Business

Founders, builders, and economic ideas.

People in Business

114 profiles

Entrepreneur

Mark Zuckerberg

Co-founding Facebook.

Economist

John Maynard Keynes

Explaining how weak spending can keep an economy in a slump.

Entrepreneur

Steve Jobs

Co-founding Apple and leading the launch of the iPhone.

Banker

J. P. Morgan

Financing industrial consolidation and helping organise Wall Street’s response to the Panic of 1907.

Showman

P. T. Barnum

Building an entertainment empire of museums, publicity and circus shows.

Industrialist

Henry Ford

Making the Model T affordable through mass production.

Entrepreneur

Henri Nestlé

Developing the infant food that began Nestlé.

Entrepreneur

Bill Gates

Co-founding Microsoft and helping make personal-computer software a mass-market business.

Economist

Amartya Sen

Changing how economists understand poverty, famine and the freedom to live a better life.

Activist

Simon Dixon

Speaking out against Zionism and supporting Palestinian rights, alongside a career in Bitcoin investing and banking reform.

Entrepreneur

Elon Musk

Building SpaceX and leading Tesla’s expansion in electric vehicles.

Entrepreneur

Jeff Bezos

Founding Amazon and expanding it from an online bookstore into a technology business.

Investor

Warren Buffett

Turning Berkshire Hathaway into a major investment and operating-business group.

Entrepreneur

Jack Ma

Co-founding Alibaba and helping expand online commerce in China.

Industrialist

Ratan Tata

Leading Tata’s international expansion through acquisitions including Jaguar Land Rover.

Economist

Abhijit Banerjee

Using field experiments to test what actually helps people escape poverty.

Economist

Esther Duflo

Testing anti-poverty programmes through field experiments in real communities.

Economist

Claudia Goldin

Explaining how women’s work and earnings have changed across generations.

Economist

Joseph Stiglitz

Explaining how unequal information changes the way markets work.

Psychologist

Daniel Kahneman

Showing how judgement and economic choices depart from ideal rationality.

Business executive

Mukesh Ambani

Expanding Reliance Industries into large-scale energy, retail and telecommunications.

Entrepreneur

Aliko Dangote

Building the Dangote Group into a major African industrial business.

Entrepreneur

Madam C. J. Walker

Building a hair-care business that created economic opportunities for Black women.

Entrepreneur

Richard Branson

Building the Virgin brand across music, airlines and other businesses.

Entrepreneur

Estée Lauder

Building the Estée Lauder cosmetics business through personal selling and department stores.

Entrepreneur

Folorunso Alakija

Building businesses in fashion and oil through Supreme Stitches and Famfa.

Economist

Adam Smith

Explaining markets, the division of labour and the sources of national wealth.

Entrepreneur

Soichiro Honda

Building Honda into a major motorcycle and car manufacturer.

Entrepreneur

Sara Blakely

Founding Spanx and building a shapewear business from a personal clothing problem.

Entrepreneur

Dhirubhai Ambani

Founding Reliance and expanding from textiles into major industry.

Entrepreneur

Mo Ibrahim

Building Celtel’s African mobile networks and establishing a governance foundation.

Entrepreneur

Akio Morita

Co-founding Sony and helping take Japanese consumer electronics worldwide.

Entrepreneur

Larry Page

Co-founding Google and helping develop PageRank.

Entrepreneur

N. R. Narayana Murthy

Co-founding Infosys and helping build India’s global software-services industry.

Industrialist

John D. Rockefeller

Building Standard Oil into an oil-industry giant and using his fortune to fund medical research and education.

Industrialist

Andrew Carnegie

Building a vast American steel business and funding thousands of public libraries with the proceeds.

Industrialist

Jamsetji Tata

Founding the Tata enterprise and laying plans for Indian steelmaking, scientific education and hydroelectric power.

Entrepreneur

Cher Wang

Co-founding HTC, a major early smartphone maker that later developed the Vive virtual-reality business.

Entrepreneur

Strive Masiyiwa

Building Econet after challenging Zimbabwe’s telecoms monopoly and expanding African communications infrastructure.

Economist

W. Arthur Lewis

Explaining how workers move from subsistence livelihoods into an expanding modern economy through the Lewis development model.

Economist

Daron Acemoglu

Investigating how political and economic institutions shape prosperity, and co-writing Why Nations Fail.

Economist

Elinor Ostrom

Showing how communities can successfully manage shared resources such as forests, fisheries and irrigation systems.

Economist

Mariana Mazzucato

Arguing that governments actively shape innovation and should share in the value created by public investment.

Entrepreneur

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

Building Biocon from an industrial-enzyme start-up into a major biotechnology company.

Entrepreneur

Morris Chang

Founding TSMC and pioneering a business devoted to manufacturing other companies’ chips.

Entrepreneur

Tony Elumelu

Building pan-African banking businesses and funding African entrepreneurs through his foundation.

Economist

Raúl Prebisch

Shaping Latin American development economics and challenging the advantages of commodity-led trade.

Economist

Milton Friedman

Advancing monetarism and becoming an influential advocate of free-market economic policy.

Business executive

Meg Whitman

Leading eBay’s growth from an early internet business into a global marketplace.

Entrepreneur

Masayoshi Son

Founding SoftBank and making large technology investments, including an early stake in Alibaba.

Entrepreneur

Pierre Omidyar

Founding eBay and helping establish online person-to-person commerce.

Entrepreneur

Patrice Motsepe

Building African Rainbow Minerals and leading African football’s governing body.

Economist

Celso Furtado

The economist who explained Brazilian underdevelopment through its colonial economy and unequal growth.

Industrialist

Cornelius Vanderbilt

The shipping and railroad magnate who built a transport empire around New York.

Economist

Thomas Piketty

The economist whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century brought wealth inequality into mainstream debate.

Business executive

Azim Premji

The business leader who transformed Wipro from a consumer-products company into a global technology business.

Industrialist

Kōnosuke Matsushita

The founder of the company that became Panasonic, whose electrical products reached households around the world.

Business executive

Marc Benioff

Co-founding Salesforce and helping popularise business software delivered through the cloud.

Business executive

Scott McNealy

Co-founding Sun Microsystems and leading its growth in networked computing.

Industrialist

Andrew Mellon

Building an industrial fortune and founding the National Gallery of Art.

Economist

Friedrich Hayek

Explaining the role of dispersed knowledge in markets and arguing against central planning.

Economist

Kaushik Basu

Connecting economic theory with development policy as a World Bank chief economist and adviser to India.

Economist

Ha-Joon Chang

Questioning free-market development orthodoxy in Kicking Away the Ladder and accessible economics books.

Business executive

Isabel dos Santos

Building major Angolan business interests that later became the subject of corruption investigations and sanctions.

Entrepreneur

Martha Stewart

Building a lifestyle business around cooking, decorating and practical household skills.

Entrepreneur

Ingvar Kamprad

Founding IKEA and building a global business around affordable, self-assembled furniture.

Industrialist

Jamnalal Bajaj

Founding the Bajaj business group while supporting Gandhi’s independence and social-reform campaigns.

Entrepreneur

Pony Ma

Co-founding Tencent, the company behind QQ and WeChat.

Fashion designer

Ralph Lauren

Building Polo into a global fashion brand around a recognisable vision of American style.

Entrepreneur

Amancio Ortega

Building Zara and the Inditex fashion group.

Industrialist

G. D. Birla

Expanding the Birla industrial businesses and supporting India’s independence movement.

Entrepreneur

Robin Li

Co-founding Baidu and developing technology for ranking web search results.

Entrepreneur

Phil Knight

Co-founding Nike with running coach Bill Bowerman.

Business executive

Bernard Arnault

Building LVMH into a global group of luxury brands.

Entrepreneur

Shiv Nadar

Co-founding HCL and helping build India’s computing industry.

Entrepreneur

Lei Jun

Building Xiaomi into a global consumer technology brand.

Entrepreneur

Yvon Chouinard

Founding Patagonia and directing its ownership towards environmental protection.

Entrepreneur

Sergey Brin

Co-founding Google with Larry Page.

Entrepreneur

Ren Zhengfei

Founding Huawei and developing its telecommunications equipment business.

Entrepreneur

Howard Schultz

Building Starbucks into an international coffeehouse chain.

Entrepreneur

Anita Roddick

Building The Body Shop around campaigning and ethical consumerism.

Entrepreneur

Falguni Nayar

Founding the Indian beauty retailer Nykaa.

Economist

Gunnar Myrdal

Connecting economics with social institutions and racial inequality.

Economist

Reinhard Selten

Refining game theory and developing experimental economics.

Economist

Bengt Holmström

Explaining how contracts and incentives work under uncertainty.

Economist

Leonid Hurwicz

Founding mechanism design and the idea of incentive compatibility.

Economist

Ragnar Frisch

Helping establish econometrics and sharing the first economics Nobel memorial prize.

Economist

David Card

Using natural experiments to study wages, immigration and employment.

Economist

Finn E. Kydland

Explaining business cycles and the time-consistency problem in economic policy.

Economist

Jean Tirole

Analysing market power and the regulation of large firms.

Economist

Leonid Kantorovich

Developing linear programming for allocating scarce resources.

Economist

Maurice Allais

Winning the 1988 economics prize for work on markets and resource allocation.

Economist

Myron Scholes

Co-developing the Black–Scholes option-pricing model.

Economist

Robert Mundell

Developing the theory of optimum currency areas

Economist

Christopher A. Pissarides

Explaining unemployment through search-and-matching theory.

Economist

Philippe Aghion

Explaining economic growth through innovation and creative destruction.

Economist

James Mirrlees

Explaining incentives and taxation when information is unequal.

Economist

James Heckman

Developing methods to account for selection bias in economic data.

Economist

Tjalling Koopmans

Mathematical analysis of efficient resource allocation

Economist

William Nordhaus

Integrating climate change into economic models

Mathematician

Robert Aumann

Game-theoretic analysis of repeated interaction

Economist

Oliver Hart

Explaining ownership and incomplete contracts

Economist

Joshua Angrist

Developing methods for estimating causal effects in economics.

Economist

Richard Stone

Developing systems of national economic accounts.

Economist

William Vickrey

Auction theory and pricing crowded roads and public services.

Economist

Michael Spence

Explaining how education can signal ability in the job market.

Economist

James M. Buchanan

Public choice theory and the rules of collective decisions.

Economist

Guido Imbens

Methods for drawing causal conclusions from natural experiments.

Economist

Gérard Debreu

Mathematical foundations of general economic equilibrium.

Economist

Douglass North

Explaining economic history through institutions and incentives.

Economist

Trygve Haavelmo

Establishing probability-based foundations for econometrics.

Economist

Saburo Okita

Helping shape Japan’s postwar economic planning.

Economist

Simon Kuznets

Measuring national income and long-term economic growth.

Economist

James A. Robinson

Research linking political institutions and economic prosperity.