Ray Kroc

He drove away his first wife with his relentless work ethic.

He drove away his second wife with the same thing.

He was temperamental, demanding, impossible to please.

He pushed people until they broke or until they became exactly what he needed them to be.

but the people who stayed loved him they adored him they loved working with him and they became really rich more importantly many of them became inversions of him they were driven they were detailed obsessed they were relentless i gave a lot of men the opportunity to become millionaires ray wrote they did it themselves i merely provided the means

The McDonald's brothers, however, ended up bitter.

They felt Ray had taken their creation and pushed them out.

And there's maybe some truth to that.

He built McDonald's into something they never could have built, but he did it with their name, their system, and their idea.

I'm not a fast foods man, Dick McDonald once said.

I'm a production man.

I saw my opportunity in the hamburger, but my brother and I never wanted it to be this big.

That's part of the difference.

The McDonald's brothers saw a restaurant, and Ray Kroc saw a system that could feed the world.

By the time he would die in 1984, McDonald's had nearly 8,000 restaurants worldwide.

Annual sales were approaching 9 billion.

Now, that number seems staggering low compared to today, but that was 1984.

Late in life, Ray Kroc would fly over cities in a helicopter looking for new locations.

He'd see a bare piece of ground and imagine what could be built there.

That was his favorite thing in the world to do.