Bill Gates once said "definitely send me a resume" if you can finish the famously punishing "The Art of Computer Programming" by Donald Knuth.
"If somebody is so brash that they think they know everything, Knuth will help them understand that the world is deep and complicated," Gates said.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is a big fan of "The Fountainhead," by Ayn Rand, a book about a principled architect who refuses to back down from his beliefs, even when they're seen as selfish.
For a while, the Fountainhead cover was even Kalanick's Twitter avatar. "It’s less of a political statement. It’s just personally one of my favorite books. I’m a fan of architecture," he told the Washington Post.
Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, is a big fan of science fiction. His favorite, "Foundation" by Issac Asimov, is the story of the long process of rebuilding civilization after a galaxy-spanning society collapses.
Musk has said that Foundation has sharpened his belief that humanity has to spread to the stars. He told The Guardian: "Given that this is the first time in 4.5 billion years where it's been possible for humanity to extend life beyond Earth, it seems like we'd be wise to act while the window was open and not count on the fact it will be open a long time."
When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shook up the company's management in April 2014, he said it was a leadership lesson taken from "The Boys in the Boat," by ex-Microsoftie Daniel James Brown, about the USA Rowing Team at the 1936 Olympics.
"There is a very evocative description in the book about a team of rowers working together at the highest level – he calls it 'the swing of the boat,'" Nadella wrote in a company-wide e-mail. He wanted the company to find the swing of the boat.
When he was 12, Google cofounder Larry Page read the autobiography of famed scientist Nikola Tesla. He already wanted to be some kind of inventor, and this just drove it home.
(You can read Tesla's autobiography online for free here.)
But where Tesla died penniless and unable to commercialize his inventions, Page knew he wanted to make something with a bigger impact.
You can listen to Page discuss Tesla here.
Page's Google cofounder Sergey Brin says "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", the autobiography of world-famous physicist Richard P. Feynman, totally changed his life.
"I remember he had an excerpt where he was explaining how he really wanted to be a Leonardo [da Vinci], an artist and a scientist. I found that pretty inspiring. I think that leads to having a fulfilling life," Brin once said during a presentation.
Larry Ellison, the jet-setting founder of Oracle, told the Academy of Achievement that his favorite book is Vincent Cronin's biography of French general Napoleon Bonaparte.
It's interesting to read about him for a couple of reasons: to see what one man of modest birth can do with his life, and to see how history can distort the truth entirely," Ellison told the Academy. He says Napoleon "definitely needed better PR
Marissa Mayer is a big fan of "The Charisma Myth," which teaches that anybody can be trained to be a great leader.
Mayer put Cabane's lessons to work at Yahoo with leadership training sessions...and even hosted the book's launch party at her San Francisco home.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is also a voracious reader, but he says he learns more from novels than he does from nonfiction. His favorite novel is "The Remains of the Day" by Kazuo Ishiguro, about a butler reflecting on his service to England during World War II.
“If you read 'The Remains of the Day,' which is one of my favorite books, you can't help but come away and think, I just spent 10 hours living an alternate life and I learned something about life and about regret," Bezos told Slate in 2009.
Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.
