Penn ranks first in producing billionaires, according to Forbes

Penn is the number one school in the U.S. for producing the most billionaires, according to the latest rankings from Forbes.

On Oct. 17, Forbes released its list of the 400 wealthiest people in the U.S., 18 of whom earned their undergraduate degrees from Penn. By drawing on this data, Forbes formed another list ranking schools according to how many billionaires they had produced. 

Six of the eight Ivy League schools made the list of the top billionaire-producing colleges, with the exceptions of Princeton University and Brown University. 

Penn's billionaire graduates include Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who graduated from the College and Wharton in 1997 after transferring from Queen’s University in Ontario, founder and chair of the Emerson Collective and 1985 Wharton graduate Laurene Powell Jobs and Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Warren Buffett, who enrolled in Wharton in 1947 before transferring to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln two years later.

The universities with the second and third highest number of billionaires are Stanford University and Yale University respectively, both of which have 13 graduates on the Forbes 400. 

This is not the first year that Penn had the highest number of billionaire graduates. In 2014 and 2016, Penn was also ranked first by Forbes in this category.

Many Penn billionaires from this year's ranking graduated from Wharton, but David Friedman, president of market research group Wealth-X president told Business Insider in 2014 that the school’s reputation for a strong business school doesn’t necessarily have that large of an impact on its wealthy alumni. He noted that Penn billionaires work in an array of fields beyond technology or finance.

“On the surface,” Friedman said, “I think [Wharton’s reputation is] a contributing factor, but it's definitely not a core driver.”