I think this is entirely misguided. People have selective memory: all but one of these companies had multiple founders. Hell, most companies we associate today with a single person had more than one founder. It's just that one held the most publicly visible role:
Apple: Steve Jobs | + Steve Wozniak + Ronald Wayne
Microsoft: Bill Gates | + Paul Allen
Google: Larry Page | + Sergey Brin
Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg | + Dustin Moskovitz + Chris Hughes + Andrew McCollum + Eduardo Saverin
Uber[1]: Travis Kalanick | + Garrett Camp + Ryan Graves
Tesla[1]: Elon Musk | + JB Straubel + Martin Eberhard + Marc Tarpenning + Ian Wright
[1]: Travis & Elon musk weren't even founders of Uber & Tesla. They just "became" founders post factum in startup lore.
Having a dominant founder is different than being an only founder. But what's common to all these companies is that one founder was really dominant and had the vision. In fact, out of the top companies, it's safe to say that very large proportion have a dominant founder, who wound up having much more equity than the other founder.
I don't understand why there are so many downvotes on something that is, indeed, a verifiable statistical fact. Can you downvoters write a message that elaborates on why you have such a strong reaction to this data?
dominant founder is highly subjective and simply wrong in some of those cases, as pointed out above. Even if you want to argue there was a 'dominant' founder (whatever that means), your examples don't make sense:
Apple would not exist without Steve Wozniak
Google started as a partnership
Allen sold qdos to IBM which established Microsoft
I'd argue that Apple had a dominant founder in the early days, but it was Steve Wozniak, not Steve Jobs. He'd basically built the Apple I in its entirety and shown it off at Homebrew before Steve Jobs said "Let's build a company around this and sell it."
Also, Larry was always the primary driver behind Google; it started out as his thesis project, PageRank is named for him, and he'd already started crawling the web by the time Sergey joined. Sergey's initial startup idea was to order pizza via fax machine. Google obviously wouldn't exist without both of them, and Larry was smart enough to share equity and credit equally, but a startup at the YC fellowship stage is much more likely to look like Larry's thesis project than Google when it took VC.
Jobs had to persuade him to leave HP, and do all the selling and marketing, those are also important parts of building a business. In my view it was a partnership and you're ignoring a huge part of what made Apple Apple. That leaves you with Google, which also had two very early significant players.
I'm not arguing against single founders, it's perfectly possible, but most companies are not started by a single founder, they are collaborations and are all the better for it.
