(FORTUNE Magazine) – MAMAS, Willie Nelson is right: Don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys -- not if you want them to be rich. Modern American cowboys make about $12,000 a year, plus room and board, and end the day coated with dust. Better by far to be one of the crowd Willie calls ''doctors and lawyers and such.'' A physician who specializes in high-risk pregnancies can take in $300,000 a year, and a lawyer who rises to senior partner in a prestigious firm can bring home as much as $1.2 million. A Wall Street merger-and- acquisition specialist can pull down twice as much, even if he's honest; if he becomes a partner in the firm he can retire at 40. All of the above would comfortably qualify for membership in what FORTUNE defines in the previous story as the working rich. But Willie should sing another verse about the men and women who start their own companies. Mamas, if you want your babies to become truly rich, raise them to be entrepreneurs. As it was in the beginning of the industrial age, so it remains. The great fortunes of the last century were built by men who created products and enterprises where none had been. Today corporate raiders are sucking up huge sums by threatening, and sometimes carrying out their threats, to dismantle companies others built. But their winnings are but a shadow of the riches created by men like Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart Stores, and H. Ross Perot, who started Electronic Data Systems. Most of those who have amassed similar wealth by ways other than inventing new corporations are ace stock pickers and real estate moguls. Warren Buffett's 41% stake in Berkshire Hathaway, a textile manufacturer he transformed into a diversified holding company and investment vehicle, is worth $1.6 billion. Close behind Buffett are men like Samuel LeFrak, the country's largest builder of middle-income apartments; Edward DeBartolo, the biggest shopping mall developer; and Donald Trump, the flashy developer and casino operator. Trump and other real estate fat cats are also testimony to the fact that money begets money: They started the race a lap ahead using capital -- and expertise -- inherited from dear old dad. But even tyros in hot markets like ; Manhattan can take a roll in the dough. Robert H. Shapiro started in 1981 as what real estate types call a flipper -- not a pinball wizard or brainy sea mammal, but a speculator who buys apartments and ''flips'' them for huge profits. Shapiro claims a net worth of $30 million, a good start for a guy of 29. Compared with some baby tycoons of high tech, Shapiro is an underachiever. Despite the fact that most start-ups fail within the first few years, the spectacle of so many successes in the electronics industry in the late Seventies and early Eighties has given new glamour to entrepreneurs. William Henry Gates III, chairman of Microsoft, the software company, is among the richest. Still just 31, Gates dropped out of Harvard to start the company and took it public last year at $21 per share. The price has since zoomed above $80, making young Bill's shares worth more than $900 million. But with the semiconductor industry in intensive care (see Competition) and the computer business ailing, are any high-tech fortunes left to be made? Investors think so. Prospective backers of embryonic companies are still plentiful. Though no one is in a hurry to seed a new chip company, the venturers are still pouring money into computer hardware and software start- ups, biomedical engineering companies, and new telecommunications firms. These days, however, the high-tech money men are targeting vertically integrated companies that offer a range of different products to the same narrow market. The San Francisco venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is particularly keen on a one-year-old Sunnyvale, California, company called CodeSmith Technologies that hopes to produce software programs for use by software engineers. Ram Banin, the Israeli-born chairman of CodeSmith, made his first $3 million as one of the co-founders of Daisy Systems, a company that designs both software and hardware for the electronics industry. He was recruited to run CodeSmith by two co-founders, R. Greg Lynott and Bill Paseman, who worked with him at Daisy. What if you have the entrepreneurial itch, but don't know a semiconductor from a semicolon? Don't despair. While all those electronics wizards were inventing out in the proverbial garage, plenty of other men and women were making fortunes in low-tech businesses like retailing. The money piled up at a more leisurely pace, but pile it did. Leslie Wexner's stock in the Limited, a women's sportswear retailer he founded in 1963, is worth $1.6 billion. Paul Fireman, 43, made a $94-million fortune in footwear. He is the founder of Reebok International, the company that made the aerobic shoe de rigueur for yuppettes. And don't forget tough but tender Frank Perdue, 66, who made a sizable fortune hawking chicken.

HIRED HANDS can also make it big if they get to the top of a major corporation. What with stock options, stock appreciation rights, and the like, chief executives of the largest companies can easily amass net worths of $10 million, and sometimes a lot more (see box). But the ability to accumulate drops off steeply down the ladder as salaries and other rewards shrink from lavish to just lush. Hewitt Associates, a compensation consulting firm, says that on average the treasurers of the 200 largest companies on the FORTUNE 500 now get $200,000 a year in salaries and bonuses; their stock options and the like should accumulate to $2.4 million over ten years. Rich, but probably too little to keep the third generation in style. A controller of a division, whose annual cash compensation is $100,000, will build up only $580,000 over the same period. Says E. Webb Bassick IV, a Hewitt partner: ''Unless you are the chief executive, working for a large corporation will make you comfortable, but it won't make you really rich.'' If you are in the middle of a big company -- call it Mighty Oak Corp. --meditating on the money your boss and the entrepreneur are socking away, you may feel a little deprived. And your self-esteem may be in a nose dive. Your Harvard MBA (cost: two years of your life and $26,000 if you graduated in 1983) adorns the wall. You have just orchestrated the introduction of a new product that is grossing your company millions. You have been lavished with bonuses, a nice new company car, and choruses of kudos. Yet you're feeling positively poverty-stricken. What are you doing buried in this corporate bog? What you are doing is trading reward for security. As any gambler or novice investor can tell you, you can't win big unless you take big risks. The man who starts Little Acorn Inc. is one of the biggest gamblers around: He is more likely to fail than any other variety of businessman. In addition, because he all but kisses daylight goodbye as he struggles to make Little Acorn grow, the entrepreneur faces what L. John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, calls ''a tremendous personal casualty rate.'' Profitable or not, most new companies precipitate at least a couple of divorces. ( You, by contrast, are leading a relatively easy, worry-free life, but considerably less worry-free than in years past. The new reality of corporate restructuring has helped make small, emerging companies more appealing to middle managers, who usually have to take a pay cut in exchange for a piece of the action. ''Twenty years ago only mavericks would make the move,'' says Sandra W. Meyer, a managing director of Russell Reynolds Associates, the headhunting firm. ''Now it's very common.'' Some executives find the start-up pace too grueling. One 55-year-old who joined a small West Coast company developed heart trouble as soon as he started the new job. Others find nirvana. Steve Bauman, 42, was an executive director at AT&T who oversaw the development of the company's personal computers. In August 1985, after 19 years with the company, he quit and headed west. Bauman's father thought he was nuts. AT&T had been paying Bauman $136,000 a year, plus another $4,000 to $8,000 in bonuses, and options on 1,200 to 1,400 shares. He rode to business appointments in a chauffeur-driven car complete with cellular phone. And he had an ''executive staff'' of five who scheduled his time, worked out budgets, and, as Bauman says, ''catered to my needs.'' But the staff and driver, he says, were a trap. ''You get your job done, but you always feel you're doing it for someone else.'' Bauman had another gripe: ''My reward for putting together innovative, entrepreneurial products was 15% raises, or 25% if I got a promotion.'' Bauman sold his $250,000 house in Middletown, New Jersey, and moved to Los Altos, California, where he paid $366,000 for a smaller one on a smaller lot (though it does have a swimming pool). He is now vice president of engineering at CodeSmith, making $84,000 a year and hoping that his 3% of the company's stock will make him rich. In the meantime, he says, ''I'm having the most fun I've ever had in my life.'' IF THE PROSPECT of an uncertain career with a sputtering new company gives you the jitters, try selling stocks or real estate. Both varieties of broker can do nicely. Edward Lee Cave, a real estate broker who peddles $5-million Manhattan apartments and French castles for the haute rich, lives as well as many of his clients. A top stockbroker can make more than $1 million a year on Wall Street, but a sharp salesman can make money anywhere. Ernest Martin, 37, a broker for A.G. Edwards & Sons in Gulfport, Mississippi, raked in almost $700,000 in 1986. The torrid demand for MBA degrees has even propelled some business school professors into the ranks of the working rich. With students plentiful and talented teachers scarce, the salaries of professors have climbed to surprising heights. At top schools the most coveted professors command salaries of $150,000. Industrious profs can double or triple that. They serve on corporate boards, advise investment bankers, and testify as expert witnesses in lawsuits, collecting as much as $5,000 a day. The really big money, however, comes from writing undergraduate textbooks. Roman Weil, an accounting professor at the University of Chicago and a prolific textbook writer, won't divulge his income except to say it is above $200,000. If none of these ways of getting rich fit your taste or talents, don't give up entirely. A few remote possibilities remain. If you weren't born rich, you still might get lucky. A California furniture deliveryman named Jose Caballero did. Two years ago he paid $1 for a lottery ticket and won $2 million. Caballero, however, was no ordinary winner. When the press fell upon him to get the requisite story about his plans for the loot, Caballero let it slip that he had entered the U.S. illegally. The Immigration and Naturalization Service shipped him back to Mexico, but the state of California let him keep the money. It had to: Nobody had thought to make it illegal for illegal aliens to win. Caballero, who used some of his winnings to buy a papaya ranch, became famous as el mojado y millonario, the wetback millionaire. And then there is crime, which may or may not pay, depending on the crime -- and the criminal. In 1971, D. B. Cooper parachuted off Northwest Airlines Flight No. 305 with $200,000 in hijack ransom. A soggy $6,000 of it turned up on a river bank nearly ten years later, but neither D.B. nor the other $194,000 has been found. Cooper could be in the twilight zone, along with Jimmy Hoffa and lots of stray socks, but he just as likely is living the life of Vesco in some banana republic. Ivan Boesky, on the other hand, looked pretty grim in his last public appearance. His crime certainly appears to have paid: The arbitrager handed over $100 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle insider- trading charges, and could go to jail. According to Wall Street rumors, Boesky may have many millions left, though he could lose them in civil suits by angry investors and corporations. By contrast, Martin Siegel, the ex- Kidder Peabody investment banker who sold secrets to Boesky, gambled away his career for a pittance. The SEC says his payments from Boesky totaled only $700,000. The moral: better to be a shark than a feeder fish. Pick the right crime in this land of opportunity and you could soon be swinging on a star. Sydney Biddle Barrows, the Mayflower Madam, says she never cleared more than $50,000 a year running what is euphemistically known as an escort service. Barrows has made about $525,000 on her autobiography so far. Ms. Barrows has been offered acting roles but turned them down. ''I could have made a lot of money, but I felt people would just be using me,'' says a woman who should know. If you are still worried that fate has consigned you to a life of mere affluence, put aside the dejection long enough to consider the following. Sure, there are plenty of lawyers out there making more money than you, but you know what Shakespeare said about lawyers. Doctors are crowding each other in big cities, and dentists -- thanks to the wonders of fluoride -- worry about where the next cavity is coming from. The new tax law wipes out most real estate shelters. That makes it hard for all but the smartest pros to profit, and puts fresh burdens on the working rich. Consider also that most successful entrepreneurs didn't start out as fortune seekers; they were pursuing visions, not the almighty buck. A striking number of wealthy entrepreneurs interviewed for these articles had the same advice on how to get rich. As one put it, ''Do what you like and the money will come.'' How much money depends, of course, on what you like. Roman Weil probably could have earned even more as a partner in a large accounting firm, but he likes to teach. And our cowboy has the sun on his face and the great outdoors at his feet. Neither fellow can claim the lifestyle of a multimillionaire, but both are probably just as happy. Would you believe almost as happy?

BOX: WHY IT'S SO GREAT TO BE C.E.O. Few people are as sure to ascend to the status of truly rich as the chief executives of major corporations. As a rule, the bigger the company, the bigger the boss's compensation -- so big that it should be a snap for C.E.O.s of the very largest ones to attain a net worth of $10 million. Some, like Steve Ross of Warner, could rack up several times that (see Corporate Performance). Hewitt Associates, a compensation consulting firm, estimates that the chiefs of the 200 biggest companies on the FORTUNE 500 collect annual salaries and bonuses that average $700,000. With that, the boss can live in a $750,000 house, own a $200,000 vacation home, buy a yacht, and have funds left over to invest. Not that he needs to do much investing on his own. The head honcho's real riches come from the stock options and other stock-related incentives that have become a standard part of executive compensation. Hewitt calculates that if stock prices rise at an annual rate of 10%, the added fillip that the average FORTUNE 200 C.E.O. gets through various incentive plans will mount to $12.2 million in just ten years. If the company has a special retirement plan for key executives, as many do, the C.E.O.'s pension benefits will be worth another $2.3 million. And if his salary rises 5% a year and the company has the full array of special savings plans, the boss can accumulate another $729,000. The total at the end of ten years: $15.3 million.