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.