Jeff Bezos went to Princeton, Zuckerberg and Gates to Harvard, Sergey Brin and Evan Spiegel to Stanford. The bestest degrees seem like a decent option for the xB/year category too.
With the exception of Bezos, everyone on your list dropped out of their degree before finishing it - although to be fair to Brin, he already had a degree from Maryland before dropping out of his PhD.
Going to schools like that is more about having the right pedigree and connections. It’s much easier to get VC funding or get hired into a tech company as a stanford dropout than as a tripple doctorate from croatia.
Dropping out doesn't mean they didn't already get a lot of benefit from their schooling. Just that they realized they didn't need the piece of paper and could do the rest on their own.
But especially the fundamentals is where I think most of the value of a uni degree is.
Yeah, there's a huge difference between "so-and-so left a PhD program to start a company based on his research" and "so-and-so read a web framework tutorial instead of going to college."
