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Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata was an aviator and industrialist who became the first licensed pilot in India and founded in 1932 the airline that grew into Air India.

He chaired the Tata group for more than fifty years, expanding it from fourteen to nearly a hundred enterprises, and pioneered employee welfare in Indian industry. He received the Bharat Ratna in 1992.

Elon Reeve Musk is a builder of companies: he co-founded the payments firm PayPal, leads the electric-car maker Tesla, and founded the rocket company SpaceX.

SpaceX has flown astronauts for NASA and lands and reuses its orbital rockets, while Tesla has accelerated the shift to electric vehicles. His ventures also include the Starlink satellite internet network.

Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani chairs Reliance Industries, the company his father founded, and has led it since 2002.

He built the world’s largest oil refining complex at Jamnagar and launched Jio in 2016, which brought low-cost mobile data within reach of hundreds of millions of Indians.

Steven Paul Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976 and led the creation of machines and devices that reshaped personal computing, music and the telephone.

He also founded the animation studio that became Pixar, and returned to Apple in 1997 to rebuild it around the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011.

Jeffrey Preston Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore and built it into one of the world’s largest companies, reshaping retail and cloud computing along the way.

He stepped down as Amazon’s chief executive in 2021 to spend more time on Blue Origin, the rocket company he founded, whose vehicles now fly suborbital and orbital missions.