People Who Shaped Investing
Learn about the investors, builders, and thinkers behind some of the biggest ideas in markets, money, Bitcoin, and long-term wealth building.
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Updated 2026-09-07The investor profiles readers open most, ranked by real page views from our analytics.
Giovanni Santostasi
FeaturedPhysicist and Bitcoin Power Law researcher
Santostasi developed and popularized the Bitcoin Power Law, a long-term model that describes Bitcoin's price as a power-law function of time since launch. We use the canonical version of that model on our Bitcoin Power Law page, so his work connects directly to a tool you can explore here.
Featured investors
Ten figures whose ideas shaped how ordinary investors think about value, risk, cost, and patience. Each one links to a full profile or their sourced quotes.
Buy good businesses at fair prices and think like a long-term owner.
Clear thinking and quality businesses matter more than constant activity.
Margin of safety: buy below your careful estimate of intrinsic value.
Invest in what you understand, and do the homework first.
Low-cost, broad index funds for patient long-term investors.
Knowing where you are in a cycle matters more than forecasting it.
Diversify across economic environments rather than trying to predict them.
A fixed-supply, decentralized digital money secured by a public blockchain.
Treating Bitcoin as a long-term corporate reserve asset.
Doing reasonably well for a long time beats brief brilliance.
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Value Investing
Investors known for buying businesses below their estimate of fair worth.
Built a long public track record applying value-investing principles, focusing on quality businesses bought at sensible prices and held for the long term.
Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner, known for emphasizing rational decision-making, mental models, patience, and temperament. He passed away in 2023.
Wrote foundational books on security analysis and taught the idea of a margin of safety. He was an early teacher of Warren Buffett.
Ran a widely followed mutual fund and wrote popular books encouraging investors to understand the businesses they own.
Built one of the first genuinely global mutual funds and became known for buying in markets and countries other investors were avoiding.
Wrote Margin of Safety, a widely studied book on risk-first value investing, and is known for holding cash when he sees no attractive opportunities.
Popularised a simple, rules-based approach to value investing in The Little Book That Beats the Market, and taught investing at Columbia Business School.
Ran a small partnership for decades using plain statistical value investing, working from published financial statements rather than company meetings.
Built an investing approach openly modelled on Buffett and Munger, and writes about cloning proven strategies rather than inventing new ones.
Argued that investors should study a company’s management, research culture and competitive position, not just its financial statements.
Wrote candidly about how environment, ego and daily habits shape investment decisions, drawing on his own mistakes.
Taught value investing at Columbia Business School for many years and wrote about how competitive advantage and barriers to entry drive business value.
Argued in 1938 that a share is worth the cash it will pay its owner over time, discounted back to today, which became the basis of modern valuation.
Ran a large mutual fund for three decades on a low price-to-earnings approach, buying unfashionable companies and counting the dividend as part of the return.
Introduced the price-to-sales ratio to a wide audience, wrote a Forbes column for more than three decades, and built a large independent advisory firm.
Teaches valuation at NYU Stern and publishes his datasets, spreadsheets, lecture series and company valuations free online, assumptions included.
Wrote The Little Book of Value Investing, a plain-English introduction to buying shares for less than an estimate of their worth.
Ran a widely followed value fund and later argued that value investing should include technology businesses rather than only statistically cheap ones.
Built a concentrated long-term investment record and is known for introducing Charlie Munger to the Chinese battery maker BYD.
Pioneered growth-stock investing as a formal discipline and built one of the earliest research-driven asset managers.
Macro & Market Cycles
Thinkers focused on the economy, risk, and where we sit in a cycle.
Built one of the largest hedge funds and wrote widely about economic cycles, diversification, and balancing risk across assets.
Known for widely read investor memos on risk, market cycles, and the role of psychology in markets.
Known for a flexible, top-down macro approach and a long record of changing positions as conditions change.
Known for large currency and macro positions, and for his theory of reflexivity, which argues that investor beliefs can change the fundamentals they are judging.
Applied statistical and mathematical modelling to markets, helping establish quantitative investing as a serious discipline.
Applied probability theory first to blackjack and then to markets, and helped popularise mathematical thinking about bet sizing and risk.
Ran a long-running hedge fund and wrote about the discipline of changing your mind when the evidence changes.
Writes long-term letters on asset valuation and market bubbles, arguing that extreme prices tend to revert toward long-run averages.
Writes about rare, high-impact events and argues that many financial models understate the likelihood and cost of extreme outcomes.
Helped bring academic factor research, including value and momentum, into large-scale systematic investment products.
Built a macro trading firm and is known for emphasising defence, position sizing and cutting losing trades quickly.
Analysed subprime mortgage lending before the 2008 financial crisis and positioned against it, a story told in The Big Short.
Runs a concentrated activist fund and is known for publicly arguing detailed investment cases, both long and short.
Known for investing in distressed debt and for buying financial assets during periods of severe market stress.
Built an influential hedge fund whose analysts went on to found many other funds, a network often called the Tiger Cubs.
Built a large multi-strategy investment firm and an affiliated market-making business, both central to modern market structure.
Built a macro trading firm and spoke about imagining how a position could go wrong before entering it.
Set up a fund in 1949 that combined long and short positions, an approach that became the template for the hedge fund industry.
Economists & Academics
Researchers whose work shaped how markets, money, and behaviour are understood.
Developed the efficient market hypothesis and, with Kenneth French, the factor models that reshaped how returns are explained.
Co-developed models showing that company size and relative valuation help explain long-run differences in stock returns.
Developed the capital asset pricing model and the ratio now used to compare returns against the risk taken to earn them.
Described how specialisation, trade and self-interest coordinate economic activity, founding much of classical economics.
Argued that demand can stay depressed without intervention, reshaping how governments respond to recessions.
Argued that the money supply is central to inflation and championed a limited role for government in markets.
Argued that prices carry dispersed knowledge no central planner can gather, a core argument for decentralised markets.
Developed the debt-deflation explanation of depressions and formalised the relationship between nominal and real interest rates.
Showed mathematically how combining assets that move differently can reduce a portfolio’s risk for a given level of return.
Brought mathematical rigour to economics and wrote the textbook that taught the subject to generations of students.
Argued that growth comes from innovation that displaces existing firms and industries rather than from steady equilibrium.
Argued that long periods of stability encourage rising leverage, which itself makes the system fragile.
Raised interest rates sharply to break the high inflation of the late 1970s and early 1980s, at significant short-term economic cost.
Writes about prices, incentives and trade-offs in plain language, emphasising the unintended consequences of policy.
Catalogued centuries of financial bubbles and showed how similar the stages of speculative episodes tend to be.
Co-authored the Black and Scholes option pricing model, one of the most widely used formulas in finance.
Helped create modern option pricing theory and wrote on noise and uncertainty in financial markets.
Compiled centuries of data on debt crises and defaults with Kenneth Rogoff, showing recurring patterns across countries.
Studied sovereign debt, financial crises and their long aftermaths alongside Carmen Reinhart.
Developed the theory of comparative advantage, explaining why countries gain from trading even when one is more productive overall.
Wrote on money, credit and the business cycle, arguing that credit expansion distorts investment decisions.
Studied the Great Depression as an academic and later led the Federal Reserve through the 2008 financial crisis.
Extended option pricing theory, work that underpins how derivatives and financial risk are valued.
Business Builders
Founders and operators who built the companies investors study.
Built Amazon from an online bookseller into a retail and cloud computing company, writing annual letters on long-term thinking and customer focus.
Led Apple through the launch of the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad, shaping how consumer technology is designed and sold.
Built Microsoft into the dominant software company of the personal computer era and later focused on global health philanthropy.
Built the world’s largest retailer by combining low prices with relentless cost control and logistics investment.
Applied moving assembly lines to car manufacturing, cutting costs enough to turn the automobile into a mass-market product.
Built a dominant steel business through vertical integration and cost control, then gave away most of his fortune, largely to libraries.
Consolidated the early oil refining industry through scale, efficiency and aggressive acquisition, prompting landmark antitrust action.
Led a major bank through the 2008 crisis and writes annual letters on risk management and the health of the banking system.
Scaled Starbucks internationally by treating the store itself as the product, not only the coffee.
Built the world’s largest asset manager, much of it in index products, and writes annual letters to company boards.
Co-founded PayPal, made an early investment in Facebook, and writes about why durable businesses avoid direct competition.
Built a global cosmetics business starting from in-person demonstrations and sampling rather than mass advertising.
Led Nvidia from graphics chips into the processors and software that power much of modern artificial intelligence computing.
Scaled a single restaurant concept through franchising and standardisation, and built a business that also owned real estate.
Built an entertainment company around durable characters and stories, later extending them into television and theme parks.
Built Nike from importing running shoes into a global brand, and wrote candidly about the near-failures along the way in Shoe Dog.
Moved Netflix from mailing DVDs to streaming and then to producing original content, cannibalising its own business twice.
Refocused Microsoft on cloud computing and partnerships, reversing a long period of stalled growth.
Led companies in electric vehicles and rocketry, both industries widely considered closed to new entrants.
Built a technology investment group known for very large, concentrated bets with widely varying outcomes.
Helped build the first widely used web browser and later co-founded a venture capital firm investing in software companies.
Extended a single brand across music, airlines and other industries, and writes about entrepreneurship and risk-taking.
Indexing & Passive Investing
Advocates for low-cost, diversified investing for everyday savers.
Founded Vanguard and popularized low-cost index funds, arguing that keeping fees low is one of the most reliable ways to improve long-term returns.
Argued that share prices are difficult to predict and that most investors are better served by low-cost diversified funds.
Argued that most investors lose to markets through avoidable mistakes and costs rather than through a lack of skill.
Reshaped institutional portfolio management, while advising individual investors to use simple low-cost index funds.
Compiled long-run historical return data for shares, bonds and cash, and argued equities have rewarded patient holders over long periods.
Wrote The Four Pillars of Investing and other books explaining portfolio theory, market history and investor behaviour in plain language.
Writes about building simple portfolios from a small number of low-cost index funds, and about the cost drag of active management.
Writes about applying academic finance research to real portfolios, with an emphasis on costs, diversification and discipline.
Behavioural Finance
Researchers and writers on why investors act against their own interests.
Documented that share and house prices can move far from fundamentals, and developed a cyclically adjusted valuation measure.
With Amos Tversky, documented the systematic biases in human judgment that became the foundation of behavioural economics.
Co-developed prospect theory with Daniel Kahneman, showing that people weigh losses more heavily than equivalent gains.
Helped build behavioural economics into mainstream policy, including work on how default options shape saving behaviour.
Writes about how behaviour, patience and personal circumstances shape financial outcomes more than technical skill does.
Uses simple sketches to explain the gap between what investments return and what investors actually earn.
Writes on investor psychology and annotated Benjamin Graham’s classic for modern readers.
Writes about the adviser’s role in preventing panic selling and keeping clients invested through downturns.
Personal Finance
Writers on saving, debt, and the habits that decide financial outcomes.
Built a widely read case for saving aggressively and holding low-cost total-market index funds through market falls.
Built a large audience around a step-by-step plan for eliminating consumer debt and building an emergency fund.
Writes about automating saving and investing so good financial behaviour does not depend on willpower.
Reached a mass audience with practical guidance on saving, debt, insurance and retirement planning.
Framed spending as an exchange of life energy and helped inspire the financial independence movement.
Surveyed high-net-worth households and found that many accumulated wealth through frugality rather than high visible spending.
Taught basic saving and investing principles through parables set in ancient Babylon, one of the earliest popular personal finance books.
Popularised extreme savings rates and low-cost living as a route to financial independence, with detailed personal accounting.
Wrote for decades on saving, spending and simple investing for ordinary households.
Bitcoin & Crypto
Builders and researchers behind Bitcoin and the wider crypto space.
Published the 2008 Bitcoin white paper and released the first software, introducing a way to transfer value online without a central authority. The real identity behind the name is unknown.
Developed and popularized the Bitcoin Power Law, a long-term model that describes Bitcoin’s price as a power-law function of time.
Led a corporate strategy of holding large amounts of Bitcoin on a company balance sheet, and became a prominent public advocate for Bitcoin as a treasury asset.
Proposed and helped build Ethereum, a blockchain designed to run programmable smart contracts, broadening crypto beyond simple payments.
Worked on cryptographic systems before Bitcoin, ran early Bitcoin software, and received the first known Bitcoin transaction.
Wrote about self-executing digital agreements and proposed bit gold, a scarce digital money design that predates Bitcoin.
Invented the proof-of-work system cited in the Bitcoin white paper and later co-founded a Bitcoin infrastructure company.
Described b-money, an early proposal for anonymous distributed electronic cash that is cited in the Bitcoin white paper.
Developed blind signatures and built early electronic cash systems decades before Bitcoin, establishing digital privacy research.
Built payment infrastructure at Block and has publicly funded Bitcoin development and open protocol work.
Built one of the first regulated consumer exchanges for crypto assets, making buying and holding them accessible to the public.
Explains Bitcoin’s technical design to general and developer audiences through books and talks, without promoting price predictions.
Took over day-to-day stewardship of the main Bitcoin codebase after Satoshi Nakamoto stopped participating publicly.
Growth & Innovation
Investors focused on long-horizon growth, innovation, and speculation.
Founded ARK Invest and is known for high-conviction, thematic investing in disruptive technology. The concentrated approach has produced large swings in both directions.
Built an open platform for market conversation and introduced the cashtag, the dollar-sign ticker convention now used across social networks.
Described a rules-based method of buying shares breaking into new price ranges and cutting losses at preset levels.
Studied the characteristics of historically strong-performing shares and built a screening framework around earnings growth and price behaviour.
Became famous for large speculative positions and repeated cycles of fortune and ruin, later treated as a cautionary study in risk.
Made his fortune in markets and later advised US presidents, writing on speculation and the limits of forecasting.
Runs long-horizon growth funds and is known for holding positions for many years and backing founder-led companies.
Built a large technology-focused investment firm covering both public and private companies.
Built on these profiles
What these investors believed, what they actually did with the money, and how they disagreed with each other.
Related learning
The ideas these people are known for, explained in plain English, plus the tools to put them into practice.
Educational content only. These profiles are brief, neutral summaries compiled for learning. They are not endorsements, not investment advice, and not a claim that any person is always right. Mentioning someone here does not imply they are affiliated with Money Masters Media.