Damien Everett · CC BY 2.0

A British entrepreneur who built Amstrad from nothing in 1968 into a major consumer electronics company, selling affordable hi-fis, word processors, and satellite equipment that brought home computing within reach of ordinary British households before he sold his stake to BSkyB in 2007. He later became known to a wider public as the gruff host of the BBC's The Apprentice since 2005, and sat in the House of Lords as a Labour peer from 2009, later serving as the UK government's enterprise champion.