a degree.In 2004, while a student at Harvard University, he launched "thefacebook.com," which later became Facebook, but he dropped out during his sophomore year to move to Palo Alto and work on his company full-time."It's sort of been this taboo thing to say, maybe not everyone needs to go to college because there's, like, a lot of jobs that don't require that," Zuckerberg told comedian Theo Von in a 2025 interview. "But I think people are probably coming around to that opinion a little more now than maybe like 10 years ago."Zuckerberg received an honorary degree from Harvard in 2017.Sam Altman — cofounder and CEO, OpenAIAnna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesSam Altman studied computer science at Stanford University for two years before dropping out in 2005 at the age of 19.He left to cofound location-sharing app Loopt, which was acquired in 2012 by Green Dot.Altman became president of the startup accelerator Y Combinator in 2014. He cofounded OpenAI in 2015, alongside Elon Musk and other founders, and he became the CEO in 2019.Altman said in an interview at the DevDay conference in 2025 that he is "envious of the current generation of 20-year-old dropouts.""The amount of stuff you can build, the opportunity in this space is so incredibly wide," he said.John and Patrick Collison — cofounders, StripeJohn Collison (left) is the cofounder and president of Stripe, while his brother Patrick Collison (right) is the CEO.Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Win McNamee/Getty ImagesJohn and Patrick Collison grew up in Ireland. As teenagers, they hatched the idea for their first business, an online auction management company named Auctomatic.The brothers sold Auctomatic in 2008 for $5 million, making them teen millionaires, The Guardian reported.Patrick Collison enrolled at MIT in 2006, but dropped out to work on his business ventures, while John Collison started at Harvard in 2009 and dropped out a year later to work on their new payments company, Stripe.The brothers launched Stripe in 2010. CNBC reported that it was valued at $159 billion earlier this year.Mustafa Suleyman — CEO, Microsoft AIMustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI.Stephen Brashear/Getty ImagesMustafa Suleyman grew up in London and studied philosophy and theology at Oxford University. He dropped out as the degree felt "abstract and impractical" to him.After leaving university, Suleyman set up the Muslim Youth Helpline, a telephone counseling service, with a friend from university.After working for several years in politics and consulting, Suleyman cofounded DeepMind in 2010.In 2024, Suleyman became the executive vice president and CEO of the newly founded Microsoft AI.Melanie Perkins — cofounder and CEO, CanvaNina Franova/Getty Images for SXSW SydneyMelanie Perkins grew up in Perth, Australia, and attended the University of Western Australia, where she came up with the idea of making design easier, she told Entrepreneur in 2019.Perkins launched Fusion Books, a website that enables students to design their own yearbooks, with her then-boyfriend (and now-husband), Clifford Obrecht, in 2007.She told the BBC that she decided to drop out of college, believing the concept could be applied to projects beyond yearbooks. Perkins began meeting investors in Silicon Valley in 2010.In 2013, Perkins and Obrecht launched Canva. The company was valued at $42 billion in a 2025 employee share sale.Daniel Ek — cofounder and executive chair, SpotifyBloomberg/Getty ImagesDaniel Ek grew up in Sweden and enrolled at the country's KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2002 to study engineering.In an interview with Forbes in 2012, he said he lasted only eight weeks, when he found out his ent
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