Howard Schultz was born in Brooklyn in 1953 and raised in the Canarsie public housing projects, a place some peers later called the country club of projects but which he described as a poverty he burned to escape. A football scholarship took him to Northern Michigan University in 1971, an injury ended that path, and after graduating in 1975 he sold for Xerox and then ran the US arm of a Swedish kitchenware company. In 1981 he noticed a tiny Seattle roaster ordering an odd number of plastic cone filters and flew out to see it. That company was Starbucks. After a 1983 trip to Milan, its founders rejected his espresso bar idea, so in 1985 he pitched Il Giornale to 242 investors. Of those, 217 said no, while the Starbucks founders themselves put in $150,000, and in 1988 they sold him the Starbucks retail unit for $3.8 million.

The same appetite for control shaped everything after. He refused to franchise, took the company public in 1992 to raise $271 million, and on returning as CEO in 2008 closed every US store for an afternoon to retrain baristas. It went badly in sports: his group bought the Seattle SuperSonics and Seattle Storm in 2001 for $200 million, he feuded with point guard Gary Payton, and when the legislature refused $200 million for an arena in 2006 he sold to Oklahoma City investors for $350 million. He fought a union wave during a 2022 to 2023 interim stint, and his 2019 independent presidential exploration ended with an endorsement of Joe Biden.

• By 2008 tall automated espresso machines hid baristas from customers and breakfast sandwiches made stores smell like burnt cheese.
• Polls judged Schultz most responsible for the Sonics leaving, and in 2019 he called the sale his biggest professional regret.
• Starbucks was the first major US company to give part-time workers health care and later offered tuition through Arizona State University.
• At a March 2023 Senate hearing led by Bernie Sanders, he rejected the union buster label despite an NLRB ruling on misconduct in Buffalo.
• His reported net worth reached $4.3 billion, alongside a $120 million superyacht and a $44 million Florida penthouse.