By Blaine McCormick and Jonathan Bean
"USA250: The Story of the World's Greatest Economy" is a yearlong WSJ series examining America's first 250 years. Read more about it from Editor in Chief Emma Tucker.
Ranking presidents is a popular pastime for historians and political scientists. But, for the average American, the true success of the American experiment isn't found in the marble halls of Washington. It is in the products, services and industries that fill -- and sometimes define -- our daily lives.
That is what we've learned from a survey of business historians and thought leaders. For three decades, we've asked this group to rank the greatest entrepreneurs and businesspeople in American history -- much like political scientists rank presidents. Our findings suggest a profound, often overlooked, truth: Business may be more important than government in transforming the human condition.
The hidden ingredients
While business visionaries are often the true agents of change, ranking them raises an inevitable question: What exactly does greatness in business mean? So, for our last survey in 2021, we asked our experts to rank "factors of greatness" that might explain the names in their rankings. (Note that since the list is five years old, some businesspeople at the forefront of innovation right now aren't represented, like those in AI-related businesses.)
At the top of the experts' list: "ability to imagine or envision the future" and "impact of product or service in reordering American life." Contrast that with a factor they ranked much lower: "created wealth for shareholders."
In other words, the entrepreneurs who loom largest in American history -- Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Steve Jobs, Andrew Carnegie, the top four names on our list -- aren't remembered for optimizing stock prices. They are appreciated for the way they changed how people lived, worked, consumed and thought about tomorrow. (Rounding out our list are luminaries from a range of eras and industries: Bill Gates, Thomas Edison, Sam Walton, Jeff Bezos, Walt Disney and J.P. Morgan.)
Consider Henry Ford, who consistently ranks first in surveys of entrepreneurial greatness. Ford was openly hostile to Wall Street and famously resistant to shareholder pressure. Yet his innovations in mass production transformed manufacturing, raised wages, lowered prices and put automobiles in the driveways of ordinary Americans. The wealth created by Ford Motor was immense, but it was a byproduct of Ford's ability to imagine a horseless future.
To better understand why reordering American life trumped creating shareholder value, consider a recent paper that calculated the compound returns for publicly listed companies from 1925 to 2023. The top three places went to Altria Group, Vulcan Materials and Kansas City Southern, whose executives haven't made our lists. The closest connection between our rankings and the companies that maximized compound return is 20th-place Exxon Mobil, a direct descendant of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil.
Still, for our experts, the wealth-creating power of Standard Oil pales next to Rockefeller's role in lowering the cost of lighting for the average American through his kerosene production. After the advent of Thomas Edison's electric light, his refineries shifted toward producing gasoline for Ford's automobiles and asphalt for the new highways.
The bootstrap elite
These rankings have proved surprisingly stable across the decades, with eight of the original top 10 remaining on the list. The two new entries, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos, make good sense given the triumph of the iPhone and the rise of online shopping.
Another consistent factor in our rankings: The lists are dominated by self-made individuals and founders, rather than career CEOs who didn't build companies from scratch, but took established businesses to the next level.
General Motors' legendary CEO Alfred Sloan, who built the quintessential multidivision corporation, made the first top 10 in 2001 but has since faded from view. Sloan's bestselling management memoir, "My Years with General Motors," seems increasingly removed from today's more nimble project-based firms.
Similarly, Sam Walton remains in the top 10 while his talented successors -- like David Glass, who created the Supercenter format, to the recently retired Doug McMillon, who built the company into an e-tailing powerhouse -- will probably never receive nominations; they simply don't have the same star power as a company founder. Historically, having one's name in the company title -- like Ford, Walt Disney or, yes, Walmart -- helps build staying power.
The self-made spirit is particularly evident among women and minorities, who, throughout the 20th century, were blocked from success through mainstream channels. Ranking high on our lists for the greatest women and minority businesspeople were Oprah Winfrey, Mary Kay Ash and Madame C.J. Walker -- three women who built empires by surmounting steep racial and gender barriers. And, by forging their own path, they created opportunities for others along the way.
One interesting side note: Our experts have never favored traditional vice industries despite strong compound returns in some of the companies that populate these industries. Names like Hugh Hefner, James B. Duke and Adolphus Busch are widely known but are rarely if ever suggested for our pool of great American entrepreneurs and businesspeople. Thus far, Mark Zuckerberg's name is conspicuously scarce on our lists despite the success of Facebook and Instagram. Does this suggest that social media might be the first great vice industry of the 21st century?
Old-timers get snubbed
A few other types of individuals might be missing from our rankings. First, recency bias probably blocks early Americans from high rankings. Benjamin Franklin (No. 14 in our 2021 ranking) had a significant impact on the American business culture with his rags-to-riches autobiography and business-oriented maxims like, "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise." Franklin and other early American contributors like John Jacob Astor and Cornelius Vanderbilt should probably rank higher than they do.
Second, some innovative business leaders get overlooked if their industries don't have the cachet as sexier peers. Andy Grove worked at Intel for almost 20 years before ascending to CEO in 1987, becoming one of our greatest immigrant success stories along the way. He led Intel to unimaginable heights, wrote management texts and coined the mantra "only the paranoid survive." Nonetheless, computer chips remain relatively invisible to the average American, despite Grove's "Intel Inside" branding campaign.
Finance, currently the nation's largest industry, is probably underrepresented in our rankings, as well. The finance industry's key representative on the list, J.P. Morgan, might slip out of the top 10 entirely in the 2031 ranking, and finance-industry greats like Warren Buffett and John Bogle have never scored highly. Once again, the finance business just doesn't have the name recognition and cachet -- and immediately obvious day-to-day impact -- of innovations like automobiles and electric lighting. Put differently, more people own smartphones than shares in mutual funds.
Whom might we see in our 2031 ranking? Elon Musk landed just outside of the top 10 last time, and he continues to innovate with companies like Starlink. The artificial-intelligence industry should also produce some nominations, with possibilities like OpenAI's Sam Altman and Nvidia's Jensen Huang as key players. Maybe our first female entrepreneur will crash the top 10.
Rest assured, though, that no matter who makes the list, businesspeople will continue to make history.
Jonathan Bean is a research fellow at the Independent Institute, Oakland, Calif., and professor of history at Southern Illinois University. He is the editor of "Race & Liberty in America: The Essential Reader." Blaine McCormick is a management professor at the Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University and author of "Ben Franklin: America's Original Entrepreneur." They can be reached at reports@wsj.com.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 25, 2026 10:00 ET (14:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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