In 1976 Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in a Los Altos garage and, by the time the company went public in December 1980, he was worth roughly $250 million on paper at age 25. He had become the public face of the personal-computer revolution. Yet by September 1985 he had resigned from the company he created, after the board sided with CEO John Sculley and stripped him of any operational role.
The exile lasted twelve years. Jobs poured his money and reputation into NeXT, a high-end workstation maker that struggled to sell hardware, and into a small computer-graphics outfit he bought from Lucasfilm in 1986 and renamed Pixar. For most of a decade both ventures consumed cash. NeXT never became a commercial success on its own terms, and Pixar lost money year after year while Jobs covered the shortfalls personally.
The turn came in 1995, when Pixar released Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated feature film, and went public a week later in an offering that made Jobs a billionaire. A year later Apple, near collapse, bought NeXT for about $400 million, bringing Jobs back as an adviser. By September 1997 he was interim CEO of the company that had cast him out.
What followed was one of the most complete comebacks in business history. The iMac (1998), iPod (2001), iTunes Store (2003), and iPhone (2007) turned a near-bankrupt computer maker into the most valuable company in the world. Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in 2006 for about $7.4 billion, becoming Disney’s largest individual shareholder. He died in October 2011, having built two fortunes and reshaped several industries.
Henry Ford is remembered as the man who put the world on wheels, but the company that bears his name was his third try at building automobiles. His first two ventures collapsed. The Detroit Automobile Company, founded in 1899 with backing from lumber merchant William H. Murphy, produced only a handful of vehicles before dissolving in early 1901. Ford’s reputation as an unreliable tinkerer, more interested in perfecting machines than shipping them, nearly ended his career before it began.
With his backers losing faith, Ford did something unexpected: he turned to racing. On October 10, 1901, in a stripped-down racer he built with associate Ed “Spider” Huff, he beat the famous Alexander Winton at the Grosse Pointe track outside Detroit. The upset victory rebuilt his name overnight and drew fresh investment, leading to the Henry Ford Company in November 1901. But that venture, too, slipped away. When investors brought in machinist Henry M. Leland to impose discipline, Ford left in 1902. The firm became Cadillac.
Ford doubled down on speed. With Tom Cooper he built the brutal 80-plus-horsepower “999,” which daredevil Barney Oldfield drove to fame in 1902. The publicity finally won Ford the capital he needed. On June 16, 1903, the Ford Motor Company was incorporated with roughly $28,000 in paid-in capital. Within five years came the Model T (1908), then the moving assembly line (1913) and the five-dollar day (1914).
By the 1920s Ford was one of the richest men in the world, his company building half the cars in America. The arc from twice-failed mechanic to industrial titan is one of the most consequential second acts in business history, even as his later years carried a darker legacy of labor strife and antisemitic publishing that history records alongside the achievement.