There's a particular humiliation to being let go from a job you were good at. Worse still when that job turns out to be the one your entire legacy gets built around — except you had to get thrown out of it first before you could build anything worth remembering. History is full of these moments. The firing that looked like a catastrophe. The pink slip that was actually a permission slip.
Here are five Americans who got shown the door — and then went on to define the very field that tried to discard them.
1. Steve Jobs — Apple Computer, 1985
The most famous firing in Silicon Valley history is almost too on-the-nose to include, except that the details still have the power to shock. Steve Jobs didn't just get fired from a company. He got fired from the company he had co-founded in his parents' garage, by a board that had grown tired of his volatility and a CEO he had personally recruited.
In 1985, Apple's board sided with John Sculley over Jobs in a power struggle that had been building for months. Jobs was stripped of his responsibilities, then effectively pushed out entirely. He was thirty years old.
What happened next is the part the business school case studies love: Jobs went and founded NeXT, invested in a little animation company called Pixar, and eventually returned to Apple in 1997 to run the very organization that had expelled him — steering it toward the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and a market valuation that no one in 1985 could have imagined. The board that fired him had no idea they were setting in motion the second act of the most consequential technology story of the twentieth century. They thought they were solving a management problem. They were actually writing the first chapter of a comeback.
