Steve Jobs

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.