A fashion designer who bid for an unwanted oil licence and built a fortune underground
She trained as a fashion designer and secretary before applying for an oil prospecting licence in the 1990s that other companies had passed over,…
A small-town German mayor who invented the credit union to save farmers from moneylenders
Watching famine push indebted farmers into the hands of loan sharks, he organised village co-operative credit societies owned and run by their own…
Took over a failing cocoa firm at 21 and built Bournville, a factory in a garden
He and his brother took on a business close to collapse and lived on almost nothing to save it. When it prospered he moved the works out of…
A Kurdish shepherd's son who bought a shuttered yoghurt plant and staffed it with refugees
Born to a Kurdish farming family in Turkey, he arrived in the United States speaking little English, bought a closed yoghurt factory with a small…
Failed at a dozen jobs and started franchising fried chicken at 65 with a pension cheque
Fired from job after job, he was running a roadside café in Kentucky when a new highway bypassed it and wiped him out. At an age when most people…
Left Kraków with a suitcase of face cream jars and built one of the first global cosmetics empires
Fleeing an arranged marriage in Poland with little money, she sold a face cream made by a family friend to Australian sheep farmers' wives, then…
Refused to accept apartheid limits and built a hair care company from his kitchen
Growing up under apartheid with no right to own property in most of South Africa, he built a small hair care manufacturing operation from his kitchen…
An Anglo-Irish landowner who spent a fortune persuading small farmers to work together
After years ranching in America restored his health, he returned to Ireland and devoted his life and much of his money to persuading small,…
Ran a student catering business in America before building a Dubai property empire from a trading desk
He funded his studies abroad by running a small catering operation, then built a trading and services company in Dubai before founding DAMAC…
Left a research career in Austria to grow medicine in the Egyptian desert
A pharmaceutical researcher who gave up a settled career in Austria to reclaim a patch of desert outside Cairo, he built Sekem, a farming and…
Arrived in America with less than one hundred dollars and rose to run one of its biggest food companies
She left Chennai for a Yale business degree with almost no money, worked nights to afford a job interview suit, and climbed through strategy roles to…
Founded IKEA at 17 with a reward from his father for good school grades
A farm boy who sold matches from his bicycle at five, he built the world’s largest furniture retailer on one idea: if you cannot afford the price,…
Failed his university entrance exam twice and was rejected by KFC before building Alibaba
A schoolteacher from Hangzhou who was turned down for dozens of jobs, including a position at the first KFC in his city, he co-founded Alibaba from…
Built 5,127 prototypes of a vacuum cleaner before one worked
Every vacuum manufacturer in Britain turned down his bagless design, so after five years and thousands of failed prototypes he built a company to…
Planned a steel city, a science institute and a hydroelectric scheme for an India that did not yet exist
A Parsi trader’s son in colonial Bombay, he built cotton mills with conditions far ahead of their time and then spent his last years on three schemes…
Grew up without running water in Soviet Ukraine and once relied on food stamps before founding WhatsApp
He emigrated from a village outside Kyiv at sixteen, worked as a school janitor to help support his family, taught himself computer networking from…
Took over his widowed mother’s herbalist shop at 13 and built Boots the Chemists
His father died when he was ten, leaving a small herbal shop in a poor part of Nottingham. He cut prices so ordinary people could afford medicine,…
Left school at 15, built a perfume house from her kitchen, sold it, survived cancer and started again
She left school with no qualifications and began making bath oil for her facial clients in a small London flat. Estée Lauder bought the company in…
Pawned his mother's furniture to launch a magazine when no bank would lend to a Black publisher
Born into poverty in segregated Arkansas and raised partly on welfare in Chicago, he borrowed against his mother's furniture to launch Negro Digest…
Gave his family’s department stores to the people who worked in them
At 21 he worked out that he, his brother and his father took as much from the business as all 300 staff combined, and decided this was wrong. Over…
A priest in a poor Basque town who started a technical school that grew into a cooperative empire
Sent as a young priest to the impoverished town of Mondragón after the Spanish Civil War, he founded a technical school and then a small cooperative…
A York grocer who made chocolate, then asked why people were poor in the first place
He joined his brother’s struggling cocoa works at 33, spent thirty years making it pay, and then put most of his wealth into three trusts to study…
A potter who lost a leg, never worked the wheel again, and built an industry instead
The thirteenth child of a Staffordshire potter, he was left lame by smallpox and turned from throwing pots to experimenting with clays and glazes,…
Married at 12, widowed and destitute by 16, she later bought and rebuilt a bankrupt steel company
Born into a Dalit family in rural Maharashtra, she survived a child marriage, an attempted suicide and years of poverty in a Mumbai slum before…
