Meet the self-made billionaire who bought a nearly bankrupt company off Warren Buffett for $1,000 and turned it into a $85 billion giant

A small investment made at the right moment has the power to launch ordinary people to millionaire status .

All it took was $1,000 and an out-there idea for Jeffrey Sprecher, the founder and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange , to set his business on a path to becoming a $85 billion behemoth.

“I had this idea that you should be able to trade electric power, buy and sell electric power, on an exchange,” Sprecher recalled at the Rotary Club Of Atlanta earlier this year.

But there was a huge caveat: He “had no idea how to do that.

I’d never worked on Wall Street, I never traded.” At the time, Sprecher had heard that Continental Power Exchange—owned by Warren Buffett’s electric utility company, MidAmerican Energy—was about to go bankrupt.

Despite Buffett’s business pumping $35 million into it, the company was still struggling.

And so Sprecher saw this as an opportune moment to swoop in and pursue his entrepreneurial vision.

“I bought the company for a dollar a share, and there were a thousand shares,” he said.

“So I bought it for $1,000, and I used that as the basis to build Intercontinental Exchange.” Thanks to his quick thinking and business savvy, Sprecher currently boasts a net worth of $1.2 billion.

But the journey to the top was not very glamorous.

Living in a 500-ft studio and driving a used car while scaling the business That measly $1,000 investment made back in 1997 served as the launchpad for Intercontinental Exchange, founded just three years later.

A small team of nine employees set off to build the technology in 2000; setting up shop in Atlanta, Sprecher and his staffers went all-in on building the business up from its former demise.

It was all hands on deck, and even as the founder and CEO, Sprecher was doing the menial labor to keep everything in order.

With money being tight, the entrepreneur lived in a small apartment and drove a used car to the office to keep Intercontinental Energy afloat.