Louis Richard "Lou" Rukeyser (January 30, 1933 – May 2, 2006) was an American financial journalist, columnist, and commentator, through print, radio, and television.

He was best known for his role as host of two television series, Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser, and Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street. He also published two financial newsletters, Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street and Louis Rukeyser's Mutual Funds.

Named by People as the only sex symbol of "the dismal science" of economics, Rukeyser won numerous awards and honors over his lifetime.

Rukeyser was famous for his pun-filled humor, and for trying to get investors to ignore the short term gyrations and think long term. In answering a letter on investing in a hairpiece manufacturer, he quipped that "if your money seems to be hair today and gone tomorrow, we'll try to make it grow back by giving the bald facts on how to get your investments toupee."

Rukeyser was born in New York City, the second of four sons of financial journalist Merryle Stanley and Berenice Helene (née Simon) Rukeyser. He was the younger brother of Merryle S. "Bud", Jr. and older brother of William S. and Robert J. His ancestors came from England, Germany and Latvia, with his paternal great-grandfather arriving in the United States about 1840. He graduated from New Rochelle High School in 1950, and then attended Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in New Jersey, graduating in 1954. While at Princeton, Rukeyser's roommate was Wayne Rogers, who would go on to star as 'Trapper John' McIntyre on the hit television series M*A*S*H and much later was a guest on Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser due to Rogers' success as an investor.

Ayn Rand ( /ˈaɪn ˈrænd/; born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, February 2 [O.S. January 20] 1905 – March 6, 1982) was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism.

Born and educated in Russia, Rand moved to the United States in 1926. She worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood and had a play produced on Broadway in 1935–1936. After two initially unsuccessful early novels, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel The Fountainhead. In 1957, she published her best-known work, the philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward she turned to nonfiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own magazines and releasing several collections of essays until her death in 1982.

Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge and rejected all forms of faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism, and rejected ethical altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed all forms of collectivism and statism, instead supporting laissez-faire capitalism, which she believed was the only social system that protected individual rights. She promoted romantic realism in art. She was sharply critical of the philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her besides Aristotle.

Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs (/ˈdʒɒbz/; February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman, designer and inventor. He is best known as the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. Through Apple, he was widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution and for his influential career in the computer and consumer electronics fields. Jobs also co-founded and served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, when Disney acquired Pixar.

In the late 1970s, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak engineered one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa and, one year later, the Macintosh. During this period he also led efforts that would begin the desktop publishing revolution, notably through the introduction of the LaserWriter and the associated PageMaker software.

Peter Lynch (born (1944-01-19)January 19, 1944) is a Wall Street stock investor. He is currently a research consultant at Fidelity Investments. Lynch graduated from Boston College in 1965 and earned a Master of Business Administration from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1968.

Lynch was hired as an intern with Fidelity Investments in 1966 partly because he had been caddying for Fidelity's president (among others) at Brae Burn Country Club in Newton, Massachusetts. He initially covered the paper, chemical, and publishing industries, and when he returned after a two-year Army stint he was hired permanently in 1969. This time Lynch was charged with following the textiles, metals, mining, and chemicals industries, eventually becoming Fidelity's director of research from 1974 to 1977. In 1977, Lynch was named head of the then obscure Magellan Fund which had $18 million in assets. By the time Lynch resigned as a fund manager in 1990, the fund had grown to more than $14 billion in assets with more than 1,000 individual stock positions. From 1977 until 1990, the Magellan fund averaged a 29.2% return. Lynch's achieved dollar successes in a range of stocks including (by order of profit achieved - source is Beating the Street): Fannie Mae, Ford, Philip Morris, MCI, Volvo, General Electric, General Public Utilities, Student Loan Marketing, Kemper, and Lowes.

Ben Shepherd (born Hunter Benedict Shepherd, on September 20, 1968) is an American musician, two-time Grammy Award Winner best known for playing bass in the grunge band Soundgarden from 1990 until the band's 1997 break-up. A Soundgarden reunion was announced on January 1, 2010, with Shepherd rejoining the band.

Shepherd was born on an American military base in Okinawa, Japan. His family moved to Texas, then settled in Bainbridge Island, Washington, where Shepherd grew up, playing in numerous punk-rock bands with friends before he was a teenager. After graduating high school, he worked as a carpenter and a laborer. He became involved in the grunge scene when he worked as a roadie for Nirvana and played in Tic Dolly Row with Chad Channing. He was being considered for the open guitarist slot (after Jason Everman was fired) in Nirvana when he joined Soundgarden.

He first auditioned for the role of bassist in Soundgarden in 1989, immediately after Hiro Yamamoto left, but was turned down because he could not play the songs well enough. Jason Everman was hired as the band's new bassist, but for unknown reasons, was fired immediately after Soundgarden completed their promotional tour in mid-1990. Shepherd was then hired.