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Éleuthère Irénée du Pont
Born
Du Pont had trained under the chemist Antoine Lavoisier at the French royal powder works, and his family left revolutionary France for the United States in 1800. Finding American gunpowder poor, he used that training, French machinery and family capital to open mills on Delaware's Brandywine Creek in 1802. The company that grew from them became DuPont, one of the longest-surviving industrial firms in America.
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Charles Pfizer
Born
Pfizer had apprenticed as a pharmacist in Ludwigsburg before emigrating to New York, and in 1849 he and his cousin Charles Erhart, a confectioner, opened a chemicals business in Brooklyn with a loan from Pfizer's father. Their first hit was a worm medicine made palatable with almond toffee, combining the two men's skills. Civil War demand for painkillers and antiseptics grew it, and the name is now on one of the world's largest drug companies.
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Domingo Ghirardelli
Born
Ghirardelli apprenticed with a confectioner in Italy, ran a sweet shop in Peru and followed the Gold Rush to California, where he set up as a chocolate maker in San Francisco in 1852. A fire and a bankruptcy along the way did not stop him; his sons expanded the firm, and its former factory on the waterfront is now a landmark. The brand, owned by Lindt since 1998, still sells under his name.
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Levi Strauss
Born
Strauss left Bavaria for New York, where his older half-brothers already ran a dry-goods business, and in 1853 opened a West Coast branch in San Francisco to supply Gold Rush shops. The riveted work trousers came from a Nevada tailor, Jacob Davis, who needed a partner to pay for the patent; Strauss provided the money and distribution in 1873. Family networks and that partnership, rather than a lone genius, built Levi Strauss & Co.
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Henry E. Steinway
Born
Heinrich Steinweg was already an experienced piano maker in Seesen, in Lower Saxony, when he emigrated to New York with most of his family in 1850 after the failed revolutions of 1848. He and his sons worked in other workshops before founding Steinway & Sons in 1853, and their patents, including the overstrung iron frame of a grand, and medal wins at exhibitions built its reputation. His sons ran the business side; the craft came over with the father.
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Adolphus Busch
Born
The second-youngest of twenty-two children of a prosperous German wine and brewing-supply merchant, Busch came to St. Louis in 1857 and sold brewing supplies before marrying the daughter of the brewer Eberhard Anheuser and joining his business. He pioneered pasteurising beer and shipping it in refrigerated railcars, which turned a local brewery into a national one with Budweiser. The family firm lasted through Prohibition and is now part of AB InBev.
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Andrew Carnegie
Born
Carnegie's family left Dunfermline for Pittsburgh in 1848, poor after his father's handloom weaving was undercut by mills. He started as a bobbin boy, became a telegraph messenger and then the protégé of a railroad boss, Thomas Scott, who gave him the inside track on investments. Carnegie Steel's efficiency built his fortune, and its merger into US Steel in 1901 created a company that still exists, though the 1892 Homestead strike remains a lasting stain.
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Friedrich Weyerhäuser
Weyerhäuser arrived from Hesse in 1852 at eighteen, worked in a brewery and then at a sawmill in Rock Island, Illinois, which he and his brother-in-law bought when it failed. Buying timberland rather than just milling logs was his big move, culminating in 1900 with the purchase of 900,000 acres from the Northern Pacific railroad. Weyerhaeuser is still one of the largest private owners of timberland in the United States.
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Michael Marks
Marks was a Jewish refugee from the Russian Empire who arrived in north-east England in the early 1880s with little English. A Leeds wholesaler, Isaac Dewhirst, lent him five pounds of stock to peddle, and in 1884 he opened a market stall under the sign "Don't ask the price, it's a penny." Ten years later he took Dewhirst's cashier Thomas Spencer as partner, and Marks & Spencer has been on British high streets ever since.
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Montague Burton
Born Meshe David Osinsky in Lithuania, Burton arrived in Britain as a teenager around 1900 and opened a menswear shop in Chesterfield on borrowed money. Settling in Leeds, he built the largest tailoring factory in Europe and a chain of shops selling made-to-measure suits at prices working men could afford, and fitted out millions of demobilised soldiers after both world wars. The Burton name survives on the high street, now online under Boohoo, though not the empire.
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Hans Wilsdorf
Born
Orphaned in Bavaria, Wilsdorf worked for a watch exporter in Switzerland before moving to London, where in 1905 he founded a firm with his brother-in-law Alfred Davis to import Swiss movements and case them as wristwatches. He registered the name Rolex in 1908, later moved the company to Geneva, and pushed the waterproof Oyster case, famously worn by Mercedes Gleitze swimming the Channel in 1927. He left the company to a foundation, which still owns it.
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Max Factor Sr.
Born
Factor was a wigmaker and cosmetician from Łódź who worked for the Russian imperial opera before emigrating to the United States in 1904. In Los Angeles he made make-up that would not crack or look wrong on film, including greasepaint in thin cream form, and became the supplier to Hollywood's studios. His sons took the products to ordinary women; the brand, though not the family firm, is still sold.
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Carl Laemmle
Born
Laemmle left Laupheim in Württemberg for America at seventeen and worked as a book-keeper and clothing store manager in Wisconsin before buying a Chicago nickelodeon in 1906. He fought Thomas Edison's patent trust as an independent distributor, merged several small producers into Universal in 1912 and opened Universal City in California in 1915. He later sponsored hundreds of German Jews to emigrate in the 1930s. Universal is still a major studio.
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Adolph Zukor
Born
An orphan from rural Hungary, Zukor arrived in New York at sixteen and swept floors at a furrier before setting up in the fur trade himself. Penny arcades led to nickelodeons, and in 1912 he founded Famous Players to make feature-length films with stage stars, which grew into Paramount. His insight was owning production, distribution and cinemas together, a model later broken up by the courts. He lived to 103, and Paramount is still trading.
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Andrew Grove
Born
Grove survived the Holocaust in Budapest, fled Hungary after the 1956 uprising and arrived in New York with almost nothing. He studied chemical engineering at City College, earned a PhD at Berkeley and joined Intel on its first day in 1968 as Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore's director of engineering. As chief executive from 1987 he took Intel out of memory chips and into microprocessors, which made it the industry's giant.
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Sergey Brin
Born
Brin's family left Moscow in 1979, when he was six, partly because of antisemitism that blocked his father's academic career. His parents' academic careers in Maryland gave him a strong maths grounding, and at Stanford he and Larry Page built the search engine that became Google in 1998, with early cheques from investors such as Andy Bechtolsheim. He stepped back from management in 2019 but returned to work on Google's AI models, and remains a controlling shareholder alongside Page.
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Jensen Huang
Born
Huang was born in Taiwan, and at nine was sent with his brother to relatives in the United States, ending up at a Kentucky boarding school that turned out to be a reform academy. He studied electrical engineering in Oregon and at Stanford, worked at AMD and LSI Logic, and in 1993 co-founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem over meals at a Denny's. The graphics chips built for games became the engine of AI computing, and he is still chief executive.
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Jan Koum
Born
Koum moved from near Kyiv to Mountain View, California with his mother at sixteen, and the family relied for a time on food stamps while she babysat and he swept a grocery store floor. He taught himself networking, worked at Yahoo for nine years and, with former colleague Brian Acton, launched WhatsApp in 2009: a messaging app with no adverts and a tiny staff. Facebook bought it in 2014, and it is now used by billions of people.
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Hamdi Ulukaya
Born
Ulukaya grew up in a Kurdish family of cheesemakers in eastern Turkey and came to the US in the 1990s to study English. He started a feta business, then in 2005 bought a closed Kraft yogurt plant in upstate New York with a Small Business Administration loan. Chobani's thick strained yogurt took Greek yogurt mainstream in American supermarkets. He still owns most of the company and runs it as chief executive, and has hired many refugees at its plants.
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Karan Bilimoria, Baron Bilimoria
Born
Bilimoria, the son of an Indian Army general, came to Britain to study accountancy and law at Cambridge, so his route was a privileged one. In 1989, with student debts, he started Cobra Beer, a smoother lager designed to go with curry and sold first to Indian restaurants from a battered car. It nearly collapsed in 2009 and was rescued by Molson Coors in a joint venture, which shows how fragile even a well-known brand can be. He sits in the House of Lords.
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