Alan Sugar
Familiar to millions of TV viewers through The Apprentice, the Hackney-born peer who has sunk the hopes of dozens of wannabe tycoons with the dreaded words “You’re fired” is one of the UK’s best-known business people.
Having worked in a greengrocers and briefly in the civil service, he started his Amstrad electronics business in the late 1960s with £100 from a Post Office savings account, selling radio aerials for cars.
Tuning into the consumer electronics boom for personal computers and satellite TV set-top boxes, the business grew fast and was acquired by BSkyB. Sugar bought Tottenham Hotspur for around £8 million after a bidding war with newspaper and publishing baron Robert Maxwell in the early 1990s. He sold a controlling stake in 2001 for over £20 million.
Sugar, who now makes much of his money from property, has been firing -- and eventually hiring -- on The Apprentice since 2005.
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