Collection I
The Founders
A company can be summarised in a filing. A person cannot. These are commissioned biographies of the operators behind the businesses — written by a human editor, verified against the record, and kept current for as long as the edition is held.
Published
Complete records.
Elon Musk – The Man Who Kept Betting Everything
Born in Pretoria in 1971, he sold a game at twelve and made two fortunes before he was thirty-two — then spent almost all of it, lost three rockets, and closed the round that saved Tesla at six in the evening on Christmas Eve.
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Rohit Jain – The Man Who Put Ahinsa on the Board
He named a construction company after non-violence, then spent three years being measured against it — from an empty plot on Republic Day 2024 to Agra’s most expensive road.
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Ratan Tata – The Man Who Gave the Company Away
An architect who took the shop floor, ran India’s largest group for twenty-one years, bought Tetley, Corus and Jaguar — and left it two-thirds owned by charity.
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Jeff Bezos – The Man Who Wrote the Rules Down
Born Jorgensen and adopted at four, he quit a Wall Street job at thirty, wrote the business plan on the drive to Seattle, and published the strategy he then spent thirty years being bound by.
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Mukesh Ambani – The Heir Who Gave It Away Free
He left Stanford to build a polyester plant, inherited a fight over an undivided company — then took India’s telecom market by charging nothing for it.
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Gautam Adani – The Dropout Who Bought the Coastline
He left college at sixteen to sort diamonds in Bombay, came home to run a plastics unit — then built India’s largest private port on a salt marsh in Kutch.
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Anand Mahindra – The Grandson Who Stopped Licensing Other People’s Cars
A Harvard film student who started at the family steel company, then gave a jeep maker the Scorpio — a car it designed entirely itself.
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Kumar Mangalam Birla – The Chairman at Twenty-Eight
A chartered accountant who inherited a $2 billion group when his father died, bought Novelis for $6 billion, and turned the Birla name global.
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Azim Premji – The Soap Seller Who Gave Wipro Away
Called home from Stanford at twenty-one to run a cooking-oil company, he turned it into Wipro — then gave two-thirds of it to India’s schools.
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Shiv Nadar – The Engineer Who Started in a Barsati
An engineer from a Tamil village who left a salaried job with a few colleagues and ₹1.87 lakh, built HCL, and became India’s most generous giver.
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Mark Zuckerberg – The Student Who Would Not Sell
He launched a website from a Harvard dorm at nineteen, turned down a billion dollars at twenty-two, and still controls the company twenty years later.
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Bill Gates – The Programmer Who Kept the Licence
A Seattle schoolboy who got hooked on a school terminal, left Harvard to write software, and became the richest man in the world by keeping one contract clause.
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Warren Buffett – The Man Who Kept the Name of a Failing Mill
A paperboy from Omaha who bought a dying textile mill out of spite, kept its name, and turned it into one of the largest companies on earth.
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Larry Ellison – The Dropout Who Named His Company After a CIA Project
Adopted as a baby, a university dropout twice over, he read an IBM research paper, beat IBM to the product, and built Oracle.
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Steve Jobs – The Founder Who Was Fired and Came Back
Adopted at birth, a college dropout, thrown out of his own company at thirty — then back twelve years later to rescue it and change the phone for good.
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Larry Page – The Student Who Ranked the Web
The son of two computer scientists, he wanted to download the whole web for a PhD project, and found a way to rank it instead.
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Sergey Brin – The Refugee Who Came Back to Code
His family left Moscow when he was six. He co-founded Google at twenty-five, stepped back at forty-six, and came back in his fifties to write code for Gemini.
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Michael Dell – The Student Who Sold Computers From His Dorm Room
He took apart an Apple II at fifteen, sold upgraded PCs from a dorm room at nineteen, and ran a Fortune 500 company at twenty-seven.
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Jensen Huang – The Busboy Who Bet on the Graphics Chip
Sent from Taiwan to a Kentucky reform school at nine, he washed dishes at Denny’s, founded Nvidia in one, and built the company behind the AI boom.
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Amancio Ortega – The Shop Boy Who Built Zara
The son of a railway worker, he left school at fourteen to deliver shirts, opened one shop in A Coruña, and built the world’s largest clothing retailer.
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Carlos Slim – The Engineer Who Bought in the Crash
The son of a Lebanese shopkeeper, he learned accounts as a boy, bought when everyone in Mexico was selling, and won the national phone company.
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Zhang Yiming – The Engineer Who Let the Algorithm Choose
A shy software engineer from Fujian who decided that a machine should choose what you see next, and built TikTok on that idea.
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Richard Branson – The Schoolboy Who Named His Business After Inexperience
A dyslexic schoolboy who left at sixteen to run a magazine, called his company Virgin because he was new at business, and put his brand on records, planes and spaceships.
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Jack Ma – The English Teacher Who Built Alibaba
He failed the entrance exam twice, taught English for $12 a month, saw the internet on a trip to Seattle, and built China’s greatest e-commerce empire.
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A founder profile is the Founder edition — 1,500 words and up with two revision rounds, as an Article with 2 updates a year, or as Article + Video with 2 article and 2 video updates a year. Take the Legacy edition and the company record is written alongside it.
Also in the archive
The Businesses
Company histories written as narrative — how the model was found, how it was financed, and what the firm actually does today.