Best Business Biographies: 50 Picks Recommended by CEOs

Ashlee Vance traces Musk from a hard South African boyhood through Zip2 and PayPal to SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity, built on long talks with Musk and hundreds of other interviews. Richard Branson praises how it captures an entrepreneur undaunted by setbacks.

Phil Knight recalls borrowing fifty dollars from his father, selling imported Japanese running shoes out of his car and fighting bankers and rivals to turn Blue Ribbon Sports into Nike. Bill Gates calls it an honest picture of how messy business success really is.

Walter Isaacson follows the Apple co-founder whose perfectionism and drive remade computers, music, phones and animated film, drawing on more than forty interviews with him and over a hundred with colleagues and rivals.

Tony Hsieh tells his own entrepreneurial story, from a worm farm at nine and LinkExchange, sold to Microsoft, to running Zappos and selling it to Amazon, and argues that culture and happiness can drive profits. Joel Gascoigne says Zappos shaped how Buffer set its values.

Richard Branson covers his first 43 years, from early music ventures to the airline and its court win over British Airways, with his ballooning adventures threaded through. Robin Sharma urges aspiring entrepreneurs to read it alongside Business Stripped Bare.

Brad Stone pairs the story of Amazon, from online bookseller through the dot-com bust to Kindle and Amazon Web Services, with Bezos’s childhood and Wall Street years. Shane Parrish recommends it for understanding disruption, and Craig Pearce calls it his favourite business book.

Sam Walton tells, with John Huey, how one dime store in a cotton town became the largest retailer on earth, and shares his rules on competition, thrift and teamwork. Doug McMillon says he returns to it often, and Jeff Bezos has recommended it.

Ron Chernow follows Rockefeller from a childhood split between a devout mother and a snake-oil peddler father to Standard Oil and his late philanthropy, weighing the charges against him fairly. Charlie Munger calls it one of the best business biographies he has read.

Yvon Chouinard, once among America’s best climbers, explains how making better climbing gear for friends grew into Patagonia, and why the company turns bottles into fleece and gives part of its revenue to green causes. Nancy Johnston says it shaped her own company’s DNA.

Bobby Hundreds recounts his punk youth in Southern California and how The Hundreds, a label started by outsiders, lasted as streetwear went mainstream, with community at the center. Ronnie Fieg reads it as a guide to launching a brand without losing its core fans.

Jack Welch tells, with John A. Byrne, how a working-class kid rose through GE Plastics to run the whole company for twenty years and push it to grow. Annika Falkengren took from it that there are no shortcuts and that facts have to be faced.

Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli follow Jobs from the reckless founder pushed out of Apple to the leader he became, drawing on many hours of taped interviews and on colleagues from Apple, Pixar and Disney. Cal Newport calls it excellent.

Howard Schultz describes how Italy’s coffee bars inspired him to grow one Seattle store into a chain of more than sixteen hundred, guided by values that weigh staff as heavily as profit. Yaro Starak reads it as the story of Schultz himself.

Alice Schroeder, the analyst Buffett chose, spent more than 2,000 hours with his files, family and partners, and he told her to keep the less flattering version where stories conflicted. Richard Lambert recommends it for explaining how Buffett kept beating the market.

Sophia Amoruso recalls hitchhiking, petty theft and a job checking IDs before she began selling vintage clothes on eBay, the seed of Nasty Gal, and argues that instinct matters more than credentials. Andrea Loubier credits it with encouraging the risk taking that founders need.

Bill McDermott traces his rise from buying a Long Island deli at sixteen to star Xerox salesman and co-CEO of SAP, using each step to argue for optimism and disciplined execution. Howard Schultz and Jack Welch both endorse it.

Duncan Clark, an early adviser to Alibaba, tells how a former English teacher of modest means built China’s e-commerce giant, from early failures and fights with rivals to a record IPO. Sir Martin Sorrell argues it refutes the idea that Chinese firms only copy the West.

Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele dismantle the Hughes legend, showing a fortune made despite his meddling, a nearly ruined TWA and a final eighteen years lost to drugs and fear of madness. Ryan Holiday reads it as a cautionary biography.

Bill Gates writes about his parents, his grandmother, the loss of his best friend and the late nights at a computer center that led to Microsoft, ending with its first deal with Apple. Warren Buffett points to it as the story of leaving college to seize the moment.

Robert Iger recounts taking over Disney in 2005 and betting on quality, technology and global reach, a plan that brought in Pixar, Lucasfilm, Marvel and Fox. Brene Brown and Daniel Coyle praise its mix of stories and leadership lessons.

Neal Gabler shows Disney turning animation into an art form and tying parks, films, television and merchandise into one company, driven by perfectionism and a wish to escape. Brian Chesky admires how Disney bet everything again and again while close to bankruptcy.

Rich Cohen follows Samuel Zemurray from a penniless arrival in 1891 and roadside banana sales to control of United Fruit, a power that helped topple Central American governments. Ryan Holiday says the story drew him in completely, and Benjamin Spall praises the writing.

Alfred Sloan recounts half a century inside General Motors and the planning, financial and leadership policies he built there, an account managers have long used as a working manual. Ben Horowitz found it useful on problems of scale.

Jim Koch draws on quitting consulting to brew a family recipe as Samuel Adams, sharing lessons on sales, hiring and culture, plus a lesson he draws from a piece of string. Tony Hsieh praises its advice on making a passion pay.

Richard Branson picks up two decades after his first memoir, covering Virgin’s push into mobile, media, fitness and banking, the Virgin Galactic crisis and his turn toward philanthropy. Yaro Starak picked it up as part two of a life whose first volume, Losing My Virginity, shaped his own big thinking.

James Wallace and Jim Erickson follow the career of a young prodigy nicknamed Chairman Bill, from his early start to running the Microsoft software empire, in a biography published in 1992. Paul Graham calls it good.

Alan Sugar recounts growing up poor in Hackney, selling ginger beer as a schoolboy, building Amstrad into a stock market favourite and nearly losing it all. Neal O’Gorman sees in it how buying low and selling higher can grow into a major company.

Richard S. Tedlow follows Grove from surviving the Nazis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary to becoming Intel’s third employee and later its chief executive, with access to his papers and friends. It appears on a reading list of Barack Obama.

Roger Lowenstein portrays Buffett as a billionaire of modest habits and a homespun dealmaker, and argues that buying undervalued companies and holding them reflects his character. Bill Gates calls it the one to read until Buffett writes his own.

Zack O’Malley Greenburg builds the rapper’s climb from Brooklyn’s streets to a business empire of clothing, clubs, cognac and streaming from more than a hundred interviews. Ryan Holiday says it doubles as a business book on applying street hustle to music.

Leslie Berlin portrays the co-inventor of the integrated circuit and co-founder of Fairchild and Intel as a daring, competitive risk taker with a folksy charm, and uses his life to show how Silicon Valley works. Patrick Collison lists it.

Lee Iacocca recounts championing the Mustang and rising to president of Ford until he was forced out in 1978, then rescuing a nearly bankrupt Chrysler with a federal loan guarantee it repaid in full. Ramit Sethi has recommended it.

Bill Browder traces his move from Stanford Business School into hedge funds and Moscow, where exposing oligarchs got him expelled and his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in custody. Eric Ries says it reads like a thriller about Putin’s Russia.

David Ogilvy recalls a poor childhood, work as a cook in Paris and as a stove salesman in Scotland, then the Hathaway shirt man and clients from IBM to Rolls Royce. Bogdan Iordache took from it how Ogilvy succeeded, failed and succeeded again by turns.

Paul Allen recounts how computers hooked him as a boy, how the idea for Microsoft came about and his strained partnership with Gates, then his later bets on private spaceflight, sports teams and brain science. David Senra lists it.

Marc Randolph describes pitching ideas to his partner on their morning commute, settling on renting movies online, raising money from his own mother and offering the young company to Blockbuster. Readers in The CEO Library community have recommended it.

Andrew Carnegie recounts going from a cotton mill job as a poor Scottish immigrant boy to control of America’s largest steel empire, and a later life giving his fortune away. Laurentiu-Victor Balasa reads it as a reminder of how easy entrepreneurship is today.

Guy Spier tells how he went from a Harvard MBA and investment banking to running his own fund, with a costly charity lunch with Buffett as a turning point and his own failed deals laid bare. Benjamin Kwan read it as a gentler way into value investing.

Michael Dell tells of three fights: starting a PC business from his dorm room, holding on to the company and remaking it decades later, along with the mentors and rivals who shaped him. Matthew McConaughey calls it an autobiographical thriller.

Mainly a book on managing creative work, it follows Ed Catmull from a boyhood admiration of Disney through Lucasfilm to founding Pixar, then opens up its Braintrust meetings. Mark Zuckerberg values his account of building a culture that fosters creativity.

Mainly the story of a startup’s collapse, John Carreyrou’s reporting centers on its Stanford dropout founder, who promised every lab test from a drop of blood and silenced doubters as the company passed a nine billion dollar valuation. Bill Gates found it impossible to put down.

Nick Bilton tells Twitter’s company story through the four men who founded it, a service born from a failed podcasting company and nearly torn apart by fights over money and control. Casey Neistat says it gave him the confidence to start a tech company.

Beth Comstock’s rise from introverted publicist to the first woman Vice Chair of GE frames a book mainly about leading change in a big company, including its clean-energy and FastWorks efforts. Adam Grant and Simon Sinek both endorse it.

David Kushner follows id Software’s co-founders, the showman John Romero and the quiet programmer John Carmack, from their first meeting to Doom and Quake, with most attention on how they worked together. Chris Oliver says it covers games many programmers grew up with.

Leigh Gallagher tells how Airbnb grew from an idea of its three founders into a giant of online lodging, covering its controversies along with its growth. Reid Hoffman praises how it follows the company from its scrappy early days.

David Kirkpatrick, given full cooperation by the company, explains how a Harvard student’s dorm project reached 500 million users and portrays its founder as someone who put growth ahead of profit. Angela Pham says it made her a fan of the company’s leaders.

Michael Lewis recalls his rise from trainee to bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s, a memoir mainly about trading floor culture and how the firm built the mortgage bond market. Chamath Palihapitiya lists it.

Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff chart how engineer Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie built BlackBerry above an Ontario bagel shop and lost ground once Apple and Google entered phones. Erik Martin calls it a reminder of how quickly technologies change at the top.

Bryan Burrough and John Helyar reconstruct the 1988 fight to buy RJR Nabisco, mainly a deal story that centres on chief executive F. Ross Johnson and the rival bidders at KKR. Bogdan Iordache recommends it.

Ricardo Semler took over his father’s Brazilian manufacturer at 21, dismissed most senior managers and let workers set quotas and read the books, a story mainly about running an unusual workplace. Joel Gascoigne values its detail on how Semler reshaped the firm.