Ray Kroc

Kroc spent decades selling paper cups and then Multimixer milkshake machines, which is how he came across Richard and Maurice McDonald's busy restaurant in San Bernardino in 1954. At fifty-two he became their franchising agent, opened his own first outlet in Illinois in 1955 and later bought the brothers out. The financial structure that made McDonald's rich, owning the land under franchisees, came from his finance chief Harry Sonneborn.