Mellody Hobson (born April 3, 1969) is the Co-CEO, President and Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Ariel Investment Trust, a Chicago-based investment firm that specializes in small and mid-capitalized stocks based in the United States. Mellody currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Starbucks Corporation and a director of JPMorgan Chase.
Early Life and Education
Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Mellody is the youngest daughter of a single mother to six children. Her mother, Dorothy Ashley, renovated apartments and condos in old and sometimes abandoned buildings. She grew up in poverty, and that experience drove her as a child to want to understand money.
“We moved often,” says Hobson. “There was always a lot of drama surrounding our living situation. At times, my mother couldn’t pay her bills and our electricity would be cut off, and we would have to heat water for our baths. We also had our phone cut off at times. We were even evicted a few times and had our car repossessed. But it wasn’t as bad as some had it, so I tried not to make too much of it. I had a loving family, and although my mother often came up short financially, she did the best she could.”
She graduated from St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago in 1987 and from Princeton University in 1991.
Money wasn’t an economic construct to me. It wasn’t toys and cars and vacations. Money was food. Shelter. Self-esteem. Books. Hot baths. Peace of mind. I wanted all those things. Not having money focused me. I was mortified every time the phone was disconnected, or the electricity shut off, or we got evicted. To this day, I do not take housing or the ability to pay my bills for granted. My childhood circumstances made me desperate to understand money—not to make it but to master it. 1
John Wooden was born on October 14, 1910, in Martinsville, Indiana, the second of four brothers. Coach Wooden’s father, Joshua, instilled in his sons the basic principles of honesty, hard work and respect for others—the elements that make up the Pyramid of Success. He also passed along to them a love for reading, especially the Bible and poetry.
Isadore “Issy” Sharp (born October 8, 1931) is a Canadian hotelier, founder, and chairman of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. Isadore started his career working with his father, Max Sharp, in the construction business.
The reason for our success is no secret. It comes down to one single principle that transcends time and geography, religion and culture. It’s the Golden Rule – the simple idea that if you treat people well, the way you would like to be treated, they will do the same.
In his memoir entitled Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy,1 founder and chairman of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Isadore Sharp, described his business philosophy, the founding of four seasons, and his approach to life.
Viola Davis (born August 11, 1965) is an American actress, producer and entrepreneur. She is the only African-American to achieve the Tripple Crown of Acting: she has won an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and two Tony Awards.
Viola Davis 2017 Oscar Best Supporting Actress Speech
Thank you to the Academy. You know there’s one place that all the people with the greatest potential are gathered, one place and that’s the graveyard. People ask me all the time what kind of stories do you want to tell viola and I’d say exhume those bodies exhume those stories, the stories of the people who dreamed big and never saw those dreams to fruition, people who fell in love and lost. I became an artist and thank GOD I did because we are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live a life. – 2017 Viola Davis Oscars Speech
She has been featured twice in Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world – 2012 and 2017.
Viola Davis was ranked as the ninth greatest actor of the 21st century by the New York Times.
Leonard Alan Lauder was born in 1933 in New York City, where he grew up and helped his mother as she founded what would become The Estée Lauder Companies business out of the family’s kitchen. According to Forbes, Leonard is the 68th richest person in the world with a net worth of $USD 23.2 Billion. Leonard and his brother, Ronald Lauder, are the sole heirs to the Estée Lauder Companies cosmetics fortune, founded by their parents, Estée Lauder and Joseph Lauder, in 1946.
Michael Saul Dell (born February 23, 1965) is an American billionaire businessman and philanthropist. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Dell Technologies, one of the world’s largest technology infrastructure companies. He is ranked 30th richest man in the world according to Forbes, with a net worth of $USD 50.2 billion as of May 15th, 2021.
With revenues of $94 Billion and 158,000 team members, Dell Technologies is one of the world’s largest IT companies serving the needs of global corporations and governments to small businesses and consumers. The company’s unique structure allows innovative, fast-moving startups to co-exist with, and leverage, the global reach and trusted reputation of the large enterprise.
Jim James Ovia (born November 4, 1951) is a Nigerian businessman and philanthropist, a native of Agbor in Delta State. He founded Zenith Bank in June 1990 and was its pioneer Managing Director/Chief Executive for 20 years, until he retired in July 2010. Under Jim’s leadership, what started with $4 million in shareholders’ funds, grew into one of Africa’s largest banks, an internationally recognized institution with more than $16 billion in assets. Zenith Bank ranks Nigeria’s Number One Bank on 2020 Top 1000 World Banks Ranking.
Jim Ovia is the founder of Visafone Communications Limited and the chairman of both the Nigerian Software Development Initiative (NSDI) and the National Information Technology Advisory Council (NITAC).
Jim Ovia is the Founder and Chairman of Zenith Bank Plc, one of Africa’s largest banks with over $17.6 billion in assets as of 31 December 2019. As the Chairman of Prudential Zenith Life Assurance Limited, he oversaw the landmark partnership of Prudential Plc – one of the world’s largest life assurance companies and Zenith Life – Nigeria’s fastest-growing life assurance company. He is currently the Chairman and majority shareholder of Zenith General Insurance Limited; Nigeria’s most profitable general insurance company. He is also the chairman of Quantum Capital Partners is a private equity firm focused on investing in or acquiring privately-owned companies in the fields of Financial Services, Technology, Real Estate, Philanthropy, and Other Sectors, with significant business presence or operations in Sub-Saharan Africa.
He is an alumnus of the Harvard Business School (OPM), University of Louisiana (MBA), and Southern University, Louisiana, (B.Sc. Business Administration).
John Clifton “Jack” Bogle (May 8, 1929 – January 16, 2019) was an American investor, business magnate, and philanthropist. He was the founder and chief executive of The Vanguard Group and is credited with creating the first index fund. Bogle was an advocate of long-term patience over short-term action, investment over-speculation, and the reduction of broker fees as much as possible.
Stephen Schwarzman (born February 14, 1947) is an American businessman, investor, and philanthropist. Stephen is the Chairman, CEO, and Co-Founder of Blackstone, a global private equity investment firm he established in 1985 with former chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers and US Secretary of Commerce Peter G. Peterson. As of 2020, the Blackstone Group total assets under management were approximately US$619 billion.
The best executives are made, not born. They absorb information, study their own experiences, learn from their mistakes, and evolve.
As of March 27, 2021, Stephen Schwarzman is worth $23.8Billion according to Forbes Magazine. He holds a B.A. from Yale University and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. He has served as an adjunct professor at the Yale School of Management and on the Harvard Business School Board of Dean’s Advisors.
Michael Bloomberg is the majority owner and co-founder of Bloomberg L.P. He was a three-term New York City Mayor from 2002 to 2013 and was a candidate for the 2020 Democratic nomination for the United States president. According to Forbes, Bloomberg is the 16th-richest man globally, with a net worth of $USD 59 billion as of March 13, 2021.
He got his start in 1966 on Wall Street at the securities brokerage Salomon Brothers selling stocks. He rose to become a general partner at the firm but was fired in 1981, after Phibro Corporation bought Salomon Brothers. Bloomberg was paid $10 million for his equity stake in Salomon Brothers, and he used the windfall to start his firm Bloomberg L.P.
Bloomberg L.P. is a privately held financial, software, data, and media company headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The firm is known for its Bloomberg Terminal. The company has 167 locations and nearly 20,000 employees.
“There are many reasons why some succeed and others don’t, why some just continue to grow and others spurt up and, as quickly, collapse. Three things usually separate the winners from the losers over the long term: time invested, interpersonal skills, and plain old-fashioned luck.”
Ted Turner (born November 19, 1938) is an American Media Entrepreneur, sailor, and philanthropist. As a businessman, he is the founder of the Cable News Network (CNN), the first 24-hour cable news channel. In addition, he founded WTBS, which pioneered the superstation concept in cable television, which later became TBS.
Ted started his entrepreneurial journey when he took over his father’s billboard business, Turner Outdoor Advertising, he took over in 1963 after his father’s suicide. He later purchased the Atlanta UHF station in 1970, which was the start of Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. an American television and media conglomerate. Among TBS’s main properties were its namesake TBS, TNT, CNN, Turner Classic Movies (TCM), Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, and TruTV.
CNN pioneered 24-hour cable news, covering the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986 and the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
Elon Musk was born (June 28, 1971) to a Canadian mother and South African father and raised in Pretoria, South Africa. He briefly attended the University of Pretoria before moving to Canada when he was 17 to attend Queen’s University. He transferred to the University of Pennsylvania two years later, where he received dual bachelor’s degrees in economics and physics. He moved to California in 1995 to begin a Ph.D. in applied physics and material sciences at Stanford University, but dropped out after two days to pursue a business career.
He co-founded Zip2, a web software company, which was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999. Musk then founded X.com, an online bank. It merged with Confinity in 2000, which had launched PayPalthe previous year and was subsequently bought by eBay for $1.5 billion in October 2002.
In May 2002, Musk founded SpaceX, an aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company, of which he is CEO and lead designer. He joined Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.), an electric vehicle manufacturer, in 2004, the year after it was founded, becoming its product architect that year and its CEO in 2008. In 2006, he helped create SolarCity, a solar energy services company (now a subsidiary of Tesla). In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI, a nonprofit research company that aims to promote friendly artificial intelligence.
In July 2016, he co-founded Neuralink, a neurotechnology company focused on developing brain-computer interfaces. In December 2016, Musk founded The Boring Company, an infrastructure and tunnel construction company focused on tunnels optimized for electric vehicles. In addition to his primary business pursuits, he envisioned an open-source high-speed transportation system known as the Hyperloop based on the concept of a vactrain.
Elon is the founder, CEO, CTO and chief designer of SpaceX; early investor, CEO, and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; founder of The Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink; and co-founder and initial co-chairman of OpenAI. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2018. Also that year, he was ranked 25th on the Forbes list of The World’s Most Powerful People and was ranked joint-first on the Forbes list of the Most Innovative Leaders of 2019. A centi-billionaire, Musk became the richest person in the world in January 2021.
Business Career
At the age of 10, he developed an interest in computing while using the Commodore VIC-20. He learned computer programming using a manual and, by age 12, sold the code of a BASIC-based video game he created called Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500.
Zip2
In 1995, Musk, his brother Kimbal, and Greg Kouri founded web software company Zip2 with funds from a group of angel investors. The company developed and marketed an Internet city guide for the newspaper publishing industry, with maps, directions, and yellow pages.
Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million in cash in February 1999. Musk received $22 million for his 7 percent share from the sale.
X.com – Confinity – Psypal
In March 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company, with $10 million from the sale of Zip2. One year later, the company merged with Confinity, which had a money-transfer service called PayPal
Musk was ousted in October 2000 from his role as CEO (although he remained on the board) due to disagreements with other company executives over his desire to move PayPal’s Unix-based infrastructure to a Microsoft one.
In October 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk received $165 million. Before its sale, Musk, who was the company’s largest shareholder, owned 11.7% of PayPal’s shares.
Paypal Mafia
PayPal Mafia
The “PayPal Mafia” is a group of former PayPal, ‘
employees and founders who have since founded and developed additional technology companies such as Tesla, Inc., LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Affirm, Slide, Kiva, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer. Most of the members attended Stanford University or University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign at some point in their studies.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp.(SpaceX) is an American aerospace manufacturer and space transportation services company headquartered in Hawthorne, California. It was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk with the goal of reducing space transportation costs to enable the colonization of Mars
In May 2020, SpaceX launched its first manned flight, the Demo-2, becoming the first private company to both place a person into orbit and dock a crewed space-craft with the ISS. Furthermore, it marked the first time an American astronaut was launched from American soil on an American rocket since the end of the Space Shuttle program.
Tesla
Founded in July 2003 as Tesla Motors, the company’s name is a tribute to inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. Elon Musk, who contributed most of the funding in the early days, has served as CEO since 2008.
Musk provided the initial concept and financial capital for SolarCity, which his cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive co-founded in 2006.By 2013, SolarCity was the second largest provider of solar power systems in the United States.
Neuralink
In 2016, Musk co-founded Neuralink, a neurotechnology start-up company to integrate the human brain with AI. The company is centered on creating devices that can be implanted in the human brain, with the eventual purpose of helping human beings merge with software and keep pace with advancements in artificial intelligence.
The Boring Company
On December 17, 2016, while stuck in traffic, Musk tweeted “[I] am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging …” He then founded ‘The Boring Company’ (TBC).
Hyperloop
The Hyperloop is a proposed mode of passenger and freight transportation, first used to describe an open-source vactrain design released by a joint team from Tesla and SpaceX, although the vactrain concept was first proposed by Robert H. Goddard in 1904.
OpenAI
In December 2015, Musk announced the creation of OpenAI, a not-for-profit AI research company. OpenAI aims to develop artificial general intelligence in a way that is safe and beneficial to humanity
Erdal Arıkan (born 1958) is a Turkish professor in the Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. In 2013, Arıkan received the IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award for his contributions to information theory, particularly for his development of polar coding. In December 2017 he was honored with the 2018 Richard W. Hamming Medal. In June 2018, he received the Shannon Award.
Andrew Carnegie (November 25, 1835 – August 11, 1919) was a Scottish-American industrialist, steel magnate, and philanthropist. Carnegie led the expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century and became one of the richest Americans in history.
The Carnegie family had left their home in Scotland and come to America when Andrew was 13. Andrew worked first in an American textile factory, then as a Morse code telegrapher, and then for the railroads. He served as an assistant on the Pennsylvania Railroad in the 1850s while still in his 20s. There, he learned sophisticated business management techniques—dealing with distributed assets, levels of trustworthiness, strict accountability, unforeseen problems, and cost-effectiveness. He showed a great talent for buying successful stocks, taking advantage of what we now call insider trading, which was then legal.
David Goggins (born February 17, 1975) is an American ultramarathon runner, ultra-distance cyclist, triathlete, motivational speaker, and author. He is a retired United States Navy SEAL and former United States Air Force Tactical Air Control Party member who served in the Iraq War. His self-help memoir, Can’t Hurt Me, was released in 2018.
David Goggins is one of my favourite endurance athlete, he lives is truth and his book Can’t Hurt Me, was very inspiring. Goggins has completed over 60 ultra-marathons, triathlons, and ultra-triathlons, setting new course records and regularly placing in the top five. He once held the Guinness World Record for pull-ups completing 4,030 in 17 hours.
The only man in history to complete elite training as a Navy SEAL, Army Ranger, and Air Force Tactical Air Controller, he went on to set records in numerous endurance events, inspiring Outside Magazine to name him “The Fittest (Real) Man in America.”
