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Dov Charney

Pushing Boundries, Sewing Success The rise of retail giant American Apparel has its origins in cross-border trips founder and C.E.O. Dov Charney would make from his native Montreal to nearby U.S. towns. It was during these visits in the early 90s that Charney noticed the disparity between the comfortable casual clothing on store shelves south of the border and the cheaper polyester blends available in Canada. Charney started buying Hanes T-shirts and selling them at a premium back home, and the seeds of an American success story were sewn. After studying in New England, Charney relocated to Los Angeles and started American Apparel as a wholesale T-shirt manufacturer.

Carlos Slim

Carlos Slim Helú, the world’s second richest man, was born to Lebanese parents in Mexico City in January 1940. Slim gained notoriety when he led a group of investors, including France Telecom and Southwestern Bell Corporation, in acquiring Telmex and Telnor from the Mexican government in 1990 during the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Today, Telmex operates 90 percent of Mexico’s telephone lines. The mobile company Telcel, also controlled by Slim, operates almost 80 percent of the country's cell phones. And over the last five years, Slim's wireless carrier, América Móvil, has purchased cell phone companies across Latin America, becoming region's dominant company and counting on more than 100 million subscribers.

Jeffery Immelt

General Electric C.E.O. Jeffery Immelt was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1956. With GE since 1982, Immelt holds a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from Dartmouth College and an M.B.A from Harvard Business School. In addition to the C.E.O. post, Immelt is on the board of two non-profit organizations, including the Robin Hood Foundation, which attempts to alleviate poverty in New York City. As GE’s chief executive, Immelt gives the impression that he's at home at a turbine factory in Schenectady, N.Y., a research lab in Bangalore, and a dress rehearsal for Saturday Night Live. "This is not a man in a bubble," NBC's Conan O'Brien told Time magazine.

Carlos Ghosn

Carlos Ghosn was born to Lebanese parents in 1954, in Porto Velho, a remote city of the Amazon basin in Brazil. He moved to Beirut with his mother when he was 6. Under Lebanon's French protectorate, he completed his secondary school studies at a Jesuit school in Beirut. He then entered the elitist French Ecole Polytechnique in 1974 from which he graduated in engineering with a specialization at the Ecole des Mines in Paris in 1978. Ghosn has French citizenship.

Steve Ballmer

Steven Anthony Ballmer has been Microsoft Corporation's chief executive officer since early 2000. The son of a Swiss immigrant father who worked as a manager in Ford Motor Company, Steve Ballmer was born in 1956 in Detroit, Michigan. He now sits in the board of directors of the high school he graduated from in 1973, Detroit Country Day School. He later graduated in mathematics and economics from Harvard University in 1977, where he lived down the hall from fellow sophomore Bill Gates.

Lakshmi Mittal

Lakshmi Narayan Mittal was born in 1950 in Rajasthan, India. to a poor and large family. He spent most of his childhood in the village until his family moved to Calcutta. There, his father, Mohan, became a partner in a steel company and eventually made fortune. In 1969, Mittal graduated from St. Xavier's College in Calcutta with a business and accounting degree. Mittal started his career with the family in the steel-making trade until 1976, when the Mittal family founded its own steel business. Mittal then developed the international division of the company, starting with the purchase of a bankrupt plant in Indonesia. In 1994, due to disagreements with his father and brothers, he took over all the international trade of the family's steel business and branched out on his own.

Ratan Tata

Ratan N. Tata is the chairman of India's largest conglomerate, the Tata Group, established by his family's earlier generations. Tata is organized into seven divisions: engeneering, materials, chemicals, energy, NTIC, services and consumption goods. Ratan Tata was born in 1937, in Mumbai, India. The Tata family have been active in industry and philanthropy since the 19th century. The Tata Group, founded by Ratan's great grandfather, Jamsetji Tata, is one of the largest private employers in India. JRD Tata, Ratan's father, was the first Indian citizen to obtain a plane pilot's license, and he is considered the father Indian aviation. In 1932, he founded Tata Airlines, which became Air India in 1946. Ratan's childhood was troubled as his parents divorced when he was 7 years old. He was raised by his grandmother. After the Campion School in Mumbai, he graduated in Architecture and Structural Engineering from Cornell University, New York, in 1962.

Richard Branson

Sir Richard Charles Branson was born in Surrey, England in 1950. Dyslexic and saddled with poor academic performance, he nonetheless attempted two ventures at age 15: growing Christmas trees and raising budgerigars. Both ventures failed. He didn't have to wait long for his first successful venture, though,  which came at age sixteen when he launched Student magazine. In 1970, at age 20, he set up a mail-order business record. The following year, he opened a now famous chain of record stores, Virgin records, later known as Virgin Megastores.

Doris and Don Fisher

Doris and Don Fisher opened the first Gap store in Ocean Avenue, San Francisco in 1969. The locale, in order to make it "easier to  find a pair of jeans," also sold records and tapes. Today Gap is one of world's largest specialty retailers, earning a reported $ 15.9 billion in fiscal year 2006.

Craig Newmark

Craig Alexander Newmark, born December 6, 1952 in Morristown, New Jersey, is an Internet entrepreneur best known as the founder of the San Francisco-based Web site Craigslist. Newmark attended Morristown High School and graduated from Case Western Reserve University with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. Newmark has been a vocal advocate of keeping the Internet free. He has donated $10,000 to a non-profit group, NewAssignment.Net, which plans to combine the work of amateurs and professionals to produce investigative stories on the Internet. Newmark resides in San Francisco's Cole Valley and is active at Craigslist in customer service, mostly dealing with spammers and scammers.[1]