Founders, CEOs, and entrepreneurs.
Howard Schultz turned Starbucks into the world's largest coffee-house chain, twice leading it as CEO and returning during the 2008 financial crisis to restructure the business.
Oprah Winfrey rose from poverty in rural Mississippi to host The Oprah Winfrey Show for 25 years and build a media empire including the Oprah Winfrey Network. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.
Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft in 1975, became a billionaire at 31 and, after leaving day-to-day management, turned to global health and climate work through the Gates Foundation and Breakthrough Energy.
Warren Buffett built Berkshire Hathaway from a failing textile mill into one of the world's leading conglomerates, guided by value investing. The 'Oracle of Omaha' has pledged to give away 99 percent of his fortune.
Sara Blakely turned $5,000 in savings and a pair of cut-off pantyhose into Spanx, then launched the footwear brand Sneex in 2024. She was named to the Time 100 in 2012.
Jensen Huang founded Nvidia in a Denny's restaurant in 1993 and steered it from near-bankruptcy to the world's most valuable company on the back of GPUs and AI.
Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from a Harvard dorm room in 2004 and now leads Meta Platforms as chairman, CEO and controlling shareholder. He became the world's youngest self-made billionaire at 23.
Jeff Bezos turned a 1994 online bookstore into Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce and cloud company, and went on to found Blue Origin and buy The Washington Post.
From PayPal co-founder to the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk has built companies spanning electric vehicles, rockets, AI and brain-computer interfaces. He became the first trillionaire on paper at the June 2026 SpaceX IPO.
He started with a toothbrush factory, pioneered cable television in India, built UTV into a media group he sold to Disney for $1.4 billion — and then went and built an edtech company, a sports league and a film studio.
He co-founded Infosys in 1981, ran it as CEO while revenue grew sixfold, then left in 2009 to build an identity system for a billion people. In 2026 the government asked him to fix India's exams.
For three years he traded shares by day and worked night shifts at a call centre to fund it. The brokerage he later built with his brother took no outside money at all — and now does ₹8,847 crore a year, wholly owned by the family.
