Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in his parents' garage in 1976 with Steve Wozniak, was forced out of the company he started in 1985 after a boardroom power struggle, and returned in 1997 to lead one of the most consequential turnarounds in business history. In between, he founded NeXT and bought the computer-graphics division of Lucasfilm for $10 million, renaming it Pixar and steering it toward Toy Story (1995), the first fully computer-animated feature film.

Back at Apple, Jobs presided over a run of products — the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad — that repeatedly redefined their categories and turned Apple into the most valuable company in the world by market capitalization. He was as well known for his uncompromising product sense and design partnership with Jony Ive as for a demanding, sometimes abrasive management style that former colleagues have described in starkly different terms depending on who is telling the story.

Jobs was diagnosed with a rare, initially operable form of pancreatic cancer in 2003 and died in October 2011, two months after resigning as Apple's CEO.