In his book "Telecosm," author George Gilder called this financial titan "the key source of organizational changes that have impelled economic growth over the last 20 years."

However, this figure's critics label him as the epitome of greed and all that was wrong in America during the 1970s and '80s. He earned more than a billion dollars over a four-year period as an employee of Drexel Burnham Lambert in the late 1980s -- at the time, the record for employee compensation in the United States.