Do the names mentioned above ring a bell?

They should because we know all of them. They are just a handful of the men and women whom we all consider as famous entrepreneurs.

Famous entrepreneurs are those people whom the public regard as tycoons, magnates, and moguls because of their material wealth and success in business. They had established their empires long ago or just a few years back and prospered - much to the envy of us common folks.

There are those who have rags-to-riches stories. Some were inheritors of vast wealth who chose to make it on their own. Others were made famous by showbiz or their colorful lifestyles. All of them had their share of struggles, faults, and weaknesses being humans, too. Nevertheless, in the end, the stories of their lives can serve as inspiration to all of us because they fit the definition of the true entrepreneur: someone who takes risk with great reward in sight.

Let's take a look at a couple of these famous entrepreneurs and the inspiring stories of their life and find out what made them, as people say, "filthy rich."

Bill Gates

When most people will be dying to finish a degree from Harvard, Bill Gates, whose interest in computers and programming started at an early age, decided to dropout to manage a small business he and his partner, Paul Allen, called Microsoft.

They modified the language of BASIC programming for the Altair 8800 known in history as the first ever successful personal computer.

But it was Bill Gates purchase of the disk operating system (DOS) from a company, then, providing MS-DOS for the personal computers of IBM, which really sealed his fate as a computer mogul, with an estimated asset of $46 billion dollars in 2004.

Oprah Winfrey

Overcoming a series of traumatic events in her childhood is by no means easy, but Oprah Winfrey was able to rise above it all.

Born out of wedlock and a victim of molestation, Oprah Winfrey studied and worked hard to have a television career - starting as a news reporter and anchor and emerging as one of the most prominent talk show hosts and businesswomen in the world.

Through HARPO (her company that uses Oprah spelled backwards as its name), she was able to expand her investments from the Oprah Winfrey Show to the Oxygen Cable Network and O Magazine. Owning 90% of HARPO and with an estimated asset of $1 billion, she usually lands in Fortune's list of the wealthiest people in the world every time.

Aside from being able to deliver compassionate and persuasive talk shows, Oprah Winfrey was also able to brand herself successfully. One only has to bring up her name and most people will know that she was the one being talked about. Even her magazine was able to outdo the likes of Vogue and Fortune in terms of the sheer number of subscribers.

Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey are just two of the famous entrepreneurs that the world has today. A closer look at the lives of these entrepreneurs will reveal techniques and methods that we may use to achieve financial freedom; invaluable insights that will teach us how to amass vast wealth and achieve greatness; and lessons that will help us develop the same spirit of entrepreneurship that these rich and famous entrepreneurs share.