Dietmar Hopp

I'm not someone who puts their money in a fund that earns 2 to 5 percent a year. I'm a man who tries to change things, move something with my money, to create jobs and, of course, at the same time earn more money with it.

Early in the 1990s, I flew alone in a dandelion-yellow, single-engine, 180-horsepower Piper Cherokee from Westchester County Airport in New York westward to the Rocky Mountains, landing and refuelling a good many times in middle-sized cities and towns along the way.