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Famous Entrepreneurs

Ten founders who built companies of lasting global scale — Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, Alibaba, Tesla and SpaceX.

How this list was chosen

This list gathers founders who built companies of lasting global scale — businesses that changed how people work, shop, communicate or travel, and that still shape their industries today. It is a small, curated selection, not a ranking of the world's entrepreneurs, and it says nothing about wealth: no net-worth figure is given, because fortunes change daily and are not a measure of what a founder built. Entries are presented alphabetically by surname, with no ranking and no popularity score.

  1. Jeff Bezos

    Jeff Bezos (born 1964) founded Amazon in 1994, starting it as an online bookstore run from a garage in Seattle and building it into one of the world's largest companies, spanning retail, cloud computing through Amazon Web Services, and digital media. He led Amazon as chief executive until 2021, when he stepped back to focus on other ventures and became executive chairman. In 2000 he founded the space company Blue Origin, and in 2013 he bought The Washington Post. Bezos studied electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton University before working on Wall Street, and his long-term, customer-first approach has become a standard case study in business schools.

  2. Sergey Brin

    Sergey Brin (born 1973) co-founded Google with Larry Page in 1998, while both were doctoral students at Stanford University. Born in Moscow, he emigrated to the United States with his family as a child. With Page he developed PageRank, the system that ranked web pages by the links pointing to them, and turned a university research project into the world's dominant search engine. Brin served as Google's president of technology and later as president of Alphabet, Google's parent company, stepping down from the executive role in 2019 while remaining a major shareholder and board member.

  3. Bill Gates

    Bill Gates (born 1955) co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975 and led the company as it brought personal computing to a mass audience, first with MS-DOS and then with the Windows operating system. He served as chief executive until 2000 and remained chairman until 2014, then left the board in 2020. With his then-wife Melinda, he established the Gates Foundation in 2000, which funds work on global health, poverty and education and has become one of the world's largest private charitable foundations. Born in Seattle, Gates studied at Harvard University before leaving to build Microsoft, and his career spans two distinct chapters: building a software empire, then turning to large-scale philanthropy.

  4. Steve Jobs

    Steve Jobs (1955–2011) co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976, helping launch the personal computer era with the Apple II and the Macintosh. Forced out of Apple in 1985, he founded the computer company NeXT and bought the animation studio that became Pixar, whose films won wide acclaim. He returned to Apple in 1997 and led a revival built on the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad, making Apple one of the most valuable companies in the world. Known for his insistence on design and simplicity, Jobs died in 2011, aged 56, from pancreatic cancer. His product launches became famous for their showmanship and are still studied as lessons in presentation.

  5. Jack Ma

    Jack Ma (born 1964) founded the Alibaba Group in 1999 from an apartment in Hangzhou, China, building it into one of the world's largest e-commerce and technology companies. Alibaba's marketplaces, Taobao and Tmall, transformed how hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers shop, and its payment service Alipay became a pillar of mobile payments in China. Ma, a former English teacher who had twice failed his university entrance exam, became one of China's best-known entrepreneurs. He stepped down as Alibaba's chairman in 2019, turning to philanthropy and education work, and has since kept a much lower public profile.

  6. Elon Musk

    Elon Musk (born 1971) is a South Africa-born entrepreneur known for founding and leading companies in electric vehicles, spaceflight and online payments. Born in Pretoria, he moved to Canada and then the United States, co-founded the online payment company that became PayPal, and used the proceeds to found SpaceX in 2002 and join Tesla as an early investor and later chief executive. SpaceX became the first private company to send astronauts to orbit, and Tesla made electric cars a mass-market product. He has also founded ventures in tunnelling, brain-computer interfaces and artificial intelligence, and remains one of the most closely followed business figures of his time.

  7. Satya Nadella

    Satya Nadella (born 1967) has been chief executive of Microsoft since 2014, leading the company's shift to cloud computing and subscription software. Born in Hyderabad, India, he studied electrical engineering before moving to the United States, joining Microsoft in 1992 and rising through its server and cloud divisions. Under his leadership Microsoft rebuilt its Azure cloud business into one of the largest in the world, acquired LinkedIn and GitHub, and returned to sustained growth after a decade of stagnation. Nadella is known for emphasising learning, empathy and a 'growth mindset' in Microsoft's culture.

  8. Larry Page

    Larry Page (born 1973) co-founded Google with Sergey Brin in 1998, while both were doctoral students at Stanford University. Page's idea — ranking web pages by the links pointing to them — became PageRank, the system that made Google's search results more useful than its rivals' and turned a research project into the world's leading search engine. He served as Google's chief executive from 2011 and as chief executive of Alphabet, Google's parent company, from 2015 until 2019, when he stepped back from day-to-day management while remaining a controlling shareholder.

  9. Sundar Pichai

    Sundar Pichai (born 1972) is chief executive of Google and its parent company Alphabet, one of the most powerful roles in the technology industry. Born in Chennai, India, he studied metallurgical engineering before moving to the United States, joining Google in 2004. He led the development of the Chrome browser and ChromeOS, then took charge of Android, before becoming Google's chief executive in 2015 and Alphabet's in 2019. Pichai is known for a calm, consensus-building style, and under his leadership Google has pushed deeper into artificial intelligence while facing growing regulatory scrutiny worldwide.

  10. Mark Zuckerberg

    Mark Zuckerberg (born 1984) co-founded Facebook in 2004 from his dormitory room at Harvard University, building it into the world's largest social network with billions of users. As chief executive of Meta, Facebook's parent company, he has overseen the acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, and the company's costly pivot towards virtual reality and the 'metaverse'. Zuckerberg, who left Harvard in his second year to run the company, remains its controlling shareholder. His career has also drawn sustained scrutiny over privacy, misinformation and competition, which he has addressed in repeated appearances before lawmakers.

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The people on this list sit in the Entrepreneurs & Business Leaders. categories and are associated with United States , Russia , China , South Africa , Canada , India . .

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