Builders & Titans

In 1995, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates demonstrated the storage capacity of CD-ROMs by scaling hard copies of what one disc could hold

Photograph by Louie Psihoyos

coca-cola

may 15, 1950 | Illustration by Boris Artzybasheff

In Japanese, the word taikun means “great lord,” and it was used as an honorific for the shogun and men distinguished for military might as well as noble birth. In the U.S. in the 1920s, a vibrant and often ruthless mercantile class was winning power and influence through risky financial endeavors as well as inherited wealth. time’s founders, Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, called them tycoons—one of several foreign words, like pundit (from Hindi) and kudos (from Greek) to which the magazine gave fresh currency. Tycoon soon became shorthand for a businessman at the height of his powers. The second decade of U.S. industrialization, the era in which TIME was born, was full of tobacco tycoons, sugar tycoons and railway tycoons, all of whom appeared in the pages of the magazine. They were the personages in Luce’s vision of a world shaped by the ambitions of extraordinary individuals, the men—and they have been almost exclusively men—whose names have become signposts in the story of American business: Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, the J.P. Morgans (father and son).

Businessmen weren’t just getting rich; they were saving the world. The younger Morgan had become America’s designated savior for Germany, which was about to default on the onerous debts inflicted on it as punishment for losing World War I. TIME—like the rest of the U.S.—was fascinated by how the tycoons made their money as well as by how they lived. Its first cover story on John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in the world, detailed the daily routine of a man who had been retired for three decades: it included walking about his estate singing to himself in “a rather pleasant baritone.”

Then the Depression came, and the rich weren’t the solution. Luce’s vision was difficult to reconcile with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which was repairing the social and economic fabric of the country through a series of reforms that involved mere bureaucrats—not tycoons—in the Works Progress Administration, the Farm Security Administration and the Social Security Administration. A 1937 story on the issuing of the first Social Security numbers pointedly said they were called accounts, “lest workers feel they are being numbered like convicts.”

The world that emerged after the Depression and World War II provided TIME with a new canvas for depicting commerce and ­industry, a cosmos not of re-emerging tycoons but of titanic corporations. The postwar boom was created not only by men but also by corporations that embodied the American ideal as the country—all of it—sought to become richer. As consumer-­oriented companies competed to reach the young, optimistic population, TIME emerged as a channel into the heart of the new mass market. The magazine became an emblem of the aspiring American middle class, embodying its sensibility and documenting how its tastes were having a global impact. In the cover story on Coca-Cola, TIME celebrated the soft-drink company’s “peaceful near-conquest of the world.” The story described Coke as a different kind of American success story, built on salesmanship rather than the country’s rich natural resources. “Where there is no desire for it, Coke creates desire. Its advertising, which garnishes the world from the edge of the Arctic to the Cape of Good Hope, has created more new appetites and thirsts in more people than an army of dancing girls bearing jugs of wine ...” It was a particularly American dream, built on aspiration and flim-flam, a desire for ­upward mobility combined with the potent hocus-pocus of salesman­ship, design and, of course, technological progress. In Coke’s case, “built on a little water, sugar and flavoring.”

Coke was just one of the great American brands that came to dominate global business in the 1950s and ’60s. TIME pulled back the curtain on personalities—the new tycoons—that built many of them: Harlow Curtice styling the 1955 Chevy into an icon of youth, Walt Disney creating a modern mythology from his mass-­produced cartoon menagerie, Bowman Gray of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco defying mounting scientific evidence to celebrate the flavors of cigarette smoking with an audacious advertising campaign.

Eventually, however, the rest of the world began to catch up. Saudi Arabia would use its oil wealth to get its way politically and diplomatically. Japan Inc., led by Sony’s Akio Morita, would stun the world with innovations and clever marketing of high-quality, portable electronics. Europe would emerge as a solid counter­balance to the weight of U.S. capital. And by the late 20th century, China began to lead a host of other countries into fierce competition for the top ranks in trade and industry.

America still produced its singularly colorful tycoons. Sam Walton turned a small-town Ozarks retailer into the world’s biggest private employer (with 2 million employees), and Oprah Winfrey, born to a single mother, became the most powerful woman in the entertainment industry. The digital revolution built enormous fortunes and legends around Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs. But the U.S. has been racked by the greed of the financial sector, which has contributed to cataclysmic cycles of boom and bust, as the pursuit of wealth—on all social levels—has taken priority over everything else. Even in the eyes of Warren Buffett, perhaps the most successful investor of the 20th century, that is not sustainable. “We can rise to any challenge,” he said, “but not if people feel we’re in a plutocracy.” It is the world the tycoons have wrought. —jyoti thottam

Henry Ford

July 27, 1925

Portrait by S.J. Woolf

Almost 17 years after the Model T’s intro­duction and just before his 62nd birthday, Ford was the subject of a time cover.

Mr. Ford does not like modern dances, thinks the old ones will come back, is preparing a book to show why. He has also written a pamphlet against cigarette smoking and a discourse on why English should be a universal language. He collects American antiques. He has built a golf course for his employees and plays on it. He has opinions on politics; opinions and a hand in business. Age (62) cannot wither his infinite variety. He is always riding in many vehicles ... Aeronautics. “I experimented twelve years with my motor car before I was convinced that it represented a lasting and stable product for the public. I have now only started to experiment with the airplane. And let me tell you that the commercial airplane is as yet a considerable distance of being a success.”

John D. Rockefeller

May 21, 1928

Portrait by S.J. Woolf

The founder of Standard Oil was the world’s richest man. By the time this story ran, he had been in retirement for 31 years.

Arises at 7 a.m., takes needle shower, carefully chooses clothes from large wardrobe ... Appears at breakfast table promptly at 8, sips orange juice and coffee, eats a fair amount of oatmeal, nibbles bits of toast, rolls, eggs, bacon; gives new dimes or nickels to servants and guests. He has distributed some 22,000 of these gleaming coins in the last two decades. To those he sees every day, he usually gives nickels; to others, dimes ... After breakfast, he remains at the table, reads out loud from Sunlit Days (a poem and a prayer for each day of the year). Then a guest reads to him from My Daily Meditation by the late Rev. J. H. Jowett and from a modern version of the New Testament ... He reads the New York Times, consults with his secretary, strolls about the estate whistling and singing to himself. His voice is a rather pleasant baritone ... Golf follows, usually nine holes. His best score, made at Pocantico when he was 65, was a 39. His average is between 45 and 55.

J. Pierpont Morgan Jr.

February 25, 1929

Portrait by S.J. Woolf

Often compared with his father, who helped create General Electric, “Jack” Morgan consolidated a banking empire.

In the early primeval times of Big Business the Elder Morgan was simply the biggest, most voracious brontosaurus. In the present years of Titanic Business it is the Morgan hand in a velvet glove which directs a fiscal juggernaut capable of thundering over mere business brontosauri. Il Magnifico in all his purple pride never had to do with a loan of more than 200 million dollars; but austere, reserved, patrician “Mr. Morgan” quietly arranged the Anglo-French loan of a half-billion dollars in 1915. It is said that the Allies wanted to borrow a round billion at that time; but Mr. Morgan led the British fiscal representative, Lord Reading, into his sanctum, and thoughtfully observed: “Reading, I wouldn’t ask a billion if I were you. I think you’d best limit the issue to half a billion.”

William Paley

September 19, 1938

Photograph by Paul Dorsey

The network in question consisted of radio stations, not yet television, but Paley was laying the foundations for a media empire of tremendous longevity.

Ten years ago, when Congress Cigar Co.’s Son & Heir Bill Paley became CBS’s 27-year-old president, it was a puny network. Although irreverent young employees stealthily called him Pale Billy (purely a trick of transposition, for he likes hot countries, bright sunlight, is usually healthily bronzed), in three months he tightened CBS’s contracts with its affiliates, gathered 22 more stations into his network, refused to sell CBS to Paramount Publix Corp. for $1,500,000. Nine months later he sold Paramount Publix a half interest for $5,000,000, within three years bought the half interest back for $5,200,000 ... Youngest and oldest chief executive in the network business, he has come a long way from cigars. He now smokes cigarettes.

Abdul Aziz ibn Saud

March 5, 1945

Portrait by Ernest Hamlin Baker

The ruthless ruler of a young but religiously conservative nation, the King was also one of the canniest businessmen and used oil wealth to stabilize Saudi Arabia.

He is also fond of automobiles, telephones and radios, all of which he has put to good use in unifying the scattered tribes in the wastes of his domain. When Ibn Saud introduced the telephone, some of Saudi Arabia’s more fanatical isolationists cried that it was a work of the devil. Replied Ibn Saud: “Of a certainty if it is the work of the devil, the holy words of the Koran will not pass over it.” Holy words passed over the new line in Riyadh to Mecca; the objectors subsided. The money for these innovations comes largely from two sources: 1) the income derived from pilgrims to Islam’s Holy City, Mecca (where Mohammed was born); 2) his revenues from a great oil concession granted twelve years ago to the principal U.S. agency in his country, the Arabian-American Oil Co. (owned fifty-fifty by Texas Co. and Standard Oil Co. of California). The company is just getting substantial production (57,000 bbl. daily) and should do very well with or without the projected U.S. oil line across Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean. —john barkham and max ways

George Merck

August 18, 1952

Portrait by Boris Chaliapin

The huge expansion of the pharmaceutical industry was the result of the years he presided over Merck & Co., originally founded as the U.S. arm of his German family’s firm.

The arsenal from which these new weapons come is as far removed from the apothecary’s pestle and mortar as penicillin is from a medicine man’s snake-oil elixir. In Merck’s four producing plants in the U.S. (Rahway, N.J., Danville, Pa., Elkton, Va., and South San Francisco), almost 2,000 chemical operators perform their mysteries in a weird, surrealistic jungle assembled by welders, riveters and pipe fitters. Rising from the floor, which may cover an acre or more, are the great boles of the chemical forest: row on row of cylindrical stills and vats. Around and among them is a secondary growth of filters and crystallization tanks, their clusters broken by the stumps of centrifuges. Dangling like lianas from the upper branches are hundreds or thousands of pipes, from an inch to a foot in diameter, marked (usually at eye level) by a cluster of iron flowers—the handwheels of the valves. Everywhere there are pipes and more pipes. Like many another modern industry, the manufacture of the purest and most delicately constructed drugs takes place in a pipefitter’s wonderland. —gilbert cant

Harlow Curtice

November 1, 1954

Portrait by Boris Chaliapin

time was on hand to watch the CEO of General Motors—nicknamed Red—go over a proposed design for a new Chevy prior to its $300 million launch.

Red Curtice had followed the progress of the new Chevrolet from first sketches to drafting board to quarter-scale model to clay mockup with all the anxious looks a young father-to-be bestows upon his wife. Now he slowly circled the car, squinting at its lines and lightly touching its smooth surface. When his eye lighted on a horizontal crease in the molding of the trunk, he shook his head. “That’s not good,” said Curtice. “You’ll see that it casts a shadow on the bottom half of the lid. That shadow makes the car look higher and narrower. What we want is a lower automobile that looks wider.” At the side of the car, Curtice stopped again. Why should the belt line (i.e., the line formed by the bottom of the windows) be straight and unbroken? When a designer explained that only the two-door models would have a racy dip in the belt line, Curtice suggested: “Don’t you think we might try it on a four-door type, too?” —osborn elliott

Walt Disney

December 27, 1954

Portrait by Boris Chaliapin

The man who created Mickey Mouse—and built the Magic Kingdom with the rodent—was both a dreamer (employing the likes of Salvador Dalí at one point) and a practical businessman.

Like most self-educated men, Disney pulled himself up from nowhere by grabbing the tail of a runaway idea and hanging on for dear life. Even now, in middle life (he is 54) he seems to most acquaintances a “cheerful monomaniac.” He works at least 14 hours a day, never takes a vacation (“I get enough vacation from having a change of troubles”) ... Lacking a formal education ... Walt has few formal habits of thought. He cannot bear to read a book (“I’d rather have people tell me things”). Yet his intellectual weakness only throws him back the more strongly on his principal strength: a deep, intuitive identification with the common impulses of common people. A friend explains that he is really “a sort of visionary handyman, who has built a whole industry out of daydreams. He has that rarest of qualities, the courage of his doodles.” —bradford darrach jr.

C.R. Smith

November 17, 1958

Portrait by Boris Artzybasheff

The CEO of American Airlines turned his company into the major player in the industry after breaking Pan Am’s monopoly of international commercial aviation.

A big (6 ft. 1 in., 192 lbs.) gruff Texan, Smith has become a living legend in U.S. aviation. With the shrewd calculation of a gambler, the financial sagacity of a banker and the dedication of a monk, he has propelled American Airlines into first place in the industry—and in the process has done more than any other man to improve the service and standards of U.S. airlines ... Smith has some of the oddest working habits of any man in top industry. His typewriter is the most important piece of equipment American owns, and Smith pecks away at it for hours on end. He writes all his own speeches, many of American’s institutional ads and stockholders’ reports. Though he had the same secretary for 25 years (until she retired recently), he never let her write more than a handful of letters a year ... But the chief product of Smith’s typewriter is his short, sharp memos, which rarely exceed a page. They cover everything from ideas on a new plane American is considering buying to complaints about an airliner’s coffee, are dispatched in a steady stream to every corner of American’s operations. —ed jamieson

The Telephone Man

February 23, 1959

Illustration by Boris Artzybasheff

To Americans, for decades telephones meant Ma Bell—the enormous corporation AT&T, which would be broken up by an antitrust decision in 1982.

For most Americans, the telephone is synonymous with the American Telephone & Telegraph Co., the colossus that embraces 20 regional telephone companies in a nationwide Bell System. So thoroughly has the telephone blanketed U.S. life that A. T. & T.’s stock is the world’s most famous and most widely held, owned by so many people (1,619,397) that more than 15,000 are named Smith ... The biggest U.S. private enterprise, including its Bell System satellites, has $19,493,951,000 in assets (more than General Motors and Standard Oil Co.—N.J.—combined) and 725,000 employees, operates 54,684,342 telephones, more than 80% of the nation’s total. The U.S. watches most of its TV shows over Bell’s television coaxial-cable network, which reaches 610 stations in 403 cities, makes all its long-distance calls over 63 million miles of A. T. & T.’s long-distance channels, puts through 2,600,000 overseas calls a year via Bell cables to Britain, Hawaii, Alaska.

Bowman Gray

April 11, 1960

Portrait by Boris Artzybasheff

The R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. had been run by Gray’s father and uncle before him. At the time this story ran, the company was exulting in the apparent trend against filtered cigarettes.

Reynolds and Bowman Gray, 53, have been stressing taste all along because, says Gray, “people smoke for fun and the simple pleasure of it.” Except for occasional flirtations with throat therapy, e.g., in its T-zone ads of the 1940s, the company has largely steered away from the health issue. When the cancer controversy started, it was Bowman Gray, then Reynolds’ advertising chief, who concluded that the wisest course was to stick with the theme of taste instead of test tubes, to push flavor before filtration ... Gray—who began smoking when he was nine—is the man with the golden tongue ... Says he: “I do believe that if a cigarette appeals to me—I’m a pretty average fella—it might appeal to the population ...” Through his mouth and into his windpipe he rolled the smoke with all the sober concentration of a wine taster. —ed jamieson

U.S. Advertising Executives

October 12, 1962

Backdrop illustration by Richard Vickrey

The Mad Men era was all too real. Indeed, the television series’ office sets would be inspired by the decor of the Time & Life Building, which was built in 1959.

Madison Avenue,” the all-purpose handle for the advertising business, is a street named Desire that starts in Manhattan and wends into every household in the land. Americans are seeing more advertisements now—an average of 1,600 per person per day—and whether they are enjoying them less is a matter of argument. But the inescapable fact is that the pleas and promises of Madison Avenue dance before the eyes of the ordinary American whenever he reads, rides, watches television, strolls down the street or strikes a match. The $12 billion that U.S. business will spend on advertising this year exceeds the gross national products of Austria and Norway combined ... Behind this vast expenditure lies one truth that both critics and practitioners of advertising agree upon: advertising is an aggressively creative force that makes music at the cash registers by stimulating the public’s desire to acquire goods. This is an overriding consideration for the nation’s businessmen at a time when the U.S. is geared to produce more than it consumes and when nothing would help the economy more than a surge in consumer spending. —marshall loeb

Akio Morita

May 10, 1971

Portrait by Birney Lettick

The age of high-quality, consumer electronics was the result of Morita’s inspired work. In 1980, he would revolutionize portable electronics with the Walkman.

In 1953, a young businessman named Akio Morita made his first trip outside Japan to investigate export prospects for his struggling little electronics company. He was dismayed to find that in the sophisticated markets of the U.S. and Europe, the words Made in Japan were a mocking phrase for shoddiness. But in The Netherlands, he recalls, “I saw an agricultural country with many windmills and many bicycles, and yet it was producing goods of excellent quality and had worldwide sales power. I thought that maybe we Japanese could do it too ...” Indeed, they could. A month ago, Morita took off on his 94th or 95th transpacific trip (he has lost exact count). This time he came as the self-assured export chief and primary owner of Sony Corp., the firm that as much as any other has made Japanese goods synonymous with high quality as well as low price. —george church

Ray Kroc

September 17, 1973

Illustration by Robert Tallon

Kroc began by selling milkshake mixers to the McDonald brothers. But he saw how successful the burger franchises were and just had to buy up the company.

When I got there,” says Kroc, “I saw more people waiting in line than I had ever seen at any drive-in. I said to myself: ‘Son of a bitch, these guys have got something. How about if I open some of these places?’” Kroc talked the McDonalds into letting him franchise their outlets nationwide. Over the next five years he organized a chain of 228 McDonald’s that even by 1960 were grossing $56 million a year ... he called the McDonalds in 1961 and asked them to name a price for selling out everything, including the name ... They did—and, says Kroc, “I dropped the phone, my teeth and everything else. They asked me what the noise was, and I told them it was me jumping out of the 20th floor of the LaSalle-Wacker Building. They wanted $2.7 million ...” Kroc borrowed the money from a group of college endowment funds at what was then an exorbitant price ... Says Kroc: “The $2.7 million ended up costing me $14 million. But I guess there was no way out. I needed the McDonald name and those golden arches. What are you going to do with a name like Kroc?” —don morrison

Sam Walton

June 15, 1992

Photograph by Steven Pumphrey

The legendary founder of the retail giant, who died in April 1992, wrote a homespun memoir that was excerpted by time shortly before its publication.

A lot of folks ask me, Could a Wal-Mart type story still occur in this day and age? Of course it could happen again. Somewhere out there right now there’s someone—­probably hundreds of thousands of someones—with good enough ideas to take it all the way. So the next time some overeager, slightly eccentric shopkeeper opens up a business in your neck of the woods, before you write him off too quickly, remember those two old codgers who gave me 60 days to last in my dime store down in Fayetteville. Go check the new store out. See what they’ve got to offer, see how they treat you, and decide for yourself if you ever want to go back. Because this is what it’s really all about. That shopkeeper’s success is entirely up to you.

Bill Gates

June 5, 1995

Photograph by Gregory Heisler

While he was Microsoft’s boss full time, Gates was one of the most formidable competitors in the world. He was not fond of this cover story.

Gates has amassed a net worth of more than $10 billion, making him either the richest or the second richest man in America, depending on the closing price of his 141 million shares. He was married last year on the Hawaiian island of Lanai; the wedding was attended by publisher Katharine Graham and fellow billionaire Warren Buffett. He is building a $40 million-plus home on suburban Seattle’s Lake Washington, with video “walls” to display an ever changing collection of electronic art, a trampoline room with a 25-ft. vaulted ceiling where he can burn off steam, a 20-car underground garage and a trout stream. The Road Ahead, a book on which Gates is collaborating with Nathan Myhrvold, a Microsoft group V.P., and journalist Peter Rinearson ... received a $2.5 million advance from Penguin, a record for a book by a few computer geeks ... None of which gives anyone at the Microsoft “campus” in Redmond, Washington, an excuse to relax. One of the most remarkable traits of Microsoft’s corporate personality—inherited directly from its restless chairman—is its inability to sit still. —philip elmer-dewitt

Steve Case

September 22, 1997

Photo-illustration by James Porto

Case would merge AOL with Time Warner in 2000—a marriage that would sour soon after. Case would leave the company in 2003, and AOL would be spun off in 2009.

Only in the digital age can an outfit go from worst to first so quickly. In the past 24 months, AOL has dodged everything from a Bill Gates bull rush (his Microsoft Network spent millions to compete with AOL) to a tussle with the Internet, whose wide-open spaces threatened to make AOL’s narrower “gated community” irrelevant. Case, 39, has been famously (if inadvertently) self-destructive, infuriating AOL members by offering too little capacity and too many headaches. Overeager users have crashed parts of the service twice in the past year by bombarding it with more calls than computers could handle. And as “America On Hold” angered customers, it perplexed Wall Street. Accountants demanded that AOL refigure its books, erasing every dollar of profit the company ever made. It faced potential lawsuits from the attorneys general of 36 states over billing practices. William Razzouk, a hotshot executive from FedEx, split after just five flabbergasted months as president of the service. The company endured, inevitably, a collapse of its too-rich stock price. Twice. —joshua cooper ramo

Oprah Winfrey

October 5, 1998

Photograph by Ken Regan

With an estimated net worth of $2.8 billion, Winfrey continues to be an enormous influence on television and entertainment. Her cable network, OWN, however, debuted in 2011 to tepid success.

Supermodels and Nobel prizewinners tend to travel in separate circles, but at a recent party held in honor of Oprah Winfrey in downtown Manhattan, both Toni Morrison and Cindy Crawford were in attendance. The gathering, held at a restaurant where it’s difficult to get a reservation unless you call long in advance or are a recent recipient of an MTV Video Music Award, was a starry one. Mariah Carey. Barbara Walters. Maya Angelou. They were all there. Oprah worked the room, shining attention on each guest briefly but brightly, a passing Lexus with her high beams on. The occasion was a celebration of Oprah’s star turn in the new film Beloved and of her appearance on the cover of Vogue magazine. She posed next to a huge blowup of the cover, bathed in camera light. The woman who once dragged a cart of fat into a TV studio to dramatize her battles with obesity, the nappy-headed girl who grew up poor in Kosciusko, Miss., had become a full-fledged movie star. —chistopher john farley

Jeff Bezos

December 27, 1999

Photograph by Gregory Heisler

The founder of Amazon was time’s Man of the Year for 1999. He has broadened the company’s reach from books to consumer electronics to streaming video.

Jeffrey Preston Bezos had that same experience when he first peered into the maze of connected computers called the World Wide Web and realized that the future of retailing was glowing back at him. It’s not that nobody else noticed—eBay’s Pierre Omidyar also knew he was on to something. But Bezos’ vision of the online retailing universe was so complete, his Amazon.com site so elegant and appealing, that it became from Day One the point of reference for anyone who had anything to sell online. And that, it turns out, is everyone ... There was a time when Bezos could say, “If I had a nickel for every time a potential investor told me this wouldn’t work ...” and then lapse off into head shaking. Now he follows that line with a wild, giggly laugh. No wonder: as of last week, Bezos had 200 billion nickels. —joshua quittner

Larry Page, Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin

February 20, 2006

Photograph by David Strick

The founding duo of Brin and Page became a triumvirate in 2001 with CEO Schmidt. Page replaced Schmidt as CEO in 2011.

Google owes much of its success to the brilliance of Brin and Page, but also to a series of fortunate events. It was Page who, at Stanford in 1996, initiated the academic project that eventually became Google’s search engine. Brin, who had met Page at student orientation a year earlier, joined the project early on. Their breakthrough, simply put, was that when their search engine crawled the Web, it did more than just look for word matches; it also tallied and ranked a host of other critical factors like how websites link to one another. That delivered far better results than anything else. Brin and Page meant to name their creation Googol (the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes), but someone misspelled the word so it stuck as Google. They raised money from prescient professors and venture capitalists, and moved off campus to turn Google into a business. Perhaps their biggest stroke of luck came early on when they tried to license their technology to other search engines, but no one met their price, and they built it up on their own. —adi ignatius

The Banking Crisis

September 29, 2008

Photo-illustration by Arthur Hochstein

Warren Buffett in 2003 called the derivatives beloved by the banking industry “weapons of financial mass destruction.” He was right. But greed was the fuel.

Didn’t the folks on Wall Street, who are nothing if not smart, know that someday the music would end? Sure. But they couldn’t help behaving the way they did because of Wall Street’s classic business model, which works like a dream for Wall Street employees (during good times) but can be a nightmare for the customers. Here’s how it goes. You bet big with someone else’s money. If you win, you get a huge bonus, based on the profits. If you lose, you lose someone else’s money rather than your own, and you move on to the next job. If you’re especially smart—like Lehman chief executive Dick Fuld—you take a lot of money off the table. During his tenure as CEO, Fuld made $490 million (before taxes) cashing in stock options and stock he received as compensation. A lot of employees, whose wealth was tied to the company’s stock, were financially eviscerated when Lehman bombed. But Fuld is unlikely to show up applying for food stamps. —andy serwer and allan sloan

Warren Buffett

January 23, 2012

Photograph by Mark Seliger

The Wizard of Omaha is one of the smartest and most reliable investors in history. He has taken to calling for the wealthy to take on more social and civic responsibility.

Buffett lives not on an isolated island of wealth but in Omaha, in a shingle-roofed five-bedroom house on an unpretentious street that looks as if it might belong to a successful dentist. He bought it for $31,500 in 1958. The corporation he runs, Berkshire Hathaway, owns 76 businesses—from a candy company to an electric utility—that throw off $1 billion a month in free cash, and he holds major stakes in many of the country’s biggest blue-chip firms ... Yet aside from his indulgence in private air travel (he named his first jet the Indefensible), he estimates his personal yearly expenses to be no more than $150,000. The company canteen in his small office suite, where he has a habit of walking around turning off lights in empty rooms, features a beat-up wooden table, a faux-leather sectional couch and Formica countertops. —rana foroohar

The Relentless Vision (and Drive) Of Steve Jobs

Few people have altered how Americans imagine visionary businessmen the way Steve Jobs did. The world was transfixed by him, the products he introduced and, just as important, the way he sold them. time put him on the cover six times during his life, chronicling his saga at Apple—losing the company, reconquering it. When news of his death arrived as the Oct. 17, 2011, issue was going to press, we rushed to change the cover in tribute to him. As Walter Isaacson, a former managing editor of time and Jobs’ biographer, summed up that week, “He revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh: retailing, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. Along the way, he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who will carry forward his vision.”