Black Executives and Founders in Finance and Tech
Robert F. Smith is the founder and chairman of Vista Equity Partners, a private equity firm managing over $98 billion in assets as of 2024, and he has pledged more than $1 billion to educational initiatives through the Fund II Foundation and Student Freedom Initiative Forbes. David Steward is the co-founder and executive chairman of World Wide Technology, a company that generated over $17 billion in revenue in 2023 and ranks among the largest Black-owned companies in the United States Forbes.
Ursula Burns was the first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company as CEO of Xerox from 2009 to 2016, and she later served as chairwoman until 2017 Forbes. Tony Fadell, often called the father of the iPod, is a mixed-race executive who co-founded Nest Labs, which was acquired by Google for $3.2 billion in 2014 and later became part of Alphabet Forbes.
Black Innovators and Athletes With Global Rankings
Tiger Woods, one of the most decorated golfers in history with 15 major championships, has a career earnings total exceeding $120 million in PGA Tour events alone PGA Tour. LeBron James, a four-time NBA champion, became the first player in league history to reach $1 billion in career earnings as a player and has invested in companies including Blaze Pizza and Liverpool FC Forbes.
Dr. Mark Dean, an IBM engineer, co-invented the ISA bus and holds three of the original nine patents for the IBM PC, and he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame IBM. Dr. Gladys West, a mathematician, did the foundational work on the GPS satellite model while at the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory, and her contributions are now documented in official Navy records and public biographies U.S. Navy.
Black Leaders in Government, Media, and Space
Dr. Mae Jemison became the first Black woman to travel to space in 1992 aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, and she later founded the Jemison Group, which works on science and technology for social impact