Steve Jobs vs. Sam Walton: The tale of the tape November 15, 2012: 5:00 AM ET A rare conversation with Walter Isaacson and John Huey, the writers who got inside the heads of these two extraordinary business leaders. By Andy Serwer, managing editor FORTUNE -- When you consider the greatest business minds of the past 100 years, certainly Steve Jobs and Sam Walton have to be at the very top of the list. Jobs created the most valuable company on earth (though down from an all-time high, Apple ( AAPL ) is still worth more than $500 billion), while Walton founded and built Wal-Mart ( WMT ), the biggest company in the world, with more than $450 billion in sales over the past 12 months. But Jobs and Walton did even more than that. Both created retailing, business, and even societal revolutions. They changed the way we buy, shop, and interact, and even how and where we work and live. The two men were vastly different. Jobs was a business version of a California counterculture icon. Walton was an old-school heartland conservative. And yet they were remarkably similar too: iconoclasts, of course, relentless, and often very tough on the people around them. And that's just for starters. If you really drill down into their lives and careers, all kinds of really cool insights emerge. Who better to compare and contrast these two remarkable men than their remarkable biographers, Walter Isaacson and John Huey? Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs , is