What do the world’s most successful people read in their spare time?
While billionaires have access to resources most of us can only dream of, many still carve out time in their busy schedules to read and learn.
Here are 10 mind-blowing books that come most highly recommended by billionaires.

1. Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger

(4.43/5 ⭐️)

A collection of speeches and essays by the Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway distilling his lifelong learnings on business, investing, and living wisely into a practical mental model toolkit for making better decisions.

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads — and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.” — Charles Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack

Recommended by: Bill Gates, Daniel Ek, Drew Houston and 3 other billionaires.

2. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

(4.37/5 ⭐️)

A sweeping history of humankind from evolution through civilization’s cognitive, agricultural, and scientific revolutions to today’s political and economic systems and their implications for human identity and potential.

“Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.” — Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

Recommended by: Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Daniel Ek and 8 other billionaires.

3. High Output Management by Andy Grove

(4.30/5 ⭐️)

A Silicon Valley legend and former CEO of Intel shares counterintuitive insights and anecdotes on entrepreneurship, company building, strategy, culture, innovation, and management.

“When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can’t do it or won’t do it; he is either not capable or not motivated. To determine which, we can employ a simple mental test: if the person’s life depended on doing the work, could he do it? If the answer is yes, that person is not motivated; if the answer is no, he is not capable.” — Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

Recommended by: Brian Armstrong, Brian Chesky, Larry Ellison and 6 other billionaires.

4. The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

(4.22/5 ⭐️)

A leading venture capitalist draws on his entrepreneurial experiences to offer hard-won, battle-tested advice on building and running a startup, managing crises, and leading people.

“Great CEOs face the pain. They deal with the sleepless nights, the cold sweats, and what my friend the great Alfred Chuang (legendary cofounder and CEO of BEA Systems) calls “the torture.” Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say, “I didn’t quit.” — Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Recommended by: Keith Rabois, Larry Page, Peter Thiel and 4 other billionaires.

5. Principles by Ray Dalio

(4.12/5 ⭐️)

The billionaire hedge fund manager details the unorthodox culture, radical transparency, idea meritocracy, and other key practices underlying Bridgewater’s success.

“Imagine that in order to have a great life you have to cross a dangerous jungle. You can stay safe where you are and have an ordinary life, or you can risk crossing the jungle to have a terrific life. How would you approach that choice? Take a moment to think about it because it is the sort of choice that, in one form or another, we all have to make.” — Ray Dalio, Principles

Recommended by: Drew Houston, Dustin Moskovitz, Howard Marks and 7 other billionaires.

6. The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen

(4.04/5 ⭐️)

A Harvard professor explains through vivid examples how leading companies often fail when disruptive innovations transform markets, and offers frameworks to harness disruption rather than be overtaken by it.

“The reason is that good management itself was the root cause. Managers played the game the way it was supposed to be played. The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to the success of established companies are the very processes that reject disruptive technologies: listening carefully to customers; tracking competitors’ actions carefully; and investing resources to design and build higher-performance, higher-quality products that will yield greater profit. These are the reasons why great firms stumbled or failed when confronted with disruptive technological change.” ― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma

Recommended by: Drew Houston, Ev Williams, Jeff Bezos and 3 other billionaires.

7. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

(4.02/5 ⭐️)

A pizza delivery driver and freelance hacker in a dystopian future America investigates a dangerous new drug that infects users with a computer virus and draws him into mafia conspiracies.

“We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.” ― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

Recommended by: Ev Williams, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and 3 other billionaires.

8. Blitzscaling by Reed Hoffman

(3.97/5 ⭐️)

The LinkedIn founder identifies counterintuitive strategies for scaling up startups at a dizzying pace by prioritizing speed over efficiency and dominating a market niche.

“Blitzscaling is a strategy and set of techniques for driving and managing extremely rapid growth that prioritize speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty. Put another way, it’s an accelerant that allows your company to grow at a furious pace that knocks the competition out of the water.” ― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling

Recommended by: Brian Chesky, Eric Schmidt, Vinod Khosla and 4 other billionaires.

9. Only the Paranoid Survive by Andrew Grove

(3.97/5 ⭐️)

The Intel CEO describes pivotal crises that threatened Intel’s survival at key inflection points and his approach to using fear as a management tool to drive change.

“Admitting that you need to learn something new is always difficult. It is even harder if you are a senior manager who is accustomed to the automatic deference which people accord you owing to your position. But if you don’t fight it, that very deference may become a wall that isolates you from learning new things. It all takes self-discipline.” ― Andrew S. Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive

Recommended by: Bill Gates, Charlie Munger, Marc Andreessen and 3 other billionaires.

10. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

(3.69/5 ⭐️)

An impassioned novel envisioning a dystopian United States spiraling into totalitarianism as society’s leaders and innovators go on strike and disappear, leaving railroad executive Dagny Taggart to fight for the future.

“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.” ― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Recommended by: Elon Musk, Ev Williams, Peter Thiel and 5 other billionaires.

Data on billionaire book recommendations compiled from Most Recommended Books
The reading lists of the world’s most successful people offer unique insight into the books that have shaped brilliant minds. While everyone has individual tastes, the influential books billionaires turn to provide food for thought. Have any of these books caught your eye?
Join our Telegram channel for more book recommendations: https://t.me/ebooks