Elon Musk Biography: Tesla, SpaceX and the World’s First Trillionaire
Elon Reeve Musk is a South African-born entrepreneur and engineer who has founded or led some of the most consequential technology and industrial companies of the twenty-first century, including PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. He serves as chief executive officer of Tesla and as founder, CEO, and chief engineer of SpaceX, which completed the largest […]
Bill Gates Biography: Microsoft, Philanthropy and a $100 Billion Giveaway
William Henry Gates III is an American entrepreneur and philanthropist who co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975, building it into the world’s largest software company and, for much of the 1990s and 2000s, the wealthiest person on the planet. Gates stepped down as Microsoft’s chief executive in 2000 and has spent much of the […]
Mark Zuckerberg Biography: Facebook, Meta and the Race for AI
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American businessman and programmer who co-founded Facebook in his Harvard dormitory in 2004 and has since built it into Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads, with a combined user base spanning billions of people worldwide. He serves as Meta’s chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling […]
Jeff Bezos Biography: Amazon, Blue Origin and Life After Retail
Jeffrey Preston Bezos is an American entrepreneur who founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore and built it into one of the world’s largest e-commerce and cloud computing companies. He served as Amazon’s chief executive officer for 27 years before stepping down in July 2021 to focus on Blue Origin, the private spaceflight company […]
Larry Page Biography: Google, PageRank and Life Beyond Search
Lawrence Edward Page is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur who co-founded Google with Sergey Brin in 1998, building it into the world’s dominant internet search engine and later restructuring it under Alphabet Inc., the holding company he and Brin created in 2015. Page served as Google’s first chief executive officer, returned to the role […]
Sergey Brin Biography: Google, PageRank and a Return to the Lab
Sergey Mikhailovich Brin is a Russian-born American computer scientist and entrepreneur who co-founded Google with Larry Page in 1998 while both were PhD students at Stanford University. Brin served as president of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., from its 2015 founding until stepping down from that role in December 2019, and, unlike several of his […]
Steve Jobs Biography: Apple, the iPhone and a Legacy Cut Short
Steven Paul Jobs was an American entrepreneur and inventor who co-founded Apple Inc. with Steve Wozniak in 1976, was forced out of the company in 1985, and returned in 1997 to lead one of the most consequential turnarounds in business history, overseeing the creation of the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad before his death from […]
Sam Altman Biography: OpenAI, ChatGPT and the AI Race
Samuel Harris Altman is an American entrepreneur and investor who has served as chief executive officer of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT, since 2019. Before OpenAI, he founded the location-sharing startup Loopt as a Stanford dropout, worked as a venture capitalist, and served as president of the startup accelerator Y Combinator from 2014 […]
Jensen Huang Biography: Nvidia, the GPU and the AI Boom
Jensen Huang, born Jen-Hsun Huang, is a Taiwanese-American engineer and businessman who co-founded the semiconductor company Nvidia in 1993 and has served as its president and chief executive officer continuously ever since. Under his more than three decades of leadership, Nvidia grew from a graphics chip startup focused on video games into the world’s most […]
Peter Thiel Biography: PayPal, Palantir and Political Power
Peter Andreas Thiel is a German-American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist who co-founded PayPal in 1998, became the first outside investor in Facebook in 2004, and co-founded the data analytics firm Palantir Technologies in 2003, where he remains chairman and largest shareholder. Beyond his direct business ventures, Thiel has built one of Silicon Valley’s […]