Copyright © 2026 OyList. All Rights Reserved.
Share
Items12
1
Roy O. Disney
Born
Walt Disney was the face and the creative force; his older brother Roy found the money. Roy co-founded the studio in 1923, kept it solvent through near-bankruptcies, arranged the loans that paid for Snow White and the financing for Disneyland, and after Walt's death in 1966 delayed his own retirement to see Walt Disney World built and opened in 1971. He insisted it carry Walt's name rather than his own.
More about Roy O. Disney2
Takeo Fujisawa
Born
Soichiro Honda built the engines; Fujisawa, who joined in 1949, ran everything else. He raised the capital, built the national network of bicycle shops that sold Honda's first motorised bikes, pushed for the Super Cub and set up the American sales operation. He and Honda retired together in 1973, and Honda later said the company would not have existed without him.
More about Takeo Fujisawa3
Taiichi Ohno
Born
Ohno was a Toyota production engineer, not a chief executive, and from the late 1940s to the 1970s he developed most of what became the Toyota Production System on the factory floor: just-in-time supply using kanban cards, stopping the line to fix problems, and relentless cutting of waste. It became the basis of lean manufacturing worldwide. He rose to executive vice-president, but his real legacy is the method.
More about Taiichi Ohno4
Henry Earl Singleton
Singleton co-founded the conglomerate Teledyne in 1960 and avoided publicity, rarely speaking to analysts or the press. His distinctive work was capital allocation: issuing shares when they were expensive to buy companies, then buying back huge amounts of stock in the 1970s and 1980s when it was cheap, which shrank the share count by about 90 per cent. Buffett later called his record perhaps the best in American business.
More about Henry Earl Singleton5
Mike Markkula
Born
Markkula had retired from Intel's marketing department in his early thirties when he met Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976. He put in about 250,000 dollars as equity and loans, wrote the first business plan, recruited Mike Scott as the first professional chief executive and set out principles on marketing and focus that shaped early Apple. He was its third employee and later chairman, and is rarely mentioned in the founding story.
More about Mike Markkula6
Charlie Munger
Born
Munger was vice-chairman to Buffett's chairman for over four decades and nearly always the second voice. Buffett credited him with the single most important shift in Berkshire's approach: from buying fair businesses at bargain prices to buying wonderful businesses at fair prices, starting with See's Candies in 1972. That change in capital allocation shaped everything Berkshire bought afterwards.
More about Charlie Munger7
Colleen Barrett
Born
Barrett started as Herb Kelleher's legal secretary and became Southwest Airlines' president, the person who built and protected its customer-service and employee culture while Kelleher was the public face. She handled staff relations, set up the culture committee and personally answered customer complaints, and led the airline through the downturn after September 2001 without lay-offs. She died in 2024.
More about Colleen Barrett8
Ajit Jain
Jain joined Berkshire Hathaway in 1986 with no insurance background and built its reinsurance business into a source of tens of billions of dollars of float, the money Berkshire invests. He priced unusual risks, from huge catastrophe covers to sporting events, with discipline about walking away when prices were too low. Buffett repeatedly said Jain had made more money for shareholders than he had, yet he gave almost no interviews.
More about Ajit Jain9
Tim Cook
Born
Before Cook became Apple's chief executive he spent thirteen years as the operations chief Jobs hired in 1998, closing Apple's own factories and warehouses, moving manufacturing to contract partners in Asia, and cutting inventory from months to days. That supply chain is why Apple could launch the iPod and iPhone in enormous volumes with high margins. Most accounts of the comeback still credit only Jobs.
More about Tim Cook10
Jeff Williams (Apple)
Williams joined Apple from IBM in 1998 and spent most of the next two decades running procurement and operations, then from 2015 served as chief operating officer. He negotiated the flash memory deals that let Apple build the iPod nano and iPhone at scale and later oversaw the Apple Watch and health work. He retired in 2025, having been seen inside Apple as Cook's operational counterpart rather than a public figure.
More about Jeff Williams (Apple)11
Ruth Porat
Porat moved from Morgan Stanley to become Google's chief financial officer in 2015 and imposed cost discipline on a company famous for spending freely: reporting the moonshot units separately so investors could see their losses, and starting large share buybacks. Alphabet's profits and margins rose sharply on her watch. Since 2023 she has been its president and chief investment officer.
More about Ruth Porat12
Gwynne Shotwell
Shotwell joined SpaceX in 2002 as its seventh employee to sell launches, and as president and chief operating officer since 2008 she has run the business side: winning NASA and commercial contracts, managing launch operations and keeping customers when rockets failed. For most of that time Elon Musk got the attention. She stepped further into view in 2026, when SpaceX went public, but the work that earns her place here was done over the preceding two decades.
More about Gwynne Shotwell
