Best Business Biographies
Biographies and company histories that expose ambition, capital, technology, politics, luck, culture, failure, and the personal costs behind large enterprises.
Business books tell you what leaders say they do. Biographies show what they actually did. This Topreads collection brings together 100 books on business biographies and the construction of power for founders, executives, investors, students of leadership, and ambitious operators. Its purpose is not to produce another generic popularity chart, but to help readers learn how consequential business builders made decisions, accumulated leverage, and failed.
Business biographies are strategy cases with human motives left in. This list prioritizes founders, industrialists, investors, operators, inventors, and company histories that reveal how power, institutions, fortunes, and reputations are built over time. Business reading becomes valuable only when it improves judgment and execution. The strongest lists combine timeless principles, empirical research, operating detail, biographies, failures, and competing schools of thought rather than repeating motivational slogans.
The reading path is deliberately broad: it combines foundations, practical applications, history, evidence, critical perspectives, and books that expose the trade-offs practitioners often miss. The current ranked selection begins with Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Steve Jobs, and The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. Rankings should be treated as a guided starting point rather than a claim that one book can be objectively best for every reader. Use the filters, book detail pages, and related Topreads lists to build a sequence that matches your current experience and goals.
Ranked 1–24 of 100 — curated order, not the site-wide popularity formula.
Business reading becomes valuable only when it improves judgment and execution. The strongest lists combine timeless principles, empirical research, operating detail, biographies, failures, and competing schools of thought rather than repeating motivational slogans. For this particular subject, the central promise is to help readers learn how consequential business builders made decisions, accumulated leverage, and failed. The page should therefore explain the problem the list solves, not merely present a wall of book cards.
This list was assembled from the Topreads catalogue using topical relevance, rating quality, rating volume, title and author deduplication, genre evidence, author diversity, and editorial usefulness. The ranking prioritizes books with enduring professional usefulness, clear frameworks, credible evidence or revealing cases, and enough specificity to change how a reader acts. It avoids overloading the top ranks with multiple books that make the same argument. Before publication, an editor must review every membership for topical fit, remove misleading editions or bundles, verify the ordering, and record a real review date. Rankings may change when the catalogue, evidence, or editorial judgment improves.
Topreads should show who curated or reviewed the list, the real last-reviewed date, the catalogue/data basis, and a link to the full ranking methodology. Do not claim subject-matter expert review unless a qualified named reviewer actually completed it.
Brad Stone
4.13 average rating, · 78.4k ratings
Alice Schroeder
4.16 average rating, · 55k ratings
Brent Schlender
4.15 average rating, · 17.2k ratings
Lawrence Levy
4.25 average rating, · 8.1k ratings
Jeffrey S. Young
4.06 average rating, · 10.8k ratings
Jimmy Soni
4.23 average rating, · 4k ratings
Gregory Zuckerman
4.07 average rating, · 7.6k ratings
Leslie Iwerks
4.55 average rating, · 688 ratings
Peter B. Doran
4.15 average rating, · 688 ratings
Daniel Schulman
4.08 average rating, · 649 ratings
Ken Kocienda
4.05 average rating, · 5.3k ratings
Michael Dell
4.13 average rating, · 2.6k ratings
Ashlee Vance
4.12 average rating, · 452.8k ratings
Eric Berger
4.46 average rating, · 6.8k ratings
Nick Bilton
4.04 average rating, · 19.1k ratings
Edward O. Thorp
4.24 average rating, · 8.1k ratings
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