Entrepreneurs & Business Leaders Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which engineer and industrialist made his first fortune from a compressed-air brake that made long trains safe to stop, then bet his company on alternating current, licensing the motor patents of a brilliant Serbian-American inventor and winning the contract to light the 1893 Chicago world's fair?

Question 2

Which industrialist chaired his family's group from 1991 to 2012, taking it global with the purchases of a British tea company, an Anglo-Dutch steelmaker and the Jaguar and Land Rover car brands, and launching a car aimed to cost one lakh rupees?

Question 3

Which businesswoman, born to immigrant parents in Queens, built a global cosmetics company from face creams her chemist uncle taught her to make, selling them at beauty counters with a free sample she pioneered as the gift with purchase?

Question 4

Which businessman co-founded, in the ruins of postwar Tokyo, an electronics firm that he insisted give itself a short, catchy Western name, and that went on to make a pocket transistor radio, a hip-worn cassette player and a home games console?

Question 5

Which broadcaster inherited a billboard company, moved into television, and in 1980 launched the first around-the-clock news channel, widely mocked at the time as the chicken noodle network?

Question 6

Which investor was for decades the vice-chairman and sounding board of a famous Omaha holding company, credited with converting his partner from hunting cheap, mediocre companies to paying fair prices for excellent ones?

Question 7

Which executive, born in Taiwan and raised partly in the American South, co-founded a chip-design company in 1993 after sketching the idea in a roadside diner, and watched its graphics processors become the essential hardware of the artificial-intelligence boom?

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About Entrepreneurs & Business Leaders

This quiz is about the people who founded and ran the world's companies: the tycoons of the industrial age, the retail and consumer kings, the technology founders, the great Indian business houses and the modern chief executives and investors. One hundred questions, each describing a person by what they built and how, and asking you to name them from four choices of the same kind, then explaining them. Only world-level figures are used.

The first pack is the modern global titans, from the founders of the biggest technology companies to the richest people on Earth. The second pack is the Gilded Age and the Industrial Revolution: Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Ford, the Rothschilds and the robber barons of oil, steel, railroads and banking. The third pack is retail, food, media and entertainment: Sam Walton, Ray Kroc, Walt Disney, the founders of IKEA, Zara, Nike and Starbucks, and moguls from Murdoch to Oprah. The fourth pack is Indian business, from Jamsetji Tata and the Birlas to the Ambanis, Azim Premji, Narayana Murthy, Lakshmi Mittal and Verghese Kurien. The fifth gathers women business leaders, famous investors and the chief executives running the giants today.

Some of the figures also appear by name in the previous quiz, Companies and Brands, but there they were background to a company and here they are the answer, drawn in full: the rise from a market stall or a garage, the feuds and the ousters, the philanthropy, the scandals and the collapses. The India pack in particular gives space to founders a world-level quiz often skips, from the 19th-century pioneers to the software billionaires and the women who built companies from a rented shed.

The wrong answers are always other business figures of the same kind, from the same era or the same field, so a good guess is easily checked. Around a quarter of the questions carry a neutral photograph, a trading floor, an exchange, a banknote, a handful of coins, that fits any of the four options and so gives nothing away, since a picture of a stock exchange cannot tell one tycoon from another. Portraits are not used, because each one would point straight at its answer. The companies these people built are the subject of the previous quiz; here the answer is always the person. Careers, dates and stories have been checked against standard reference works and were current in early 2026.