17 Successful People and How They Really Sleep

Sleep habits among successful people vary wildly, from religious 8-hour protectors to those who’ve run on dangerously little for years. Harvard Medical School research (published in the journal <em>SLEEP</em>, Sept 2011) estimates insomnia costs the average US worker 11.3 lost days a year, $2,280 in lost productivity, a $63.2 billion national cost. Here are 17 genuinely documented examples, sourced to their own interviews and public statements, not a generic “they all sleep 8 hours” list.

At a Glance

• Best for Extreme Discipline: Mark Wahlberg
• Best Cautionary Tale: Indra Nooyi
• Best Napper: Winston Churchill
• Best Tech-Tracked Routine: Jack Dorsey
• Best Evening Ritual: Marie Kondo

1. Tim Cook

Cook took over as Apple’s chief executive in 2011, succeeding Steve Jobs, having joined the company in 1998 and built his reputation running its supply chain and global operations. He is known for a methodical, disciplined style and famously long hours, often described as among the first into the office and the last to leave. Biographers and colleagues paint him as calm, private and relentlessly detail-focused, a deliberate contrast to Jobs’s volatility. Under his leadership Apple in 2018 became the first US company to reach a trillion-dollar valuation.

Apple’s CEO wakes at 3:45am and is in bed by around 9pm, and tracks his sleep via Apple Watch.

• Role: Apple CEO
• Bedtime / Wake: ~9pm / 3:45am
• Sleep tracking: Apple Watch
• Source: Axios on HBO / CNBC

2. Jeff Bezos

Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookshop and grew it into one of the largest companies in the world before stepping down as chief executive in 2021 to focus on his space venture Blue Origin. He is closely associated with a customer-obsessed, long-term philosophy, captured in his repeated insistence that it is always “Day 1” at Amazon. A widely discussed 2015 New York Times investigation described the company as an intensely demanding place to work, a characterisation Bezos publicly disputed at the time. He remains one of the wealthiest people alive.

The Amazon founder prioritises 8 hours a night, and has said shortchanging sleep for extra hours creates only “illusory” productivity. He deliberately schedules his highest-stakes decisions for 10am, when he’s at his sharpest.

• Role: Amazon Founder
• Sleep Hours: 8 hours
• Key habit: Schedules big decisions for 10am
• Source: CNBC, David Rubenstein interview

3. LeBron James

James entered the NBA straight from high school in 2003 and has become one of basketball’s most decorated players, winning four championships and passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to become the league’s all-time leading scorer in 2023. He is well known for investing enormous sums in his body, with reporting putting his annual spend on training and recovery at more than a million US dollars. Coaches and teammates point to his professionalism and longevity, with his career stretching past two decades at the elite level. Away from the court he has built a media company and funded a public school in his home town of Akron.

The NBA star reportedly gets around 12 hours of sleep a day, including naps, sleeping in a dark, cold room and switching devices off 30-45 minutes before bed.

• Role: NBA Player
• Sleep Hours: ~12 hours incl. naps
• Key habit: Cold, dark room; no devices pre-bed
• Source: CNBC; Tim Ferriss Show

4. Arianna Huffington

Huffington co-founded The Huffington Post in 2005 and sold it to AOL in 2011, then launched the wellbeing company Thrive Global in 2016. After collapsing from exhaustion and sleep deprivation in 2007, she became one of business culture’s most prominent advocates for rest and against burnout. She has written extensively on the subject, including the books Thrive and The Sleep Revolution. Her second act has centred on the argument that overwork is counterproductive rather than a badge of honour.

Huffington collapsed from sleep deprivation and exhaustion in 2007. She now advocates strongly for 7 to 8 hours a night and wrote an entire book on the subject, The Sleep Revolution.

• Role: Thrive Global Founder
• Sleep Hours: 7-8 hours
• Key habit: Wrote The Sleep Revolution
• Source: NBC News

5. Jack Dorsey

Dorsey co-founded Twitter in 2006 and the payments company Square, later renamed Block, in 2009, at one point running both as chief executive at the same time. He is known for an unusually ascetic personal routine, including fasting, meditation and cold exposure, which drew equal parts fascination and criticism. He stepped down as Twitter’s chief executive in 2021. His wellness habits and hands-off management approach have both been the subject of extensive, and not always flattering, coverage.

The Twitter and Square co-founder wakes at 5am, takes an ice bath, and tracks his sleep with an Oura ring.

• Role: Twitter/Square Co-founder
• Wake time: 5am
• Key habit: Ice bath, Oura ring tracking
• Source: Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast, via CNBC

6. Roger Federer

Federer won 20 Grand Slam singles titles across a career that reshaped modern tennis before he retired in 2022. He was admired as much for his longevity and composure under pressure as for his shot-making, competing at the top of the sport into his late thirties. Rivals and commentators have often described him as one of the most complete players the game has produced. Recovery, and sleep in particular, was central to how he sustained that level for so long.

The tennis great sleeps 11 to 12 hours a day including a nap, and says he physically hurts himself if he doesn’t get that amount.

• Role: Tennis Player
• Sleep Hours: 10 hours + 2 hour nap
• Key habit: Non-negotiable nap

7. Bill Gates

Gates co-founded Microsoft in 1975 and built it into the dominant force in personal-computing software, ranking as the world’s richest person for much of the 1990s and 2000s. In his early career he was known for an intense, combative work ethic and a well-documented capacity for total focus during solitary “think weeks” of reading. Since stepping back from day-to-day work he has directed most of his time and fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and global health. He has been candid about revising some early views, including his one-time pride in getting by on very little sleep.

The Microsoft co-founder used to brag about running on 6 hours a night. He now insists on 7, a change he credits partly to his father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

• Role: Microsoft Co-founder
• Sleep Hours: 7 hours (was 6)
• Key habit: Changed his mind after his father’s diagnosis
• Source: Unconfuse Me podcast, via CNBC/Fortune

8. Elon Musk

Musk runs several companies at once, among them Tesla, SpaceX and the social platform X, and is known for extreme working hours and a hands-on, high-pressure style. He has spoken openly about sleeping at his factories during production crises and about the personal toll of that pace. Depending on the account, his intensity is cast either as the engine of his companies’ success or as a source of strain and turnover among staff. By most measures he is among the wealthiest people in the world.

Musk says he needs at least 6 hours or he experiences what he calls “brain pain.”

• Role: Tesla/SpaceX CEO
• Sleep Hours: 6 hours minimum
• Source: CNBC interview, 2023

9. Indra Nooyi

Nooyi led PepsiCo as chief executive from 2006 to 2018, one of very few women to run a company of that scale, and steered its strategy toward healthier products. She was widely regarded as a demanding but visionary leader who set a punishing pace for herself. In her memoir and interviews she has been unusually frank about the personal cost of that schedule and the difficulty of balancing it with family. Her roughly four hours of sleep a night is best read as a cautionary example rather than a template.

The former PepsiCo CEO ran on roughly 4 hours a night for years and checked email hourly overnight, a widely cited example of an unsustainable routine rather than one to copy.

• Role: Former PepsiCo CEO
• Sleep Hours: ~4 hours
• Key habit: Cautionary example, not a template

10. Oprah Winfrey

Winfrey built The Oprah Winfrey Show into one of the most successful talk shows in television history, running it for 25 years and turning it into an empire spanning her network, magazine and production company. She is regularly described as one of the most influential figures in American media and one of the country’s wealthiest self-made women. Those who have worked with her describe a disciplined, deeply prepared interviewer. Her attention to wellbeing, including consulting a sleep specialist, reflects a broader public focus on recovery.

Winfrey gets 7 to 8 hours, roughly 10pm to 6am, and has consulted sleep physician Dr. Michael Breus on her routine.

• Role: Media Executive
• Sleep Hours: 7-8 hours
• Key habit: Consulted a sleep physician
• Source: Inc., CNBC

11. Richard Branson

Branson founded the Virgin group, which has spanned records, airlines, telecoms and space travel, and is one of Britain’s best-known entrepreneurs. He has cultivated a reputation for adventure and risk-taking, from record-breaking balloon crossings to launching Virgin Galactic. He credits an early start and a consistent routine of exercise for his energy, and writes about it regularly on his own blog. His management style leans heavily on delegation and a famously informal, people-first culture.

The Virgin founder gets 5 to 6 hours, up around 5am, based on his own daily routine posts.

• Role: Virgin Founder
• Sleep Hours: 5-6 hours
• Source: Virgin.com, his own blog

12. Mark Wahlberg

Wahlberg rose from a troubled youth in Boston and a music career as Marky Mark to become one of Hollywood’s most bankable actors and producers, with credits including The Departed and the Transformers films. He is known for an extreme daily discipline, publicly sharing pre-dawn routines built around training, prayer and recovery. That regimen, including a bedtime as early as 7:30pm, has become almost as well known as his films. He has also built businesses across fitness, nutrition and hospitality.

The actor famously goes to bed between 7:30 and 8pm, waking at 2:30am to start his day with prayer, breakfast and cryo chamber recovery.

• Role: Actor
• Bedtime / Wake: 7:30pm / 2:30am
• Key habit: Cryo chamber, prayer
• Source: Time, via his own Instagram post

13. Winston Churchill

Churchill led Britain as prime minister during the Second World War and is remembered as one of the most consequential political figures of the twentieth century. He was also a prolific writer and historian who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953. Famous for working late into the night, he guarded a daily afternoon nap as a way, in his own framing, of getting two days into one. His routine was documented first-hand by those who worked alongside him.

Churchill took an hour-long afternoon nap most days, a habit documented first-hand by his valet, and credited it with helping him work later into the night.

• Role: Former UK Prime Minister
• Key habit: Hour-long daily afternoon nap
• Source: The Churchill Project, Hillsdale College

14. Mark Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg founded Facebook in a Harvard dorm room in 2004 and built it into Meta, one of the largest technology companies in the world, along the way acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp. He has been both celebrated as a generational founder and heavily scrutinised over privacy, misinformation and the company’s market power. More recently he has leaned publicly into fitness, taking up mixed martial arts and sharing data from his sleep tracking. He retains majority voting control of the company he started.

The Meta CEO gets around 8 hours, tracked via Eight Sleep and an Oura ring, and avoids scheduling back-to-back meetings.

• Role: Meta CEO
• Sleep Hours: ~8 hours
• Key habit: Eight Sleep + Oura tracking
• Source: Fortune, via his own Threads post

15. Cristiano Ronaldo

Ronaldo is one of the most successful footballers of his generation, with a haul of Champions League titles, multiple Ballon d’Or awards and one of the highest goal tallies in the sport’s history. He is known above all for an obsessive commitment to fitness and recovery that has kept him at the elite level well into his late thirties. Teammates and coaches routinely single out his professionalism and training intensity. That focus on recovery extends to a structured, coached approach to sleep.

Ronaldo worked with sleep coach Nick Littlehales on a polyphasic routine, five 90-minute sleep cycles totalling around 7.5 hours across the day, though recent reporting suggests he’s since shifted toward one longer nightly block plus naps.

• Role: Footballer
• Sleep Style: Polyphasic, 5x90min cycles (historically)
• Coach: Nick Littlehales

16. Kobe Bryant

Bryant spent his entire twenty-year NBA career with the Los Angeles Lakers, winning five championships and building a reputation for a relentless work ethic he called the “Mamba Mentality.” Teammates and rivals described his training as famously obsessive, often arriving hours before anyone else. After retiring in 2016 he won an Academy Award for a short film, before his death in a helicopter crash in 2020. In later years he spoke about rethinking the extreme habits, including very little sleep, that had defined his early career.

Bryant told Arianna Huffington directly that he “used to get by on three or four hours a night,” a habit he later reconsidered as his understanding of recovery science grew.

• Role: NBA Player
• Sleep Hours: 3-4 hours (self-reported, not recommended)
• Source: Thrive Global, direct quote to Arianna Huffington

17. Marie Kondo

Kondo turned a tidying method into a global brand through her bestselling book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and a popular Netflix series. Her KonMari method, which asks whether an object sparks joy, made her one of the most recognisable names in the organising and wellbeing space. She has spoken about carrying the same sense of calm and ritual into her evenings and her sleep. More recently she drew headlines for admitting that, with young children at home, her own space is far messier than her public image suggests.

The organising consultant has a specific evening ritual: a bath, diffusing Japanese kuromoji wood essential oil, writing a gratitude list, then bed early.

• Role: Organising Consultant
• Key habit: Bath, essential oils, gratitude list
• Source: konmari.com

Related Reading on Sleep

If you want practical, actionable advice rather than just what the famous and successful do, these cover the fundamentals in more depth.

More from Man of Many:

• 13 Secrets to a Better Night’s Sleep
• 10 Foods That Help You Sleep Better at Night
• Better Sleep: The Forgotten Key to Upgrading Your Life
• Eight Sleep Pod 4 Ultra Review
• How Eight Sleep Built a Health-Tech Empire from the Bedroom

How Successful People Sleep: FAQs