I chose Tesla for three reasons (over PayPal and Zip); first, it's what he is most famous for; it produced most of his fortune and is by a large margin his biggest success; and it's amazing what he went through to pull it off.

There are other entrepreneurs on the list with smaller successes prior to their big hits (a lot of them in fact). In my post I included the text "the age at which they got their big hit" to cover that aspect.

I understand your logic, but find the list misleading. Regardless of hard work, Tesla was founded by an experienced millionaire.