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James Cameron is now a billionaire. The college dropout worked odd jobs like truck driving before making his big break with films like Avatar

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The world has been forever changed by Hollywood franchises like Titanic, Avatar, and The Terminator. But none of them would exist without one filmmaker: James Cameron.

The legendary director is the creative force behind several of the highest-grossing films of all time. Collectively, Cameron’s movies have earned nearly $9 billion at the global box office—a success that has slowly but steadily propelled his wealth into 10-digit territory. 

Now, the 71-year-old’s net worth is estimated at $1.1 billion, according to Forbes. And with Avatar: Fire and Ash—the third instalment in the franchise—hitting theaters this week, that fortune is expected to grow even further.

This level of success once seemed unimaginable for Cameron. In his late teens, the Canadian native dropped out of Fullerton College, a California community college where he was studying physics. He was torn between two competing passions, science and art, but ultimately walked away from formal education altogether.

Instead, Cameron chose to chart his own path. He taught himself optical printing and special effects, and paid the bills by taking odd jobs as a truck driver and janitor. 

“I was completely an autodidact,” he told The New York Times of his film studies. “I just went to USC and studied on my own time. I wasn’t enrolled. I just snuck in, went to the library and studied it all.”

That self-directed education soon paid off. Cameron was able to get his foot in the door in the film industry, and by age 30, he had his first big hit: The Terminator—a film that has since grossed more than $200 million worldwide.

The power of embracing the unknown

Chasing curiosity—and deliberately choosing the unfamiliar—is a mantra Cameron has followed from his teenage years all the way through his decades in Hollywood.

“I’m attracted, in case you haven’t noticed, by things I don’t know how to do,” he told CBS News late last month. “Because you grow and you learn. If I’m still making movies when I got an oxygen tube up my nose and I’m 87 or whatever, should I be that lucky, I want to still be doing things I don’t know how to do.”

That instinct to lean into uncertainty is one Cameron shares with fellow billionaire filmmaker Steven Spielberg, who has long argued that purpose rarely announces itself loudly or all at once.

“You have to every day of your lives be ready to hear what whispers in your ear; it very rarely shouts,” Spielberg said at the Academy of Achievement in 2006. “And if you can listen to the whisper, and if it tickles your heart, and it’s something you think you want to do for the rest of your life, then that is going to be what you do for the rest of your life, and we will benefit from everything you do.”

The rise of billionaires outside of the traditional mold

With his 10-figure net worth, Cameron now joins Spielberg and just three other filmmakers—George Lucas, Peter Jackson, and Tyler Perry—to be part of the exclusive billionaire club.

Traditionally, the word “billionaire” conjures images of tech titans like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg. But that profile is rapidly changing as wealth creation expands beyond Silicon Valley and corporate boardrooms.

There are now more than 2,900 billionaires worldwide, controlling a combined $15.8 trillion in wealth, according to UBS Global Wealth Management’s Billionaire Ambitions Report for 2025. And many of them don’t have a founder or CEO at the top of their resume. Tennis legend Roger Federer, soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, and The Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, are among those to also reach billionaire status in 2025.

Federer, for his part, has urged young people to look beyond narrow definitions of success and pursue work that feels meaningful.

“All of you have so much to give,” he told graduates at Dartmouth College last year. “I hope you will find your own unique ways to make a difference, because life really is much bigger than the court.”



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The Epstein files are heavily redacted, including contact info for Trump, celebs, and bankers

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The highly anticipated Epstein files have so far landed with a thud as page after page of documents have been blacked out, with many nearly totally redacted.

While hundreds of thousands of documents have been released so far on the Justice Department’s site housing the information, there isn’t that much to see.

“Simply releasing a mountain of blacked out pages violates the spirit of transparency and the letter of the law,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement. “For example, all 119 pages of one document were completely blacked out. We need answers as to why.”

That appeared to refer to a document titled “Grand Jury NY.” 

The data dump came late Friday, the deadline that Congress established last month for disclosing the trove of files, though other documents had already been released earlier by the DOJ, Congress and the Epstein estate.

One document listed thousands of names with their contact information redacted, including Donald Trump as well as Ivana and Ivanka Trump.

Numerous celebrities were also in that document, such as Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger and the late pop idol Michael Jackson, who also appeared in photos with Epstein.

Former Senators John Kerry and George Mitchell were on the list as were Jes Staley, a former JPMorgan and Barclays executive, and Leon Black, a cofounder and former CEO of Apollo Global Management.

Appearing in the files doesn’t necessarily imply any wrongdoing as Epstein mingled in wider social circles and was ofter asked for charitable donations.

But Staley said he had sex with a member of Epstein’s staff, and Black was pushed out of Apollo over his Epstein ties, which Black maintains were for tax- and estate-planning services.

Numerous hotels, clubs and restaurants are listed too, plus locations simply described as “massage.” Banks included the now defunct Colonial Bank as well as Bear Stearns and Chemical Bank, which both eventually became part of JPMorgan.

Other entries fell under country categories like Brazil, France, Italy and Israel. Former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak were on the list.



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Epstein files: Trump, Clinton, Summers, Gates not returning any results in search bar

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The Justice Department released a massive trove of files related to the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein on Friday, but the site housing the information was failing to turn up any results.

The data dump came on the deadline that Congress established last month for disclosing the highly anticipated information, though a top Justice official suggested that not all the documents would come out at once with more due in the coming weeks.

While President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and scores of other powerful men have been linked to Epstein, their names failed to come up in a search of DOJ’s “Epstein Library.”

“No results found. Please try a different search,” the site says after queries for their names.

The site adds that “Due to technical limitations and the format of certain materials (e.g., handwritten text), portions of these documents may not be electronically searchable or may produce unreliable search results.”

However, Clinton also appears in photos that were released as does the late pop singer Michael Jackson. Other records were heavily redacted.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress that the Justice Department had identified 1,200 victims of Epstein or their relatives and redacted materials that could reveal their identities, according to the New York Times.

Last month, an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote in Congress produced legislation to force the Trump administration to release the DOJ files, though emails and photos from Epstein’s estate had already come out.

One of the sponsors of that legislation, Rep. Ro Khanna, warned on Friday that if DOJ doesn’t show that it’s complying with the law, Congress could hold impeachment hearings for Attorney General Pam Bondi and Blanche.

Earlier on Friday, Blanche told Fox News that “several hundred thousand” pages would be released on Friday. “And then, over the next couple of weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more,” he added.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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Want a job in AI-era tech? Forget prestigious degrees—tech leaders want to see your GitHub projects and internships

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For decades, computer science has been sold as one of the surest paths to economic security. And leaders across politics and industry—from former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates—have at times urged students not to overlook the field, framing coding skills as the secret to stable, high-paying jobs.

But as artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes the workplace, that promise is starting to look less certain.

A new survey of more than 200 engineering leaders, conducted by tech training nonprofit CodePath and shared exclusively with Fortune, shows entry-level tech hiring is slowing. More than one-third of respondents, 38%, said their company has reduced the number of entry-level hiring over the past year, and nearly 1 in 7 reported pausing Gen Z hiring altogether.

At the same time, 18% said hiring had stayed the same, and 8% reported an increase. Despite the overall slowdown, CodePath CEO Michael Ellison—a Y Combinator alum—argues telling people to avoid tech right now would be a mistake.

“That’s just kind of like taking crazy pills if you end up choosing not to invest in the tools that make you the most powerful—of telling computers what you want them to do in an age where computers are becoming exponentially more powerful,” Ellison told Fortune. “So to me, it’s like saying, ‘don’t learn how to use the internet.’”

Ellison’s argument reflects a broader shift in how computer science fits into the AI economy. As generative AI tools become more capable, understanding how software works—and how to direct, customize, and integrate AI systems—is increasingly seen as a foundational skill rather than a specialized one.

That demand is already showing up in the labor market. AI literacy topped LinkedIn’s list of the skills professionals are prioritizing and companies are hiring for right now. And a Lightcast analysis of more than 1.3 billion job postings in 2024 found roles advertising at least one AI or generative AI skill offered an average of $18,000 more in annual compensation that those that did not.

Notably, the majority of those roles were outside the tech sector. Some 51% of jobs requiring AI skills were in non-tech industries, up from 44% in 2022—a sign coding and AI fluency are becoming relevant far beyond Silicon Valley.

The new secret to landing a tech job

Still, slowing hiring doesn’t mean aspiring technologists should give up. Instead, the CodePath data suggests candidates may need to rethink what they emphasize—and what they leave off—when applying for tech roles.

When asked which signals matter most outside the interview process, engineering leaders indicated proof of real-world skills matter far more than formal credentials. Side projects or portfolios topped the list, cited by 38% of respondents, followed by internship experience (35%), and public code portfolios like GitHub (34%).

Traditional markers of achievement, by contrast, carried far less weight. Just 4% of leaders said credentialing programs were a top influence in hiring decisions, while only 23% cited a candidate degree or academic focus and 17% pointed to school prestige.

The shift away from pedigree suggests employers are seeking evidence candidates can actually do the work. Greater fluency with AI tools and frameworks was the most common skill expectation for early-career hires, followed by faster time to writing production-ready code and the ability to learn new tools or programming languages quickly.

And despite buzz about tech layoffs, job opportunities do still exist. The U.S. federal government, for example, recently announced it would be hiring about 1,000 new engineers, data scientists, and AI specialists. No degrees or work experience is required—and salaries will range from $150,000 to $200,000. Meta has also still been hiring young talent in recent weeks, with job postings for roles such as product software engineers.

Ellison’s advice for those seeking roles is simple: Opportunities are out there as long as you are willing to dig in deeper—and build a portfolio that hiring managers are looking for.

“People are rewarded for being aggressive and for going after what they want,” he said. It’s surprising the opportunities that are hidden in plain sight.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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