Steve Jobs — Apple

Jobs dropped out of Reed College after one semester because he felt guilty spending his working-class parents' savings. He kept auditing a calligraphy class — which directly inspired the Mac's revolutionary typography. Apple is now worth $3+ trillion. Jobs was fired from his own company in 1985, built Pixar into a $7.4 billion acquisition, returned to Apple, and launched the iPhone — a device that has generated over $2.3 trillion in cumulative revenue since 2007. The Reed College calligraphy class might be the single most valuable elective in educational history.