17 people who became billionaires with the least amount of work

• Most billionaires needed a lifetime of work to amass their fortunes, but others were able to earn $1 billion in a relatively short amount of time.
• The list includes online commerce pioneers like Jeff Bezos and tech innovators like Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Spiegel, who all became billionaires with less than six years of work.
• Some of the billionaires who got rich quick are among the most influential business players in the world.

Making a billion dollars sounds like it would take a lifetime of hard work.

But some people managed to pull it off in just a year.

We compiled a list of self-made billionaires who made their fortunes the fastest. The list includes pioneers of online commerce to early execs of the biggest social media site on the planet, and many of them are among the wealthiest and most influential players in the business world.

Read on to see who became a billionaire within the shortest time frames. But be warned — their results aren't easy to replicate.

SEE ALSO: Meet John Collison, the 27-year-old Harvard dropout whose tech startup turned him into the youngest self-made billionaire in the world

SEE ALSO: How many years it took the 23 richest people in the world to go from millionaire to billionaire

Eduardo Saverin — 1 year

Eduardo Saverin's saga, from co-founding Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 to getting squeezed out of the company a year later, was dramatized in the movie "The Social Network."

Despite working at Facebook for less than a year, Saverin retained a minority stake in the company, which translated into more than $1 billion by 2010. Today, Saverin is worth more than $9 billion.

Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy — 3 years

Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy founded Snapchat in 2011 after they came with the idea of a photo-sharing app in which the pictures disappear.

By 2014, their sizable stock holdings put their net worths over $1 billion, and the 20-somethings appeared on the Forbes billionaires list one year later.

Sean Parker — 1.5 years

Sean Parker may have co-founded the pioneering music-sharing site Napster, but it was his brief stint as president of Facebook that earned him billionaire status.

Parker served as Facebook's first president for a little over a year starting in 2004. He left the company in early 2006, but retained nearly 70 million Facebook shares, according to Bloomberg. He sold about 3.5 million of them ahead of Facebook's 2012 initial public offering, putting him firmly in billionaire territory.