PHIL KNIGHT

Started Blue Ribbon Sports in 1964 with his University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman. The original business model was importing Onitsuka Tiger running shoes from Japan.

Knight would sell them at track meets out of his green Plymouth Valiant.

In 1971, Blue Ribbon Sports became Nike — named after the Greek goddess of victory. Bowerman created the first Nike sole by pouring rubber into his wife's waffle iron.

That destroyed waffle iron is now worth more as a piece of business history than most people's houses.

Nike went public in 1980. By 1986 annual revenues crossed $1 billion.

The signing of Michael Jordan in 1984 — a bet that every other shoe company passed on — changed everything. Air Jordan didn't just sell shoes.

It created an entirely new category of athlete-brand partnership.

Nike is the obvious one. Knight served as CEO from 1964 to 2004, then as chairman until 2016.

He still holds about 245 million Class A shares — roughly $35 billion worth. Nike employs 79,000 people and has contracts with athletes in every sport on every continent.

He also co-founded Laika, an animation studio in Portland that produced "Coraline," "ParaNorman," and "Kubo and the Two Strings." It's a stop-motion studio — the most painstaking form of animation possible. Very Phil Knight: do the hard thing, do it obsessively, make it beautiful.

Significant philanthropic investments through the Knight Foundation. He's given over $2 billion to Stanford, $500 million to the University of Oregon, and hundreds of millions to Portland-area causes.

Knight is a builder, not a trader. He built one company for 50 years and held the stock forever.

His investing philosophy is essentially: find a massive market, obsess over the product, sign the best athletes, and outmarket everyone.

He doesn't do venture capital or hedge funds. His wealth is almost entirely Nike stock.

When he has invested outside Nike, it's been in things he personally cares about — animation with Laika, education through massive university gifts.

The man is allergic to diversification. One stock, one company, one lifetime.

Signing Michael Jordan. Nike offered Jordan $2.5 million over five years in 1984.

Jordan wanted to sign with Adidas. His mother Deloris made him take the Nike meeting.

Adidas passed. Air Jordan generated $162 million in its first year alone.

The Jordan Brand now does over $6 billion in annual revenue. It's arguably the single best endorsement deal in the history of commerce.

Sweatshop labor scandals in the 1990s. Reports of child labor and terrible conditions in Nike's Southeast Asian factories nearly destroyed the brand.

Knight initially dismissed the criticism, which made everything worse. It took Nike years of reforms and billions in compliance spending to recover its reputation.

Knight has said it was the most painful period of his career.

Knight believes in the power of brand. Not product, not price — brand.

Products can be copied. Prices can be undercut.

But a brand that makes people feel something is an unassailable competitive advantage.

He also believes in hiring people who are obsessed. His original team at Nike — the group he calls "shoe dogs" — worked insane hours for modest pay because they loved what they were building.

Knight has said he'd rather hire a passionate amateur than a competent mercenary.

Compete like your life depends on it. Then compete some more.

Married to Penny Knight since 1968. Two sons: Matthew and Travis.

Matthew passed away in 2004 in a scuba diving accident in El Salvador — a tragedy Knight rarely discusses publicly. He named the University of Oregon's basketball arena the Matthew Knight Arena.

Travis Knight is the CEO of Laika and has directed animated films. The family is extremely private by billionaire standards.

Attended Cleveland High School in Portland, Oregon. Then the University of Oregon, where he ran track under coach Bill Bowerman — the relationship that would become Nike.

MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1962. His Stanford thesis about Japanese shoe imports was literally the business plan for Blue Ribbon Sports.

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