Benedetto "Bettino" Craxi (pronounced [betˈtiːno ˈkraksi]) (24 February 1934 – 19 January 2000) was an Italian politician, head of the Italian Socialist Party from 1976 to 1993, the first socialist President of the Council of Ministers of Italy from 1983 to 1987.

Craxi led the 2nd longest-lived government of Italy during the republican era (after the 2nd Silvio Berlusconi cabinet), and had strong influence in Italian politics throughout the eighties; for some time, he was a close ally of two key figures of Christian Democracy, Giulio Andreotti and Arnaldo Forlani, in a loose cross-party alliance often dubbed CAF (from the first letter of the surname Craxi-Andreotti-Forlani). Craxi had a firm grasp on a party previously troubled by factionalism, and tried to distance it from the communists and to bring it closer to Christian Democrats and other parties; his objective was to create an Italian version of European reformist socialist parties, like the German SPD or the French Socialist Party. The Italian Socialist Party reached its post-war apex when it increased its share of votes in the general election of 1987. However, the Italian Socialist Party never outgrew the much larger Italian Communist Party, whose highly charismatic leader, Enrico Berlinguer, was a fierce adversary of Craxi's policies throughout the years.

George Soros ( /ˈsɔroʊs/ or /ˈsɔrəs/;Hungarian: Soros György; Hungarian: [ˈʃoroʃ]; born August 12, 1930, as Schwartz György) is a Hungarian-American business magnate,investor, and philanthropist. He is the chairman of Soros Fund Management. Soros supports progressive-liberal causes. He is known as "The Man Who Broke the Bank of England" because of his US$1 billion in investment profits during the 1992 Black Wednesday UK currency crisis.

Between 1979 and 2011, Soros gave away over $8 billion to human rights, public health, and education causes. He played a significant role in the peaceful transition from communism to capitalism in Hungary (1984–89), and provided Europe's largest higher education endowment to Central European University in Budapest. Soros is also the chairman of the Open Society Institute.

Soros was born in Budapest, Hungary to a well-to-do, nonobservant Jewish family. His mother Elizabeth (also known as Erzebet), whom Tivadar married in 1924, came from a family that owned a thriving silk shop. His father Tivadar (also known as Teodoro) was a lawyer and had been a prisoner of war during and after World War I until he escaped from Russia and rejoined his family in Budapest. Tivadar was an Esperantist writer and taught George to speak Esperanto from birth. Soros later said that he grew up in a Jewish home and that his parents were cautious with their religious roots. Soros was thirteen years old in March 1944 when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary. Soros took a job with the Jewish Council, which had been established during the Nazi occupation of Hungary. Soros later described this time to writer Michael Lewis: