Billionaire Immigrant

Immigrant Story That Will Make You Believe In The American Dream Again
(Immigrant Billionaire Thomas Peterffy and the American Dream)

Thomas Peterffy is a Hungarian-born American billionaire businessman. He is the founder, chairman, CEO, and the largest shareholder of Interactive Brokers. Peterffy worked as an architectural draftsman after emigrating to the United States, and later became a computer programmer.

Thomas Peterffy was born in the basement of a Budapest hospital on Sept. 30, 1944. His mother had been moved there because of a Soviet air raid. After the Soviets liberated Hungary from Nazi occupation, Hungary became a satellite state, laboring under a different kind of oppression: communism. Peterffy and his family, descended from nobles, lost everything. "We were basically prisoners there," he says. As a young man Peterffy dreamed about being free from that prison--in America.

At the age of 20 he hatched an escape plan. At the time Hungarians were allowed short-term visas to visit family in West Germany, and he took advantage of this. When his visa expired, like millions who have immigrated to the U.S. illegally in recent years, he didn't go back home. Instead he left for the U.S. Peterffy landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City in December 1965. He had no money and spoke no English. He had a single suitcase, which contained a change of clothes, a surveying handbook, a slide rule and a painting of an ancestor.