Ivan Seidenberg is the former CEO and current Chairman of telecom giant Verizon.

A Bronx native who worked as an assistant cable splicer for New York Telephone in his youth, Seidenberg was wounded in Vietnam and joined the New York Telephone fold full-time after his return from war, attending classes at CUNY by night. In the wake of AT&T's breakup in 1984, he was appointed chief of NYNEX's Washington regulatory office; by 1994, he'd worked his way up to the CEO suite. After NYNEX's massive $25 billion merger with Bell Atlantic, and then Bell Atlantic's even more massive $53 billion acquisition of GTE (which created the company we now know as Verizon), Seidenberg became the company's chief executive. In 2006, the company expanded further when Seidenberg agreed to pay $8.5 billion for MCI. Today Verizon is one of the largest companies in the area, and Seidenberg was at the helm of the company during the transition from a landline-driven phone company to a more multifaceted communications company offering internet, mobile, and television services. [Image via Getty]