Top 10 Italian Entrepreneurs in 2026

Michele Ferrero took the hazelnut paste his father had sold in post-war Alba, reformulated it and launched it as Nutella in 1964, then built Kinder and Ferrero Rocher on the same idea of stretching scarce chocolate with local Piedmont hazelnuts. He ran the company privately for decades, never listed it, and at his death in 2015 was the richest person in Italy.

Renzo Rosso founded Diesel in 1978 and turned distressed denim into a premium category, then used it as the base for OTB, a group with revenue around €1.6 billion that also owns Maison Margiela, Marni, Jil Sander and Viktor&Rolf.

Miuccia Prada took over her family's leather goods house in 1978 and turned it into a global luxury group, first through the black nylon bags of the late 1980s and then a ready-to-wear line. She holds a doctorate in political science from the University of Milan, launched the Miu Miu label in 1993, and runs the Fondazione Prada arts institution in Milan with her husband and business partner Patrizio Bertelli.

John Elkann runs Exor, the Agnelli family holding company, and chairs both Stellantis and Ferrari. Under him Exor has moved capital out of cars and into healthcare and media — stakes in Philips and Institut Merieux, control of Juventus, and the largest shareholding in The Economist Group.

Enzo Ferrari founded Scuderia Ferrari in 1929 as a team running Alfa Romeos, and only began building cars under his own name after the Second World War. He treated the road-car business chiefly as a means of funding the racing, a priority that shaped the company through the forty years he ran it, until his death in 1988.

Andrea Illy is the third generation to chair illycaffe, the Trieste company his grandfather Francesco founded in 1933, and which still sells a single blend of nine Arabica origins rather than a range. A chemist by training, he has pushed the firm toward direct relationships with growers and published sourcing standards, and illy runs the Universita del Caffe training network.

Alberto Bombassei turned Brembo, founded by his father near Bergamo in 1961, into the dominant supplier of high-performance braking systems, from Formula 1 and MotoGP grids to carbon-ceramic discs on road cars. He led the company for decades before handing the chairmanship to Matteo Tiraboschi in 2022, and also served a term in the Italian Chamber of Deputies.