Bounce, Don’t Break: A childhood disease that should have crippled him. A car accident killed his friend. Two tours in Vietnam. The Vegas gamble. The coup attempt. The European disaster. Each crisis taught Fred the same lesson: adapt or die. He didn’t just survive—he built an $88 billion empire that moves 17 million packages daily. Most people are

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Smith, however, was an entrepreneur, and that Yale paper became the basis for FedEx, which he founded in 1971. He was also a betting man: once, in the early days of FedEx, after a bank had refused to extend a crucial loan, he took the company’s last $5,000 to Las Vegas and won $27,000 playing blackjack to cover the company’s $24,000 fuel bill. Of c

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