Founders, CEOs, and entrepreneurs.
Ray Kroc was a milkshake-mixer salesman who convinced the McDonald brothers to let him franchise their San Bernardino burger stand, bought the brand in 1961 and grew it into the world's biggest fast-food company.
Sam Walton opened the first Walmart in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962 and built it into the world's largest corporation by revenue. He was the richest person in the United States from 1982 to 1988.
Sergey Brin left Moscow at six, met Larry Page at Stanford and launched Google from a Menlo Park garage. He returned in 2023 to work on AI research at Alphabet.
Jessica Alba went from Hollywood lead roles in Dark Angel and Fantastic Four to co-founding The Honest Company in 2011, a Los Angeles consumer-goods brand focused on baby and household products.
Daymond John started FUBU in his mother's house in Queens after selling $800 of homemade hats in a single day in 1992, and later became a Shark on Shark Tank.
Martha Stewart built a lifestyle empire spanning magazines, television and merchandising, survived a 2004 conviction and five months in prison, and staged a comeback that returned her company to profit in 2006.
Mark Cuban sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo! to become a billionaire, then bought the Dallas Mavericks and led them to the 2011 NBA title. He was a Shark Tank investor from 2012 to 2025.
Marc Benioff sold his first program at 15, rose to Oracle's youngest vice president, and founded Salesforce in a San Francisco apartment in 1999 with the promise of 'The End of Software'.
Larry Page co-created the PageRank algorithm and co-founded Google with Sergey Brin, later leading Alphabet as CEO until stepping back from day-to-day roles in 2019.
Reed Hastings, a former Peace Corps math teacher in Swaziland, co-founded Netflix and helped build it into a global streaming service. He is also a prominent charter-school advocate.
Brian Chesky, an industrial designer by training, co-founded Airbnb and leads it as CEO. He holds roughly a 10 percent stake in the company.
Michael Dell built one of the world's largest technology infrastructure companies, took it private in the biggest management buyout since the Great Recession, and later returned it to the public markets.
