Entrepreneurs & Business Leaders Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which entrepreneur co-founded, in 2010, a company that leased office buildings, fitted them out as shared workspaces and sublet the desks, while describing it in almost spiritual terms and reaching a private valuation of 47 billion dollars backed by a huge Japanese fund?

Question 2

Which 19th-century tycoon, nicknamed the Commodore, made a first fortune in steamboats and then a far larger one consolidating the railroads into New York, and at his death in 1877 was the wealthiest American who had yet lived?

Question 3

Which self-made son of Armenian immigrants, who left school at fourteen and flew bombers across the Atlantic in wartime, built three of the largest hotels in the world in turn in Las Vegas, owned a Hollywood studio three separate times, and mounted raids on Chrysler and General Motors?

Question 4

Which press baron built the largest chain of newspapers in the United States, was accused of stoking the 1898 war with Spain through sensational coverage, and spent a fortune on a hilltop California castle stuffed with European art and antiques?

Question 5

Which executive, born in Chennai and a graduate of an Indian Institute of Technology, rose through a search giant by leading its web browser and its mobile operating system, became chief executive of the search company in 2015 and of its holding parent in 2019?

Question 6

Which French businessman built the world's largest luxury group by a series of takeovers aggressive enough to earn him the nickname the wolf in cashmere, starting by acquiring a fashion house through a bankrupt textile firm in the 1980s?

Question 7

Which entrepreneur co-founded a sportswear company with his former university running coach, at first importing Japanese track shoes and selling them from the boot of a car at athletics meets, and later commissioned a design student to draw its now-famous mark for thirty-five dollars?

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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.