This kind of happened with Mark Shuttleworth in 2005. At that time you had Suse and Mandrake/mandriva as the top desktop distributions. Both were going out thou

This kind of happened with Mark Shuttleworth in 2005. At that time you had Suse and Mandrake/mandriva as the top desktop distributions. Both were going out though: Suse was moving to servers/closed source and mandriva was in crisis. Mark's millions gave desktop linux a good push and it spawned a new generation of desktop linux (like Mint)