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in 1995 Jeff Bezos offered 20 percent of Amazon for $1 million. 40 investors still said no. in the clip below he tells how he got the first money for the company. the deal valued Amazon at $5 million. he split the round between 22 angel investors, about $50,000 each. getting there took 60 meetings, and most of them went nowhere. "it was the hardest thing i've ever done." almost every meeting started the same way. the first question was what the internet even was, so he had to explain it before he could pitch anything. then he told every one of them the honest odds. he thought there was a 70 percent chance they would lose all of it. "the whole enterprise could have been extinguished then." today he says even that was too kind, the real odds were worse. the 40 who passed heard the exact same pitch, 70 percent warning included. lucky bet on a stranger - or the easiest money the 40 ever walked away from?

Mark Zuckerberg offered a 23 year old living at his dad's house a reported $3 billion for his app. he said no, and $10 million made it easy. in the clip below Snapchat's Evan Spiegel explains how he turned that down. Facebook had just bought Instagram. Spiegel thought that deal gave away a massive opportunity, and he didn't want to repeat it. "i wish i could say it was wisdom. i think it was just that Bobby and i loved what we were doing." the detail is the money they already had. in an earlier round, investors let Spiegel and co-founder Bobby Murphy each sell $10 million of stock. "we each had $10 million, and we were like, wow, we've made it." with that in the bank, $3 billion stopped looking like a lifeline. four years later Snap went public and closed its first day worth about $33 billion. the smartest no in tech - or a bet that only looks good because it worked?

John Paul DeJoria co-founded Patrón, which Bacardi later bought in a deal worth $5.1 billion. years earlier he was picking up soda bottles at 2 cents each to feed his son. in the clip below he explains how he and his 2 year old ended up living in a car. one day he found the boy sitting on the floor in a pile of clothes. his wife had left a note. "can't handle it anymore, better off with you, good luck, i'm gone." for three months, he says, she kept the bill money and ripped up the bills. no rent, no electricity. the bank account was empty, and they were evicted the next day. "i cried. i was just so heartbroken." a woman lent him a 1951 Cadillac with a broken water pump. he refilled it with water every four hours, and it became their home. small bottles paid 2 cents, big ones 5. in 1980 he and hairdresser Paul Mitchell started a company with $700. the worst start a father could get - or the reason he made it at all?

Netflix was $50 million in the hole when it asked Blockbuster for $50 million. Blockbuster's executives tried not to laugh. in the clip below co-founder Marc Randolph recalls that meeting. Netflix was doing $5 million a year. Blockbuster was doing $6 billion, with 60,000 employees against their 150. "we were like a gnat to them, to an elephant." it took months to get a meeting. when Blockbuster finally called, Randolph had only shorts and thong sandals with him. they chartered a jet anyway. the pitch went well. Blockbuster runs the stores, Netflix runs the online side. then came the question of price. there was silence in the room, he says, and then it dawned on him. they were trying to keep a straight face. "meeting goes downhill pretty quickly after that." Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010. Netflix is now worth hundreds of billions. the worst no in business history - or a fair call on a company bleeding $50 million?

Elon Musk once lived in a $200 a month office with a leaky roof and showered at the YMCA. four years later Compaq paid $307 million cash for the company he was building in it. in the clip below a 27 year old Musk tells CBS how it started. summer of 1995. he was 23, about to start graduate school, with a scholarship and a stipend waiting. he picked the startup instead. "i had no money whatsoever." the office was cheaper than an apartment in Silicon Valley, so he slept there. "it was just the nastiest place you can imagine." the real reason they picked it was downstairs. an internet provider sat on the floor below, so they drilled a hole in the floor and plugged straight into its server. Zip2 put city guides and maps online. in February 1999 Compaq bought it. Musk walked away with about $22 million and put most of it into his next company, X.com. so would you skip a paid PhD to sleep in a leaky office - or take the safe stipend?

Elon Musk runs one of the biggest AI labs in the world. he says the AI boom is about to hit a problem that money can't fix quickly. in the clip below he explains why the chips might end up sitting there switched off. outside of China, he says, electrical output is more or less flat. maybe a slight increase. China is the one place where it's rising fast. anyone building data centers somewhere else runs into the same wall as they scale. "the output of chips is growing pretty much exponentially, but the output of electricity is flat." the money is pouring into GPUs. the grid around them barely moves. "so how are you going to turn the chips on?" "magical power sources, magical electricity fairies." his own company ran into it in Memphis, where xAI brought in gas turbines to keep its Colossus supercomputer running. so is electricity the real limit on AI - or just the next problem money will solve?

Sam Altman once said the idea is the easy part of a company. years later his own board fired him from OpenAI, and he was back 5 days later. in the clip below, from his Y Combinator days, he explains what actually builds a company. if the idea and the product take six months, he says, execution is the next nine and a half years. "it is the relentless waking up every day and just sort of banging your head against the wall until things work." then the founder fantasy. hire a COO to run things, while you think about strategy, meet investors and go to conferences. "obviously that fails 100% of the time." the value comes from compounding execution, he says, for years and years. and it never gets easier. in November 2023 OpenAI's board pushed him out. hundreds of employees threatened to quit and follow him, and the board brought him back. so is the founder really the company - or is that exactly how boards end up afraid of them?

Jensen Huang washed dishes at Denny's when he was 15. at 30 he went back to a Denny's booth and started Nvidia there. in the clip below 60 Minutes takes him back to that same Denny's. it was 1993. Huang was an electrical engineer, married with two kids. he sat down with two friends, Chris Malachowski and Curtis Priem, and they decided to build a new kind of graphics chip for video games. "frankly, i had no idea how to do it. and nor did they. none of us knew how to do anything." the first chip flopped. by 1996 the company was close to going under. they changed course and built the GPU, the chip that took video games from blocky to lifelike. "completely changed computer graphics, saved the company, launched us into the stratosphere." that same kind of chip now trains most of the world's big AI models, and Nvidia is worth trillions. so was Nvidia a genius plan - or three guys at a diner who got the timing right?

the day Geoffrey Hinton won the Nobel Prize, he thanked his students. then he said he was most proud of the one who fired Sam Altman. in the clip below the man called the godfather of AI explains why, at his press conference in October 2024. he starts the usual way. students much cleverer than him, who actually made things work. "i'm particularly proud of the fact that one of my students fired Sam Altman." he pauses and says he'd better leave it there. then he keeps going. the student was Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's chief scientist. OpenAI was set up with safety as its main goal, Hinton says, and over time that changed. "it turned out that Sam Altman was much less concerned with safety than with profits." the firing lasted about five days. Altman came back, and Sutskever later left to start his own AI lab built around safety. a Nobel winner naming the real problem in AI - or a scientist who doesn't get what it costs to build it?