On Monday, interim Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz stepped down from his position about two weeks ahead of his previously announced schedule — and three days before the company’s annual shareholder meeting. Schultz will be testifying under oath on the national stage next week about the company’s labor practices under him and his predecessors. The outgoing executive only agreed to testify under threat of a subpoena from Senator Bernie Sanders, who called Schultz out publicly in his position as head of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

Schultz bought the company in 1987 for $3.8 million, with $400,000 of his own money and the rest borrowed from investors like Bill Gates Sr. Indeed, while he previously worked there and no doubt played a very important role in the rise of Starbucks, he is not its founder, as much of mainstream media and even Sanders himself have mistakenly stated.

But Schultz has helped craft this portrait. As with so many other figures like him, his image as the founder of Starbucks is part of a narrative of scrappy entrepreneurialism, propagated in multiple books, fawning media coverage, and a foundation, culminating in his consideration to be Hillary Clinton’s secretary of labor had she won.