There is a small class of Americans who achieve what I like to think of as P.T. Barnum Status. Stan Lee, who died on Monday at age 95, was one of them.

What I mean by P.T. Barnum Status is this: You cannot imagine the modern circus without him. He was the industry. There are very few people who drive an enterprise as fully as he did. The computer industry, for instance, would still have happened without either Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. The automotive industry would have developed without Henry Ford.