@ucbalumnus – my rinky-dink software company gained some notoriety a few years back and at a local party a neighbor (an engineer from a top school) came up to DW and said, “how can he do that, he has no training” (meaning, I had no formal education in the scientific field). She told me about it afterwards. I said to her, “I have two eyeballs and can read”.
I think it’s important to note that the microcomputer and software fields are very different from scientific fields. Many of the examples in this thread are about people who made billions in microcomputer hardware/software without a formal education. What we’re doing is applying the hard-earned knowledge of the true experts. You don’t hear much about the guy who worked for years to shave a few picometers off the gate size in transistors – because he wasn’t celebrated in the media – yet it was no doubt a difficult task. The accumulation of similar effort from many people enabled the algorithms in Google, Facebook, etc. (e.g. Intel could make denser chips that were faster and cooler).
Final note. I have to laugh when I read stories about how the computers in the Space Shuttle and other spacecraft are “ancient”. Those computers and their software are in a completely different league! Lives and/or billions of $$$ of hardware are on the line. The engineers making them have to be extremely conservative and their products have to work the first time they’re used. Could Jobs, Wozniak, or Gates make that? I seriously doubt it. Amount of money != genius.