Curated playlist

American technology company founders

Elon MuskIn 2001, Elon Musk traveled to Moscow twice to buy missiles, hoping to launch a plant greenhouse to Mars.
MC HammerMC Hammer started out as an 11-year-old selling baseballs in a parking lot. The Oakland A's owner hired him on the spot.
Bill GatesBill Gates and Paul Allen wrote software for a computer they did not have. Their Altair demo worked the first time.
Larry PageLarry Page, the co-founder of Google, once held a cheque for $100,000 that was made out to a company that did not exist. Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote it to "Google, Inc." before anyone had filed the…
Sergey BrinSergey Brin, co-founder of Google, helped build a search tool that grew faster than its makers expected. His partner Larry Page later recalled the moment the project began to feel real: "Pretty soon, we had 10,000 searches a day. And we…
Steve JobsSteve Jobs died on the 5th of October 2011, and he had arranged one last gesture for the people who came to remember him. At the memorial held at Stanford University, every guest received a small brown box as a farewell gift from him.…
Michael BloombergMichael Bloomberg was on the ballot in New York City's Republican mayoral primary when voting opened on the morning of the 11th of September 2001. Later that day, officials postponed the primary because of the attacks on the city. The…
Jimmy WalesJimmy Wales was three years old when a door-to-door salesman sold his mother a World Book Encyclopedia. The publisher mailed owners little stickers to paste over outdated pages, and the toddler put them to work on his family's set. Decades…
Marc AndreessenMarc Andreessen was earning $6.85 an hour as a programmer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications when he helped build the tool that made the internet feel like a place. He was born in 1971, and he is now an American…
Andrew NgA neural network taught itself to recognize cats from YouTube videos. Andrew Ng cofounded Google Brain.
Jensen HuangJensen Huang founded Nvidia in a Denny's booth, where he once worked as a dishwasher. Three engineers pooled $600.
Gabe NewellGabe Newell, the president and majority owner of Valve Corporation, has lived mostly at sea since the COVID-19 pandemic. He is an American video game developer and businessman, and he co-founded the company he now controls. His path to…
Jeff BezosJeff Bezos read a single statistic in the spring of 1994. Web usage, it said, was growing at 2,300 percent a year. Within months he had walked away from a senior job on Wall Street to sell books over the internet. He warned many of his…
Sal KhanSal Khan appeared on the cover of Forbes in 2012 beneath a bold tagline: "The $1 Trillion Opportunity." The phrase did not describe a gadget or a start-up with a flashy product. It described free lessons, recorded by one teacher and open…
Alexis OhanianAlexis Ohanian has a plaque in his honor at Booth 19 of a Waffle House in Charlottesville, Virginia. It reads: "Site of Alexis Ohanian's Waffle House Epiphany." A division manager named Derick Moore had it installed to mark the moment.…
Steve WozniakSteve Wozniak, nicknamed Woz, built his first computer in June 1971. A newspaper reporter destroyed it by stepping on the power supply cable. He had built the machine with his friend Bill Fernandez as a self-taught engineering project. It…
Mark CubanIn 2002, Mark Cuban told the world that the NBA's manager of officials, Ed T. Rush, "wouldn't be able to manage a Dairy Queen." The restaurant chain took offense. Its management answered with an invitation to prove the point. Cuban…
Palmer LuckeyPalmer Luckey once built a virtual reality headset meant to kill the person wearing it. Announced in November 2022 as a tribute to the anime Sword Art Online, it appeared to be a modified Meta Quest Pro. Several explosive charges were…
Bridgit MendlerBridgit Mendler is an American entrepreneur, a former actress and a singer-songwriter, and she once explained how she spent the COVID-19 lockdowns. She told CNBC: "While everybody else was making their sourdough starters, we were building…