1. Bill Gates.

Bright young technie with a ruthless entrepreneurial streak. After cutting a deal with IBM in the 1980s, his business exploded, becoming the world's leading software company. Gates had the world at his feet. He could have become a legend, creating software that people would love and idolize him for. Instead, he fluffed it. Microsoft became synonymous with buggy software and clunky overweight operating systems, and in 2013 - to the relief of almost the entire web development community - finally went bust. Gates, by then a broken man, spent the final years of his life in a mental asylum, where he was rumoured to tell anyone who would listen that "Internet Explorer really is the world's best browser".