RJR Nabisco, Inc., was an American conglomerate headquartered in the Calyon Building in Midtown Manhattan, New York City.

It formed in 1985 by the merger of Nabisco Brands and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. RJR Nabisco was purchased in 1988 by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. in the largest leveraged buyout at the time. In 1999, due to concerns about tobacco lawsuit liabilities, the tobacco business was spun off into a separate company, and RJR Nabisco was renamed Nabisco Holdings Corporation. Nabisco is currently owned by Kraft Foods.

The RJR Nabisco leveraged buyout was, at the time, widely considered to be the pre-emininent example of corporate and executive greed. Bryan Burrough and John Helyar published Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, a successful book about the events which was later turned into a television movie for HBO.

RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp. (NYSE: NGH) was the parent company of RJR Nabisco, Inc. After the food and tobacco businesses separated in June 1999, Nabisco Group Holdings Corp. owned 80% of RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp., which was the parent company of Nabisco, Inc.

Warren Edward Buffett (/ˈbʌfɨt/; born August 30, 1930) is an American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He is widely considered the most successful investor of the 20th century. He is the primary shareholder, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. He is consistently ranked among the world's wealthiest people. He was ranked as the world's wealthiest person in 2008 and is the third wealthiest person in the world as of 2011. In 2012, American magazine Time named Buffett one of the most influential people in the world.

Buffett is called the "Wizard of Omaha", "Oracle of Omaha", or the "Sage of Omaha" and is noted for his adherence to the value investing philosophy and for his personal frugality despite his immense wealth. Buffett is also a notable philanthropist, having pledged to give away 99 percent of his fortune to philanthropic causes, primarily via the Gates Foundation. On April 11, 2012, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Buffett was born in 1930 in Omaha, Nebraska, the second of three children and only son of U.S. Representative Howard Buffett, a fierce critic of the interventionist New Deal domestic and foreign policy, and his wife Leila (née Stahl). Buffett began his education at Rose Hill Elementary School in Omaha. In 1942, his father was elected to the first of four terms in the United States Congress, and after moving with his family to Washington, D.C., Warren finished elementary school, attended Alice Deal Junior High School, and graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1947, where his senior yearbook picture reads: "likes math; a future stock broker."

Henry R. Kravis (born January 6, 1944) is an American businessman and private equity investor. He is the co-founder of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., a private equity firm with over $62 billion in assets as of 2011. He has an estimated net worth of $3.7 billion as of September 2011, ranked by Forbes as the 88th richest man in America. He mainly lives in New York City and has a residence in Palm Beach, Florida.

Kravis was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the son of Bessie (Roberts) and Raymond Kravis, a successful Tulsa oil engineer who had been a business partner of Joseph P. Kennedy. Kravis began his education at the Eaglebrook School, ('60) followed by high school at the Loomis Chaffee School. He then majored in economics at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California and graduated in 1967 before going on to Columbia Business School, where he received an MBA degree in 1969.

After working at various jobs in New York City's financial sector, he and his first cousin, George R. Roberts, joined the staff of Bear Stearns. Kravis and Roberts share the same grandfather, an immigrant from Russia.^{[citation needed]} There, they worked under the corporate finance manager, Jerome Kohlberg, Jr.. They both became partners at Bear Stearns at a very young age, 30 and 31.

Willard Mitt Romney (born March 12, 1947) is an American businessman and the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party for President of the United States in the 2012 election. He was the 70th Governor of Massachusetts (2003–07).

The son of Lenore and George W. Romney (Governor of Michigan, 1963–69), he was raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. In 1966, after one year at Stanford University, he left the United States to spend thirty months in France as a Mormon missionary. In 1969, he married Ann Davies, and the couple had five children together. In 1971, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Brigham Young University and, in 1975, a joint Juris Doctor and Master of Business Administration from Harvard University as a Baker Scholar. He entered the management consulting industry, which in 1977, led to a position at Bain & Company. Later serving as Chief Executive Officer, he helped bring the company out of financial crisis. In 1984, he co-founded the spin-off Bain Capital, a private equity investment firm that became highly profitable and one of the largest such firms in the nation. His net worth is estimated at $190–250 million, wealth that has helped fund his political campaigns. Active in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he served as Ward Bishop and later Stake President in his area near Boston. He ran as the Republican candidate in the 1994 U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts, losing to long-time incumbent Ted Kennedy. In 1999, he was hired as President and CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics and Paralympics; and he helped turn the fiscally troubled games into a success.

Richard Keith "Dick" Armey (pronounced /ˈɑrmi/; born July 7, 1940) is a former U.S. Representative from Texas's 26th congressional district (1985–2003) and House Majority Leader (1995–2003). He was one of the engineers of the "Republican Revolution" of the 1990s, in which Republicans were elected to majorities of both houses of Congress for the first time in four decades. Armey was one of the chief authors of the Contract with America. Armey is also an author and former economics professor. After his congressional career, he worked as a consultant, advisor and, lobbyist.

Armey was born in the farming town of Cando, North Dakota, the son of Marion (née Gutschlag) and Glenn Armey. He grew up in a rural area. He graduated from Jamestown College with a B.A. and then received an M.A. from the University of North Dakota and a PhD in economics from the University of Oklahoma. Armey is a member of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity.

Armey served on the economics faculty at the University of Montana from 1964 to 1965, was an Assistant Professor of economics at West Texas State University from 1967 to 1968, an Assistant Professor of economics at Austin College from 1968 to 1972, an Associate Professor of economics at North Texas State (now the University of North Texas) from 1972 to 1977 and Chairman of the economics department at North Texas State from 1977 to 1983.