Jerry Yang
Taiwan-born engineer who co-founded Yahoo with David Filo in 1994 — and in 2008 turned down Microsoft's $44 billion offer.
Born in Taipei in 1968, Yang moved to the US at age ten. As a PhD student at Stanford in 1994, he and classmate David Filo built a hand-curated directory of the web, first called "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" and soon renamed Yahoo. It became one of the early web's busiest addresses.
As CEO from 2007 to 2009, he rejected Microsoft's roughly $44.6 billion offer in 2008 — a decision history has judged harshly as Yahoo faded in Google's shadow. He did make one genuinely brilliant call, though: an early investment in China's Alibaba, whose value eventually dwarfed Yahoo's own core business.