Founders with fan clubs, inventors with memes and executives with keynote halos. Whose reputation runs furthest ahead of the record?
1Thomas EdisonFamous inventor who ran a patent factory and fought a bitter current war with Tesla.1000pts
2Steve JobsApple's co-founder, credited with products that teams of engineers, including Steve Wozniak, actually built.777pts
3Nikola TeslaBrilliant inventor turned internet folk hero, whose legend often outgrows his real results.678pts
4Steve WozniakApple's engineering genius, sometimes seen as the nice guy riding on nostalgia.678pts
5Jeff BezosAmazon founder whose success critics tie as much to logistics and low wages as to vision.555pts
6Jony IveApple's star designer, praised for minimalism and blamed for the butterfly keyboard.555pts
7Peter ThielPayPal co-founder and investor who became tech's best-known contrarian.555pts
8Marissa MayerEarly Google star whose attempt to turn Yahoo around ended with its sale to Verizon.555pts
9Elon MuskHailed as a real-life Iron Man; critics note he joined Tesla as an investor after it was founded.0pts
10Mark ZuckerbergFacebook founder whose reputation rests on one early hit and billions spent on the metaverse.0pts
11Bill GatesMicrosoft co-founder whose first big product, MS-DOS, was bought from another company.0pts
12Jack DorseyTwitter and Square co-founder often portrayed as a visionary monk of tech.0pts
13Larry EllisonOracle founder whose critics say his yachts and lawsuits get more attention than new ideas.0pts
14Tim CookApple CEO who turned the company into a money machine without a new category-defining product.0pts
15Jensen HuangNvidia co-founder in the leather jacket, crowned king of the AI chip boom.0pts
16Travis KalanickUber co-founder celebrated as a disruptor until scandals forced him out.0pts
17Steve BallmerMicrosoft CEO from 2000 to 2014 who laughed off the iPhone, wrote off the $7.6 billion Nokia deal and missed the mobile era.
18Larry PageGoogle co-founder behind PageRank, whose later Alphabet moonshots such as Google Glass and Loon produced few lasting products.
19Sergey BrinGoogle co-founder who championed Google Glass and other X lab projects that failed to match the success of search.
20Sam AltmanOpenAI's CEO and the public face of ChatGPT, briefly fired by his own board in 2023, whose image critics say outruns his technical role.
21Marc AndreessenCo-created the Mosaic browser and founded Netscape, which lost the browser war, before becoming a venture capitalist known for bold predictions.
22Jack MaAlibaba founder and former English teacher who openly said he did not write code, celebrated as China's tech visionary until 2020.
23John McAfeeFounded one of the first commercial antivirus companies in 1987, then became better known for erratic stunts, legal troubles and a presidential bid.
24Michael DellBuilt a PC empire from his University of Texas dorm room on direct sales and supply chains rather than technical invention.
25Eric SchmidtGoogle's CEO from 2001 to 2011, brought in as 'adult supervision', and often credited with growth the founders' products created.
26Carly FiorinaHewlett-Packard CEO who pushed through the Compaq merger in 2002, saw the stock halve and was forced out by the board in 2005.
27Meg WhitmanGrew eBay into a giant in the 2000s, then led HP's breakup and the short-lived Quibi streaming app, which shut down within a year.
28Sheryl SandbergFacebook's long-time COO and Lean In author, praised as a management star while the company faced privacy scandals like Cambridge Analytica.
29Alexander Graham BellWon the first telephone patent in 1876, hours ahead of Elisha Gray, and the credit for inventing the telephone is still disputed.
30Guglielmo MarconiNobel laureate called the father of radio, though the US Supreme Court in 1943 upheld earlier radio patents of Nikola Tesla and others.
31Steve CaseAOL co-founder who engineered the 2000 merger with Time Warner, often described as one of the worst corporate deals in history.
32Elizabeth HolmesTheranos founder hailed as the next Steve Jobs, whose blood-testing technology never worked and who was convicted of fraud in 2022.
33Sam Bankman-FriedFTX founder celebrated as a crypto genius until the exchange collapsed in 2022; he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 25 years.
34Adam NeumannWeWork co-founder who sold an office landlord as a tech company valued at $47 billion, before its 2019 IPO collapsed.
35Masayoshi SonSoftBank founder whose $100 billion Vision Fund backed WeWork and other flops alongside early bets on Alibaba that made his name.
Photo credits
- Steve Jobs — Matthew Yohe, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Steve Wozniak — Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Jony Ive — Marcus Dawes https://www.marcusdawes.com [email protected], CC BY-SA 3.0
- Peter Thiel — Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Marissa Mayer — World Economic Forum, CC BY-SA 2.0
- Elon Musk — Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Mark Zuckerberg — Anurag R Dubey, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Bill Gates — Bogdan Hoyaux / European Union, CC BY 4.0
- Jack Dorsey — Mark Warner, CC BY 2.0
- Tim Cook — Dati Bendo / European Union, CC BY 4.0
- Travis Kalanick — Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Steve Ballmer — Off2riorob, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Larry Page — Stansfield PL, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Sam Altman — TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0
- Marc Andreessen — JD Lasica, CC BY 2.0
- Jack Ma — Foundations World Economic Forum, CC BY 2.0
- John McAfee — Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Michael Dell — Village Global, CC BY 2.0
- Eric Schmidt — Guillaume Paumier, CC BY 3.0
- Carly Fiorina — Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0
- Sheryl Sandberg — World Economic Forum from Cologny, Switzerland, CC BY-SA 2.0
- Steve Case — TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0
- Elizabeth Holmes — Photo by Max Morse for TechCrunch TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0
- Sam Bankman-Fried — Cointelegraph, CC BY 3.0
- Masayoshi Son — European Communities, 2025 / EC - Audiovisual Service, CC BY 4.0
Comments 2
Is he Edison with better keynotes? Wozniak and Jony Ive stand on this list too, next to the man who got the credit: https://youpick.best/articles/steve-jobs-ranked-many-ways
YP
ypb-teamSep 29Jobs once said Microsoft had absolutely no taste, and yet Gates and Jobs both landed on the unkind list. The rivalry, twelve ways: https://youpick.best/articles/bill-gates-vs-steve-jobs-ranked
YP
ypb-teamOct 30
