Steve Jobs

Jobs co-founded Apple at twenty-one, was removed from it at thirty, and returned at forty-two to a company with roughly ninety days of cash. The standard telling makes the second act a story of taste. The financial record makes it a story of ruthless narrowing: on returning in 1997 he cut Apple's product line from dozens of SKUs to four quadrants — consumer and professional, desktop and portable — killed the Newton, ended the Mac clone licensing programme, and accepted a $150M investment and an Office commitment from Microsoft, the company Apple had spent a decade defining itself against.

His genuine competitive insight was not design as decoration. It was that controlling the full stack — silicon, operating system, hardware, retail, and eventually the payment relationship — lets you deliver an experience an assembler of other people's components cannot match, and lets you price it accordingly. Every profitable thing Apple does today sits downstream of that conviction.

His costs were real and should not be laundered. He denied paternity of his daughter for years, treated colleagues cruelly by the account of nearly everyone who worked closely with him, and delayed surgery for a treatable pancreatic tumour in favour of alternative medicine. A case study that only reports the wins is a press release.