Category
People
Individuals with a documented public record — educators, founders, researchers and public officials.
- Aaron Bell
Co-founder and first CEO of AdRoll, the San Francisco retargeting company he founded in 2007 with Adam Berke, later moving to chief product officer in 2017.
- Minnie F. Abrams
An American Methodist missionary, evangelist and revivalist in India whose 1906 book on baptism in the Holy Spirit is credited with helping spark the Pentecostal movement in Chile.
- Adam Berke
Co-founder and president of AdRoll, where he led the pivot to retargeting after the 2008 crash, then co-founded WorkPatterns after a decade at the company.
- Adam Rehmeier: the indie filmmaker behind The Bunny Game and Dinner in America
American writer-director Adam Rehmeier went from documentary camera operator to Sundance's U.S. Dramatic Competition with Dinner in America (2020) after the banned horror debut The Bunny Game (2011); his 2024 film Snack Shack drew on his Nebraska childhood.
- Amy Adams
Six-time Oscar-nominated actress known for Junebug, Enchanted, American Hustle and Arrival; in 2026 she returned to television with Apple TV's Cape Fear and revealed on a podcast that she once helped save a stabbing victim's life in Santa Monica.
- Eric Adams
New York City's 111th mayor (2022-2025) — the former NYPD captain who entered as a reformer, declared himself the "future of the Democratic Party," was indicted on federal bribery charges, had his case dismissed at Emil Bove's urging, and left office endorsing Andrew Cuomo over Zohran Mamdani.
- Nagarjuna Akkineni
Telugu-cinema actor who launched the Season 2 of the animated series Krish, Trish and Baltiboy: Bharat Hain Hum at IFFI Goa in 2024; a career of over four decades runs from Vikram (1986) to Kuberaa (2025), alongside co-ownership of Hyderabad's Annapurna Studios.
- Abdulrahman Al Awar
UAE Minister of Human Resources and Emiratisation since 2021 and Acting Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research since 2024, a former oil-and-gas geoscientist and federal HR official who has overseen the country's mandatory private-sector Emiratisation targets.
- Yaqoub Al-Rifai
Kuwaiti finance minister since February 2026 with a three-decade career in banking education and vocational training, who unveiled a deficit-heavy FY2026-27 budget, pushed government sukuk legislation, and signed a financial-cooperation MoU with Qatar.
- Alex Morgan
American former soccer striker who won World Cups in 2015 and 2019, scored 123 goals in 224 USWNT appearances, and later backed Alt's $75 million Series B and bought a minority stake in San Diego Wave FC.
- Alexis Ohanian
Reddit co-founder who left the company's board in 2020, built the venture firm Initialized Capital, then founded Seven Seven Six, led Alt's Series A, and became a leading investor in women's sports.
- Amir Ali
U.S. district judge for the District of Columbia and former MacArthur Justice Center appellate litigator; in 2025 he ordered payment of nearly $2 billion in frozen foreign-aid funds, and in September 2026 he blocked the administration from tying counterterrorism grants to election changes.
- Alison Hastings: the press editor turned BBFC vice-president
British media figure: BBFC vice-president from 2008; former Newcastle Chronicle editor (1996–2002) and founding BBC Trust trustee; sat on the Presidential Team that refused The Bunny Game a certificate in 2011.
- Allan Evans
CEO and director of Unusual Machines (NYSE American: UMAC), the Florida drone components company that appointed Donald Trump Jr. to its advisory board in November 2024; a Michigan PhD who co-founded the Avegant AR headset company and previously ran Fat Shark and Red Cat's operations.
- Jack Altman
American technology entrepreneur and investor who co-founded and led the HR software company Lattice, later founded the venture firm Alt Capital, and became a general partner at Benchmark in 2026.
- Sam Altman
American technology entrepreneur and investor, chief executive of OpenAI since 2019, who co-founded Loopt, led Y Combinator, and was briefly removed and then reinstated as OpenAI's CEO in November 2023.
- Alvin Bragg
Manhattan DA since 2022, the first Black prosecutor to hold the office, convicted a former president on 34 felonies, and in September 2026 ran the largest known seizure of AI-deepfake porn sites.
- Aman Sanger
Co-founder and chief operating officer of Anysphere, the company behind the Cursor AI code editor, who built its distribution and community operation after a computer-science start at MIT.
- Christiane Amanpour
CNN's chief international anchor and war correspondent since 1983; the 2026 AUB honorary doctorate recipient whose one un-landed interview — Vladimir Putin — drew a famous 2023 "he may be afraid of her" line.
- Daniela Amodei
Co-founder and president of Anthropic, who chairs its board and runs the company's business side; a former OpenAI safety executive who built one of the world's most valuable AI companies on an English literature degree.
- Dario Amodei
Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; as OpenAI's VP of Research he led GPT-2 and GPT-3. Author of "Machines of Loving Grace," co-inventor of RLHF, and a prominent voice on AI safety and frontier-model governance.
- Anand Sharma: commerce minister, Rajya Sabha deputy leader, and Congress dissenter
Anand Sharma, a four-time Rajya Sabha MP from Himachal Pradesh, was Union commerce minister under Manmohan Singh, deputy leader of the Congress in the Rajya Sabha until 2022, and a G-23 dissenter who later broke with the party over a caste census.
- Anthony Eisen
Australian fintech entrepreneur who co-founded Afterpay with Nick Molnar in 2014, ran it as co-CEO through its $29 billion sale to Block, and now sits on Block's board while leading refunds startup Reshop.
- Shieny Aprilia
Indonesian entrepreneur and co-founder of the Bandung video game developer Agate who was promoted from chief operating officer to chief executive in June 2022, succeeding Arief Widhiyasa.
- Mohit Aron
Indian-American computer scientist and entrepreneur who worked on Google's file system, co-founded Nutanix, and founded the data management company Cohesity, where he served as chief executive until 2022.
- Arvid Lunnemark
Swedish mathematician and programmer who co-founded Anysphere, the company behind the Cursor AI code editor, and left in October 2025 to found the AI-safety venture Integrous Research.
- Colonel John Ashley
Colonel John Ashley (1709–1802) chaired the committee that drafted the 1773 Sheffield Resolves and was Sheffield's largest enslaver; Elizabeth Freeman and Brom sued him for their freedom in 1781 and won.
- Lloyd Austin
The 28th U.S. secretary of defense (2021–2025) and the first African American to hold the office — a retired four-star general whose 41-year Army career ran through the Iraq invasion to CENTCOM, and whose tenure was shaped by the Afghanistan withdrawal, Ukraine aid and a health-secrecy crisis.
- B. K. Hariprasad: Congress organisation man, four-time Rajya Sabha MP, and KPCC president
B. K. Hariprasad is a Congress organisation leader from Bengaluru: a four-time Rajya Sabha MP, the opposition's 2018 Deputy Chairman candidate, and president of the Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee since June 2026.
- Ankit Baiyanpuria
Indian wrestler-turned-fitness-influencer from Haryana whose 2023 documentation of the 75 Hard Challenge made him a desi-workout star; won Best Health and Fitness Creator at the 2024 National Creators Award and made a 2026 grappling debut against UFC contender Arman Tsarukyan.
- Nandita Bakhshi
An American banking executive who served as CEO of Bank of the West from 2016 to 2023, known for restricting the bank's financing of activities deemed harmful to the environment, and later a board member at BMO, Grameen America, Beyond Meat and Quaker Houghton.
- Édouard Balladur
Prime Minister of France from 1993 to 1995 under Socialist President François Mitterrand, who privatized major state companies, later stood trial in the "Karachi affair" arms-kickback case, and died on 31 August 2026 at age 97.
- Sam Bankman-Fried
FTX founder whose half-billion-dollar bet on Anthropic bought a 13.56% stake with no board seat, later liquidated by his bankruptcy estate for ~$1.3B to repay creditors. Convicted in 2023 of fraud and conspiracy; sentenced in March 2024 to 25 years and an $11B forfeiture.
- Michael F. Barry
A longtime Quaker Chemical Corporation executive who served as CEO from 2008 and chairman from 2009, led the 2019 merger that created Quaker Houghton, retired as chairman in 2026, and later joined FMC Corporation's board of directors.
- Jim Baum
American technology executive who led Netezza as president and CEO through its 2010 acquisition by IBM, later ran the warehouse-robotics startup CasePick Systems, and has since served on multiple corporate boards.
- Nick Bax
Blockchain researcher who helped trace a wave of crypto heists to cracked LastPass vaults and debunked a watchdog claim linking North Korea's Lazarus Group to World Liberty Financial token sales as a memecoin-contract false positive.
- Beau Bayh
A seventh-generation Hoosier, Marine Corps veteran and attorney who in 2025 became the fourth generation of his family to seek statewide office, winning the 2026 Democratic nomination for Indiana Secretary of State and now facing Republican Max Engling in the November general election.
- Ben Ray Luján
Democratic U.S. Senator from New Mexico since 2021; former House Assistant Speaker and DCCC chair who now leads the Senate push to permanently protect the Greater Chaco region.
- Michael J. Berry II
Princeton neuroscientist who heads the Berry Lab, studying how retinal neurons carry out computations; the ex-physicist whose lab trained Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, whom Berry called his most talented graduate student.
- Scott Bessent
79th U.S. Treasury Secretary and former hedge fund manager (Soros Fund Management, Key Square Capital Management); the June 2026 call from Amazon's CEO about a jailbroken AI model, his 2025–26 double-hat as acting IRS commissioner, and the September 2026 extension of the U.S.–China trade truce.
- Bettina Anderson
Palm Beach philanthropist and model — co-founder of The Paradise Fund (2005), face of Hamilton Jewelers, Columbia art-history graduate — who married Donald Trump Jr. in May 2026 after an engagement announced in December 2025.
- Rochelle Bilal
The first woman and first Black woman elected Sheriff of Philadelphia, a former police officer whose tenure has drawn sustained Inquirer investigative coverage, including a 2024 finding that her campaign used AI to fabricate news headlines.
- Bill Prady
Bill Prady is the television writer and producer who co-created The Big Bang Theory, ran for California governor in the 2003 recall, and received a NASA medal.
- Lauren Bis
White House spokeswoman (by September 2026) who rose from communications director at an election-integrity nonprofit to DHS public affairs chief, and became the administration's on-the-record voice rebutting Epstein-files claims and pushing noncitizen-voting enforcement.
- Leon Black
Billionaire co-founder of Apollo Global Management who stepped down as CEO in 2021 over his financial ties to Jeffrey Epstein. In September 2026 the full House of Representatives voted unanimously to hold him in contempt of Congress.
- Tony Blair
Former UK prime minister (1997–2007); in 2026 a founding Executive Board member of the Board of Peace, meeting a Hamas delegation in Cairo in August over the Gaza roadmap.
- Bruce Blakeman
Nassau County Executive and 2026 Republican gubernatorial candidate whose August 2026 event with Attorney General Todd Blanche drew Hatch Act complaints.
- Todd Blanche
Former personal criminal-defense lawyer of Donald Trump who became U.S. attorney general in August 2026 after serving as deputy and acting AG; his tenure is marked by the September 2026 press-access fight and criticism over his appearances at GOP political events.
- Pam Bondi
Florida's first female attorney general (2011–2019) and the 87th U.S. attorney general, fired by Donald Trump on April 2, 2026 over the Epstein files. Weeks later she disclosed thyroid cancer and returned to the White House orbit on an AI advisory panel.
- Boris Epshteyn
Donald Trump's senior personal counsel — a felony defendant in Arizona's fake-electors case until charges were dropped in June 2026 — who by 2026 had become the president's Oval Office "fixer" and the negotiator of a $1.776 billion anti-weaponization settlement.
- Emil Bove
Third Circuit judge and former Trump defense lawyer whose Southern District prosecutor years — an internal inquiry, a planned demotion, the collapsed Sadr case — foreshadowed his stormy 50-49 confirmation and his August 2026 swearing-in of Todd Blanche as attorney general.
- John Branca
Entertainment attorney and sole executor of the Michael Jackson estate; brokered the 1985 $47.5M Beatles-catalog deal and led its $500M-debt turnaround.
- Alex Breingan
New Zealand television producer facing 33 fraud and forgery charges from the Serious Fraud Office over the collapse of his Stripe Media/Stripe Studios production companies, which owed creditors more than $20 million.
- Brett McGurk
Brett McGurk is an American diplomat who served as Biden's NSC coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, led the anti-ISIS coalition under Obama and Trump, and closed the January 2025 Gaza ceasefire alongside his own designated successor.
- Greg Brockman
American computer scientist and entrepreneur, co-founder and president of OpenAI, who was previously chief technology officer at Stripe, resigned from OpenAI's board in November 2023 during Sam Altman's brief ouster, and took a sabbatical from August to November 2024.
- Brom of Sheffield
Brom was an enslaved man in Col. John Ashley's Sheffield household and the named first plaintiff in the 1781 freedom suit Brom and Bett v. Ashley, which helped end slavery in Massachusetts. His life after winning his freedom is unrecorded.
- Gen. Charles "CQ" Brown Jr.
Fighter pilot and 21st chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the first Black chief of a U.S. military service, he was fired by Trump 16 months into his term in February 2025 after a career that began with a burning F-16 over the Everglades.
- Tom Brown
Anthropic co-founder and its Chief Compute Officer; first author of the 2020 paper that introduced GPT-3. A former B-minus linear algebra student who self-studied his way into OpenAI's first 20 employees and now runs compute strategy for the AI build-out he calls bigger than the railroads.
- Bruce Chizen
Adobe CEO from 2000 to 2007 who bought Macromedia for Flash, expanded Adobe beyond design tools, and handed the company to Shantanu Narayen.
- Brett Butler
Stand-up comedian who never wanted a sitcom and became one anyway: the star of ABC's Grace Under Fire (1993–1998), a top-five hit undone by her painkiller addiction, later a working character actress and psychic medium.
- Candace Parker
American basketball player who won three WNBA championships with three different teams, two league MVP awards and two Olympic gold medals, then became president of adidas Women's Basketball and an investor in the alternative-asset platform Alt.
- Mariah Carey
Pop singer-songwriter whose December 2025 record of 20 weeks at No. 1 for "All I Want for Christmas Is You," MusiCares Person of the Year honor, and Milano Cortina Olympics opening-ceremony slot cap a resurgence built on her first studio album in seven years.
- Tucker Carlson
American conservative commentator Tucker Carlson hosted Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight (2016–2023) before an abrupt exit. He later built an independent media platform, interviewed Vladimir Putin in 2024, and broke with Trump over the 2026 Iran war, calling for his removal under the 25th Amendment.
- Caroline Ciccone
Caroline Ciccone is president of Accountable.US, a progressive watchdog nonprofit. A strategic communications veteran of Democratic politics and the Biden-Harris administration, she signed the 2024 IRS complaint against Epoch-affiliated nonprofits and filed against Trump-linked crypto ventures.
- Cade Carradine
American actor from the Carradine acting family — son of Keith Carradine — who played the younger "Boxer Ray" opposite his own father in Alan Rudolph's Ray Meets Helen (2017) and took a supporting role in Turkey's Oscar-nominated Ayla: The Daughter of War (2017).
- E. Jean Carroll
The advice columnist whose 'Ask E. Jean' ran in Elle from 1993 to 2019, who in her mid-70s brought the only successful sexual-assault civil case against Donald Trump — and whose verdicts have survived every appeal through the Supreme Court.
- Maurizio Cattelan
Italian conceptual artist (b. 1960) whose satirical installations — the duct-taped banana Comedian ($6.2M at Sotheby's in 2024) and the solid-gold toilet America ($12.1M in 2025) — made him contemporary art's most famous provocateur.
- Chad Clinton Freeman: the man behind PollyGrind
Founder and director of the Las Vegas underground genre-film festival PollyGrind (est. 2010); on record calling The Bunny Game "the epitome of what PollyGrind is about" after its 2011 jury sweep.
- Evans Chan
Hong Kong-born, New York-based filmmaker, critic, playwright and librettist whose documentary-fiction hybrids chronicle Hong Kong's handover, diaspora and protest history; founder of Riverdrive Productions and librettist of the opera Datong: The Chinese Utopia.
- Evan Chandler: Dentist, Screenwriter, Accuser
Beverly Hills dentist and Robin Hood: Men in Tights co-writer who made the 1993 sexual-abuse accusation against Michael Jackson; died in 2009.
- Charles Geschke
Adobe co-founder who built PostScript at Xerox PARC with John Warnock, survived a 1992 kidnapping, and led Adobe as president and co-chairman until 2017.
- Charles Hearn
Co-founder and chief technology officer of Alloy, the New York identity-decisioning company, and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honouree in enterprise technology for building its fraud and risk platform.
- Children of Mike Johnson
The four children of House Speaker Mike Johnson — Hannah, Abigail, Jack and Will — and Michael, whom he and his wife Kelly took in as newlyweds without a formal adoption.
- Denny Chin
Senior Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; the first Asian American appointed a federal district judge outside the Ninth Circuit, who sentenced Bernard Madoff to 150 years and in 2026 co-published a casebook on Asian Americans and the law.
- Pushpindar Singh Chopra
Indian aviation historian and journalist (1943-2021) who founded Vayu Aerospace & Defence Review in 1974 and wrote the three-volume Himalayan Eagles history of the Indian Air Force. He debunked a 1985 PAF claim, then wrote Fiza'Ya on the PAF — and was mourned by the PAF chief.
- Chris Whipple
Vanity Fair contributing writer whose on-the-record White House interviews produced the Susie Wiles bombshells and Tucker Carlson's claim that Trump ordered the Epstein files cover-up; former 60 Minutes producer and author of The Gatekeepers.
- Cipto Adiguno
Indonesian game-industry executive who co-founded Bandung studio Ekuator Games, became a Vice President at its acquirer Agate, chaired the Indonesian Game Association from 2019 to 2024, and co-founded the publishing accelerator Indiesche Partners in 2025.
- Thomas Clare
The Alexandria defamation lawyer whose boutique, Clare Locke, extracted a record $787.5 million from Fox News on behalf of Dominion — and who now represents France's first couple against Candace Owens, in a career that has put him on both sides of the media war.
- Hillary Clinton
Former U.S. secretary of state, senator from New York, and the first woman to top a major party's presidential ticket. This profile leads with her 2026 House deposition on Jeffrey Epstein, her Columbia teaching role, and the 2016 Trump Tower meeting.
- Glenn Close
Glenn Close is an American stage and screen actress with three Tony Awards, three Emmy Awards and three Golden Globes — and eight Oscar nominations without a win. She co-founded the mental-health nonprofit Bring Change to Mind in 2010 after her sister's bipolar diagnosis.
- Michael Cohen
Trump's former fixer and personal attorney who became the prosecution's star witness in the 2024 New York hush-money trial, then reconciled with Trump in 2026 and was floated for a presidential pardon.
- Kaitlan Collins
CNN's chief White House correspondent and weeknight 9 p.m. "The Source" anchor, whose adversarial relationship with Donald Trump — a 2018 event ban, live-TV clashes, and a September 2026 credential fight settled by a federal judge — made her a defining journalist of the second Trump presidency.
- Frederic René Coudert
American lawyer at Coudert Brothers who served as a special assistant U.S. Attorney General and legal adviser to the British Embassy during World War I, and was a Columbia University trustee for over four decades.
- James Cuff
High-performance-computing research technologist who built Harvard's research-computing organization and its North East Storage Exchange before moving on to lead scientific-computing strategy at composable-computing startup GigaIO.
- Andrew Cuomo
Former three-term governor of New York (2011–2021) who resigned amid a sexual-harassment investigation, then lost twice to Zohran Mamdani in the 2025 NYC mayoral race — despite real-estate millions and a late Trump nudge.
- Curtis Sliwa
Founder of the Guardian Angels and two-time Republican mayoral nominee whose red-beret iconography collapsed in 2025 with a live on-air WABC resignation — he finished with 7% of the vote.
- Dang Thanh Tam
Vietnamese industrialist and chairman of Kinh Bac City Development Holding Corporation, whose company is developing the Trump Organization's licensed golf and residential project in Hung Yen province.
- Dang Thi Hoang Yen
Vietnamese businesswoman who founded Tan Tao Group, was removed as a National Assembly delegate in 2012 amid disputed circumstances, and later filed billion-dollar international arbitration claims against Vietnam.
- Stormy Daniels
Adult-film actor and director whose hush-money case made Trump the first former president convicted of felonies; the 2024 Peacock documentary Stormy follows her life through threats, debt, and the fight to tell her story.
- David Cooke: the BBFC director who refused The Bunny Game
Director of the British Board of Film Classification 2004–2016; career civil servant who jointly took the 2011 decision refusing The Bunny Game a UK certificate.
- David Gregory: the Severin Films co-founder behind the cult-restoration label
British-born filmmaker and co-founder/CEO of Severin Films (2006); previously produced DVD extras for Anchor Bay and Blue Underground; co-founded Autonomy Pictures in 2012.
- David Sacks
South African-born PayPal veteran, Yammer founder, and Craft Ventures co-founder who served as the White House's first AI and crypto czar (Dec 2024–Mar 2026), then shifted to co-chairing the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
- Derek Curl: the TLA Releasing producer who launched Autonomy Pictures
Genre-film producer (The Innkeepers, Stake Land) who took control of TLA Releasing and co-founded Autonomy Pictures, launching it with The Bunny Game's 2012 US release.
- Lynn Devin
American adoption agency operator who ran Seattle International Adoptions with her sister Lauryn Galindo and pleaded guilty in 2003 to conspiracy to commit visa fraud and money laundering over Cambodian adoptions.
- Cameron Diaz
Actress who co-starred with Nicki Minaj in the rapper's live-action debut The Other Woman, then retired in 2014, built the organic wine brand Avaline, and returned in Netflix's Back in Action (2025).
- Süleyman Dilbirliği
Turkish Army sergeant of the Korean War who rescued the orphaned Korean girl Kim Eunja in 1950, named her Ayla, and cared for her for a year — once trying to smuggle her home in a box — before being reunited with her in 2010 after sixty years. Their story became the film Ayla: The Daughter of War.
- Diljit Dosanjh
Punjabi singer-actor who became the first Punjabi artist to headline London's Wembley Stadium in September 2026, capping a run of global firsts from Coachella 2023 to The Tonight Show.
- Abhijeet Dipke
An Indian political-communications strategist who founded the satirical "Cockroach Janta Party" in May 2026 after India's Chief Justice referred to unemployed youth as cockroaches, drawing tens of thousands of sign-ups and international press coverage.
- James Dobson
Child psychologist who founded Focus on the Family in 1977, co-founded the Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom, and became a leading voice of the American religious right; died August 21, 2025, aged 89.
- Colman Domingo
Emmy-winning actor and playwright; two-time Oscar nominee for Rustin and Sing Sing, who plays Joe Jackson in Fuqua's 2026 biopic Michael.
- Gen. Christopher Donahue
Army general and former Delta Force commander who was the last U.S. soldier to leave Afghanistan; after 18 months commanding U.S. Army Europe and Africa he was forced out in mid-2026 under Defense Secretary Hegseth.
- Bill Doogue
Australian criminal defence lawyer and founding director of Doogue + George, a Melbourne firm, who has represented clients in a number of high-profile Victorian criminal cases.
- Doug Burgum
55th US Secretary of the Interior (since 2025) and former two-term Governor of North Dakota, who built Great Plains Software, sold it to Microsoft for $1.1 billion, and now leads the Trump administration's energy-dominance agenda on federal lands.
- Dan Driscoll
26th Secretary of the Army (February 2025 – August 2026), an Iraq veteran and Yale Law classmate of JD Vance who resigned after clashes with Pete Hegseth over personnel purges and the rollback of his drone modernization drive.
- Ignacio Dülger
Chilean lawyer and Republican Party politician, regional councilor (CORE) for the Santiago Metropolitan Region; a 2026 "Second Floor" presidential adviser amid dual-pay controversy who left to head Acción Republicana and drove the failed Tricel bid against Governor Claudio Orrego.
- Donald J. Edwards
Chicago private-equity investor who served as President and CEO of Liberté Investors Inc. (July 2002–April 2004), leading its USAuto Holdings acquisition. He founded Flexpoint Ford in 2004 and chaired the University of Illinois Board of Trustees (2017–2025).
- Elizabeth Warren
Democratic U.S. Senator from Massachusetts since 2013 and ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee; former Harvard bankruptcy law professor who championed the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
- Adrienne Elrod
Democratic strategist who held senior communications roles on all three campaigns that ran against Donald Trump (2016, 2020, 2024), ran talent for the Biden inauguration, and in March 2025 co-founded the Elrod Gifford Group with Rufus Gifford.
- Elena Engel
Bay Area project manager for library renovation and construction projects, and mother of Anthropic co-founders Dario and Daniela Amodei. She is not the entertainment-industry producer of the same name.
- Effie Epstein
Managing partner of Sound Ventures, the Los Angeles venture capital firm founded by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary. Hired in 2017 after strategy leadership at Marsh, iHeartMedia and CLEAR, she runs the firm's investing, strategy and day-to-day management, and stayed on through Kutcher's 2026 exit.
- Jeffrey Epstein
Financier and convicted sex offender whose 2008 plea deal and 2019 jail death triggered the Epstein Files Transparency Act. His own jail writings, unsealed by the New York Times in June 2026, deny he was ever a hedge fund manager and call his federal case "NOT NEW."
- Eron (footballer, born 1998)
Eronildo dos Santos Rocha (born 16 July 1998), known as Eron, is a Brazilian striker: 2023 Série D top scorer with Caxias (14 goals, a single-season record), then Vegalta Sendai in Japan's J2 League in 2024 and Santa Cruz FC's 2026 Copa do Brasil squad.
- Ethel Percy Andrus
Retired educator who founded AARP in 1958 after building the National Retired Teachers Association into the first group health insurance plan for retirees over 65; California's first woman high school principal and a 1993 National Women's Hall of Fame inductee.
- Fats Domino
New Orleans pianist Antoine "Fats" Domino (1928–2017), a founding figure of rock 'n' roll whose boogie-woogie sound powered hits like "Blueberry Hill" and "Ain't That a Shame." He toured Jim Crow America, lived his whole life in the Lower Ninth Ward, and joined the Rock Hall's first class in 1986.
- Frank Fertitta
Casino billionaire Frank Fertitta III chairs Red Rock Resorts. He bought the UFC for $2 million in 2001 and sold it for $4 billion in 2016; in September 2026 he gifted $70 million in stock to 10,000 employees.
- Lorenzo Fertitta
Casino heir and former UFC co-owner. Lorenzo Fertitta sat on the Nevada athletic commission during the Tyson-Holyfield ear-bite, bought the UFC for $2 million in 2001, sold it for about $4 billion in 2016, and now chairs Fertitta Capital while serving as vice chairman of Red Rock Resorts.
- Joseph Fessio
American Jesuit priest who co-founded Ignatius Press in 1978, became a primary English-language editor of Pope Benedict XVI's works, and was removed from three institutions he helped build amid recurring disputes with administrators.
- Florin Șoavă
Romanian former international defender (22 caps, 2000–2006) turned manager. After a decade away from senior coaching, he returned in 2025 as the first head coach of CS Drobeta-Turnu Severin, winning the Liga IV Mehedinți title and promotion to Liga III in the club's debut season.
- Marc Fogel
Pennsylvania history teacher whose August 2021 arrest in Russia for 17 grams of prescribed marijuana, 14-year sentence, and February 2025 release on Steve Witkoff's private plane made him the most visible of the Americans left out of the August 2024 prisoner swap.
- Adam Fogelson
Chair of Lionsgate's Motion Picture Group and former Universal Pictures chairman; on the August 2026 earnings call he laid out the Michael sequel plan.
- Gerald J. Ford
Dallas banker and investor (born 1944) who built a fortune buying troubled banks, culminating in the $6 billion sale of Golden State Bancorp, and chaired [Liberté Investors](/organizations/liberte-investors/) through its 2004 transformation into First Acceptance Corporation.
- Foster Friess
Wyoming investor who built Friess Associates and the Brandywine Funds into a $17 billion growth-stock firm, gave away more than $500 million, and bankrolled The Daily Caller's launch with $3 million.
- Knut Frängsmyr
A Swedish former Klarna executive appointed CEO of Avanza in 2023 who left the role after roughly one week when the bank withdrew its approval of him following a financial regulator's disclosure about fines tied to renovation work on his home.
- Aretha Franklin
The "Queen of Soul" whose 73 Billboard Hot 100 entries stood as the female record for nearly 40 years until Nicki Minaj passed it in 2017 — 18 Grammys, first woman in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and a 2019 posthumous Pulitzer citation.
- Rick Frazier
Founding member of the Front Row Joes who says he attended more than 100 Donald Trump rallies before breaking with him in a September 2026 Politico Playbook report over the Epstein files and the Iran war.
- Elizabeth Freeman
Enslaved woman in Sheffield, Massachusetts, who sued for her freedom in 1781 and won, helping end slavery as a legal practice in the state.
- Antoine Fuqua
Director of Training Day and the Equalizer trilogy whose 2026 Michael Jackson biopic Michael became the first biopic to cross $1 billion worldwide.
- Arthur Gaeth
An American who led the first Latter-day Saint mission in a Slavic country as a 24-year-old in 1929, then reported live from Nuremberg in 1946 on the execution of convicted Nazi war criminals, a broadcast held by Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
- Lauryn Galindo
American adoption facilitator who arranged roughly 700-800 Cambodian adoptions from 1990-2001, including actress Angelina Jolie's adoption of her son Maddox, before pleading guilty in 2004 to visa fraud and money laundering conspiracy.
- Gilberto Garza Jr.
Gilberto Garza Jr. is an Idaho man known as the petitioner in Garza v. Idaho (2019), the Supreme Court case holding that the Flores-Ortega presumption of prejudice for ineffective counsel applies even when a defendant signed an appeal waiver.
- Gavin Newsom
California's 40th governor since 2019; the wine-and-hospitality businessman whose Getty-family ties, 2004 same-sex marriage directive, and 2025 Prop 50 redistricting fight defined his political rise.
- Joe Gebbia
Airbnb co-founder whose first U.S. government project was digitizing the paper-based federal retirement system; in August 2025 he became the first U.S. Chief Design Officer, leading the "America by Design" initiative.
- Gen. Randy George
41st chief of staff of the U.S. Army (2023-2026), fired by Pete Hegseth in April 2026 days after being told to drop a probe into Apache helicopters that buzzed Kid Rock's Tennessee home.
- Gerard Lemos: the social policy chair who became Baron Lemos
British social policy researcher, author and chair of UK public bodies (English Heritage, NS&I, HMPPS); BBFC vice-president from 2008; introduced to the House of Lords as Baron Lemos in February 2025.
- Ghulam Nabi Azad: Congress loyalist, Jammu and Kashmir chief minister, and founder of the DPAP
Ghulam Nabi Azad spent five decades in the Congress, serving as Jammu and Kashmir chief minister, Union health minister and Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, before quitting in 2022 to found the Democratic Progressive Azad Party.
- Giannis Antetokounmpo
Greek basketball star who spent 13 seasons with the Milwaukee Bucks, winning two MVP awards and the 2021 NBA championship, before a 2026 trade to the Miami Heat; he also backed trading-card platform Alt's $75 million Series B.
- Jean-Louis Gouraud
French journalist, editor and writer specialising in the history and culture of the horse; rode from Paris to Moscow in 1990 and wrote Karabakh Horses.
- Paul Graham
American computer scientist, essayist and investor who co-founded the web-store company Viaweb (sold to Yahoo in 1998) and, in 2005, co-founded the startup accelerator Y Combinator, which he led as president until 2014.
- Ariana Grande
Pop singer and three-time Grammy winner whose career runs from Nickelodeon to Wicked's Glinda; in 2023 she bought her r.e.m. beauty brand's assets out of bankruptcy court for about $15 million, and in 2026 Wicked: For Good was shut out of the Oscars after the first film earned 10 nominations.
- Al Green
Houston's 22-year Democratic congressman who made impeachment his signature fight — censured in 2025, ejected from the 2026 State of the Union, and forcing an eighth impeachment vote months after losing his seat to redistricting.
- Marjorie Taylor Greene
Republican former U.S. Representative for Georgia's 14th district, 2021–2026: a Trump ally who served as impeachment manager in the Mayorkas case, failed to oust Speaker Mike Johnson, and resigned after Trump withdrew his endorsement.
- Stephanie Grisham
One of Trump's longest-serving aides and his third press secretary, who held no televised briefings, quit as Melania Trump's chief of staff on January 6, 2021, then wrote the memoir I'll Take Your Questions Now portraying Jared Kushner as the White House's "real" chief of staff.
- Guy Verhofstadt
Belgian liberal politician: prime minister of Belgium from 1999 to 2008, the European Parliament's Brexit coordinator, and later president of the European Movement International.
- Jen Guyton
American-German conservation ecologist and wildlife photographer whose doctoral fieldwork in Mozambique and Namibia produced a Nature paper on vegetation patterns, a Wildlife Photographer of the Year award, and a national conservation-science honor.
- İsmail Hacıoğlu
Turkish actor who played the young Süleyman Dilbirliği in the Oscar-submitted Ayla (2017), then sang every song himself as Cem Karaca in Cem Karaca'nın Gözyaşları (2024) — a biopic pulled from theaters by court order weeks after release.
- Sean Hannity
Conservative broadcaster hosting Hannity on Fox News and The Sean Hannity Show on radio; testified under oath in 2022 that he did not believe 2020 election-fraud claims, was tied by The Guardian to a 870-home property empire, and announced his Florida move and Ainsley Earhardt engagement.
- Harivansh Narayan Singh: journalist turned three-time Deputy Chairman of the Rajya Sabha
Harivansh Narayan Singh, a former Prabhat Khabar editor-in-chief from Ballia, has held the Rajya Sabha Deputy Chairman's post since 2018, winning it three times — by ballot in 2018, by voice vote in 2020, and unopposed in 2026 as the first nominated member to hold the office.
- Stephen J. Harrison
Co-founder of USAuto Insurance Company and CEO of First Acceptance Corporation from 2004 to 2011. He held the company's largest single stake (~14.8% in 2008) and sold his shares back in a December 2011 buyout tied to a separation agreement.
- Thomas M. Harrison
Nashville insurance executive who became Executive Vice President and Secretary of First Acceptance Corporation in the 2004 Liberté–USAuto merger. At the 2008 proxy he held about 14.7% of First Acceptance stock — the company's second-largest disclosed stake.
- Demis Hassabis
2024 Nobel laureate in Chemistry for AlphaFold; Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet after handing over day-to-day leadership in August 2026; CEO and co-founder of Isomorphic Labs; one of Time's 2025 "Architects of AI" Person of the Year honorees.
- Reed Hastings
Netflix co-founder who left the company's board in June 2026 after 30 years — co-CEO until 2023, chairman until 2026 — and reassembled as a board member at Bloomberg and Anthropic, CEO of Powder Mountain, and one of education philanthropy's largest donors.
- Carla Hayden
Librarian of Congress from 2016 to 2025, the first woman and first Black person in the role, fired by President Trump after a career built on keeping libraries open and defending readers' privacy.
- Vanessa Haydon
Former model and ex-wife of Donald Trump Jr. (married 2005, divorced 2018), mother of five. She inherited an estimated US$62 million from her stepfather's stake in Rao's pasta-sauce business and has dated golfer Tiger Woods since 2025.
- Pete Hegseth
Former Fox News host and Army National Guard veteran confirmed 51-50 as defense secretary in January 2025; uses the secondary title "Secretary of War." His tenure is defined by the Iran war, the Signal leak, a purge of senior officers, and a September 2026 impeachment fight.
- Hope Hicks
The longtime Trump communications aide who entered politics with no political experience, left for Fox Corp, returned as counselor, and became the one aide subpoenaed under oath at every stage of the Trump era — from the Russia probe to the hush-money trial.
- Adolf Hitler
Austrian-born dictator of Germany (1933–45) who started World War II by invading Poland and bears primary responsibility for the Holocaust — the state-sponsored murder of six million Jews.
- Gen. David M. Hodne
U.S. Army general and modernization specialist who commanded the Transformation and Training Command for six months before Hegseth fired him in April 2026.
- Stevin Hoover
Former money manager and sole owner of Hoover Capital Management who defrauded clients through forged signatures, fictitious statements, and the Chestnut Fund LP hedge fund; pleaded guilty to securities fraud in 2002, barred from the advisory industry, and ordered to disgorge over $1 million.
- Trisha Hope
Trisha Hope is a Texas realtor and author of the 2018 book Just the Tweets who became a "Front Row Joe" rally regular and a 2024 RNC delegate. In September 2026 she broke with Donald Trump, calling him "a fraud and a liar" over his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
- Beryl Howell
Senior U.S. district judge in Washington, D.C.; the Obama appointee who struck down Trump's executive order against Perkins Coie in a 102-page ruling — then upheld his $100,000 H-1B visa fee as lawful.
- Howie Liu
Co-founder and CEO of Airtable, the spreadsheet-database platform he built slowly from 2012, took to a $1.1 billion valuation in 2018 and an $11 billion peak in 2021, then sold to Bending Spoons for $1.28 billion in 2026.
- Kirsten Hughes
Massachusetts Republican Party chairwoman from 2013 to 2019, elected amid a divided state committee and a Scott Brown-shaped transition, who led the party through two Charlie Baker gubernatorial wins before stepping down.
- Hunter Biden
Son of former U.S. president Joe Biden: artist, memoirist, convicted of federal gun felonies and tax charges in 2024, pardoned that December, disbarred in 2026, and back in the spotlight with a blunt 2026 media tour.
- Hiroshi Ichikura
Japanese advertising copywriter, creative director and lyricist (b. 1955, Gunma). Suntory (1978), Nakahata Advertising (1987), then founder of Ichikura Advertising Production (1990). Wrote lyrics for Kazuyoshi Saito's "Wedding Song"; TCC Hall of Fame 2023; chief judge of the 64th Sendenkaigi Award.
- Igor Fruman
Businessman and Rudy Giuliani associate who pleaded guilty in 2021 to soliciting foreign money for U.S. political donations, was sentenced to a year and a day, and served under two months in federal custody.
- Laura Ingraham
Host of The Ingraham Angle on Fox News since October 2017, a former litigator and Clarence Thomas law clerk whose September 2026 Dallas sit-down with Donald Trump produced headlines on the "Trump dividend" and Chinese cars.
- Steve Inskeep
Co-host of NPR's Morning Edition and Up First whose Sept. 24, 2026 Newsmakers interview drew Tucker Carlson into saying Trump should have been removed from office under the 25th Amendment for threatening nuclear war against Iran.
- Jared Isaacman
Billionaire founder of Shift4 Payments and private astronaut confirmed as the 15th NASA administrator in December 2025, after a nomination that was withdrawn and then revived. He commanded Inspiration4 and the first commercial spacewalk on Polaris Dawn.
- J.P. Nadda: BJP organiser, two-time Union Health Minister, and party president 2020–2026
Jagat Prakash Nadda — BJP national president Jan 2020–Jan 2026, Union Health Minister 2014–2019 and again from June 2024, and Leader of the House in the Rajya Sabha — rose as a party organiser, from ABVP student politics to Himachal minister to the BJP's top post.
- Jack Clark
Anthropic co-founder and head of policy; former OpenAI policy director and Bloomberg tech journalist; co-chair of Stanford's AI Index Steering Committee and founder of the Import AI newsletter.
- Jack Reed
Democratic U.S. Senator from Rhode Island since 1997, a West Point graduate and former 82nd Airborne paratrooper who chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee (2021–2025) and now serves as its ranking member. Not to be confused with Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings.
- Jack Smith
American career prosecutor who served as Justice Department special counsel from November 2022 to January 2025, bringing two federal indictments against Donald Trump before resigning after the 2024 election.
- Jaafar Jackson
Michael Jackson's nephew who played his uncle in the 2026 biopic Michael — his acting debut — after a two-year casting process.
- Joe Jackson
Jackson family patriarch and manager of the Jackson 5 who died in 2018; father of Michael Jackson, played by Colman Domingo in Michael (2026).
- Katherine Jackson
Jackson family matriarch; mother of ten including Michael and Janet, guardian of Michael's children after 2009, played by Nia Long in Michael (2026).
- Paris Jackson
Michael Jackson's only daughter: model, actress and singer (Wilted, 2020) who challenged the estate's co-executors over the 2026 biopic Michael.
- Robert Jacquinot de Besange
A French Jesuit priest who negotiated a civilian safe zone in wartime Shanghai in 1937, sheltering roughly 250,000 refugees from the fighting, an arrangement later cited as an influence on the 1949 Geneva Conventions' protections for civilians.
- James Comey
Former FBI director fired by Donald Trump in 2017 and indicted twice in 2025-2026; the second case, over a May 2025 Instagram photo of seashells reading '86 47', is headed for a January 2027 arraignment in North Carolina.
- James R. Mountain
Former San Ildefonso Pueblo governor and All Pueblo Council of Governors chairman who led New Mexico's Indian Affairs Department in 2023 before resigning the council chairmanship in late September 2025.
- James Scapa
Founder, chairman and CEO of Altair Engineering, the simulation-software company he built from a three-person Detroit consulting shop in 1985 into a public company sold to Siemens for $10.6 billion in 2025.
- Jan Leike
AI alignment researcher who co-led OpenAI's superalignment team, resigned in May 2024 saying safety had taken a backseat to products, and now leads Alignment Science at Anthropic.
- Andy Jassy
Amazon CEO since July 2021 and the co-creator of AWS; in 2026 he raised Amazon's AI-infrastructure bet to $220 billion while his own researchers' jailbreak finding shut down Anthropic's flagship model worldwide.
- Jean-Luc Godard
The French-Swiss filmmaker (1930-2022) who ignited the French New Wave with Breathless and spent his career exploding cinematic form. Profile leads with his hidden Canadian chapter: the 1977-78 Montreal cinema-history lectures at Serge Losique's invitation that seeded Histoire(s) du cinéma.
- Jeff Bezos
The Amazon founder who told his 1982 high-school class he wanted to colonize space to save Earth — then spent three decades building Amazon into the funding engine for Blue Origin, his $30-billion personal bet on that dream.
- Thomas Jefferson
Third U.S. president and principal author of the Declaration of Independence, whose words proclaimed equality while he enslaved over 600 people; the Louisiana Purchase, religious freedom, and the University of Virginia defined his public legacy.
- Jensen Huang
Taiwan-born co-founder, president and CEO of NVIDIA since 1993. He led the company behind the GPU and the AI data-center boom, and received the 2026 IEEE Medal of Honor.
- Jessie J
English pop singer behind "Price Tag" and "Bang Bang" who announced an early-stage breast cancer diagnosis in June 2025, released her first album in eight years that November, and was declared cancer-free in May 2026.
- Jimmy Kimmel
Late-night host of Jimmy Kimmel Live! since 2003 — a Brooklyn-born comedian who became a First Amendment test case after a 2025 suspension, signed a contract through mid-2027, and kept feuding with the White House into 2026.
- Joe Biden
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., the 46th president of the United States (2021–2025) and "Amtrak Joe" — the rail-commuting senator honored with a namesake station. He served 36 years in the Senate, 8 as vice president, and withdrew from the 2024 race on July 21, 2024.
- Joey Sanchez
Former Santa Ana Pueblo governor who became chairman of the All Pueblo Council of Governors in December 2025 and led its 2026 campaigns to protect Chaco Canyon and the Caja del Rio.
- John Collison
Irish entrepreneur who co-founded the payments company Stripe with his brother Patrick, serves as its president, backed the collectibles platform Alt, and bought into Weston Airport to build a hub for light aviation in Dublin.
- John Kirby
Retired Navy rear admiral who served twice as Pentagon press secretary and as the White House National Security Communications Advisor; director of the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics since November 2025.
- John Knoll
Visual-effects supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic, co-creator of Photoshop with his brother Thomas, and originator of the story for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
- John Warnock
Adobe co-founder and inventor of PostScript and PDF, who turned a Xerox PARC printer protocol into desktop publishing and led Adobe as CEO until 2000.
- Fawn Johnson
American journalist and News Director at Bloomberg Industry Group, overseeing newsroom training and AI policy. Former National Journal correspondent and Morning Consult chief policy editor; won First Prize in the 2011 National Awards for Education Reporting.
- Jeanne Johnson
Mother of U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and three other children, and the former wife of firefighter James Patrick "Pat" Johnson. A private individual; no independent reporting covers her life beyond the family relationship.
- Kelly Johnson
Wife of U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson since 1999. A former teacher and licensed pastoral counselor who co-hosted the faith podcast Truth Be Told with Mike & Kelly Johnson.
- Mike Johnson
Louisiana constitutional lawyer elected Speaker of the U.S. House in October 2023 and reelected in January 2025. A key Trump ally central to 2020-election challenges, he pivoted to pass Ukraine aid in 2024 and joined Trump's September 2026 AI meeting.
- Jon Stewart
Comedian and former Daily Show host whose 16-year tenure reshaped political satire — and who then helped win permanent federal benefits for 9/11 first responders, from the 2010 Zadroga Act to its 2019 permanent reauthorization.
- Bobby Jones
Bobby Jones (1902–1971): the only golfer to win a single-season Grand Slam (1930) — and a mechanical engineer who redesigned golf clubs, pioneered instructional films, and co-designed Augusta National and founded the Masters.
- Joseph Bianco
Second Circuit judge and former federal prosecutor who rose to chief of the Southern District of New York's Organized Crime and Terrorism Unit; confirmed to the appeals court 54–42 in 2019 after a voice-vote district-court confirmation in 2005.
- Shibani Joshi
A business journalist who traded Morgan Stanley investment banking for a CNNfn teleprompter, then spent six years as Fox Business's technology reporter and "Joshi on Tech" host; a 2013 solar claim drew national fact-checks. She now coaches at Stanford GSB and teaches at OU.
- Juan Merchan
New York trial judge who oversaw Donald Trump's 2024 hush-money case, in which a jury convicted Trump on 34 felony counts, and sentenced him to an unconditional discharge in January 2025. His daughter's former fundraising firm came under federal investigation in 2026.
- Julian Richards: the Welsh director who built Jinga Films into a genre-sales powerhouse
Welsh horror director (The Last Horror Movie, Darklands) who founded Jinga Films, turned it into a key global genre-sales company, and negotiated The Bunny Game's US deal.
- Justin Sun
Founder of the TRON blockchain and former Grenada ambassador to the WTO, Justin Sun became one of World Liberty Financial's biggest backers and the top holder of Donald Trump's $TRUMP memecoin before the two sides sued each other in 2026.
- Susan Kandel
Former Los Angeles Times art critic turned mystery novelist. Her five Cece Caruso novels (2004–2009) earned an Agatha Award best-first-novel nomination and a 2010 Mary Higgins Clark Award shortlist spot.
- Kansuke Yamamoto
Japanese Surrealist poet-photographer (1914–1987) who said artwork comes from 'disobedient spirit'; censored under wartime Japan, revived internationally after 2001.
- Karine Jean-Pierre
White House press secretary and senior adviser to Joe Biden (2022-2025) — the first Black person and first openly LGBTQ person in the role — who left the Democratic Party in June 2025, registered as an independent, and published 'Independent' about the end of Biden's presidency.
- José Antonio Kast
Chilean lawyer and politician, 35th President of Chile since 11 March 2026; founder of Acción Republicana (2018) and the Republican Party (2019), he won the presidency on his third attempt with a security-first platform and resigned his own party's membership hours before taking office.
- Celeste Katz
American political journalist whose career spans the New York Daily News, Mic, Newsweek and Glamour; co-host of the 2016 "Special Relationship" podcast, a 2022 Mirror Award finalist for Nieman Reports, and editor-in-chief of The Concord Bridge since April 2025.
- Greg Kelly
Newsmax TV host and retired Marine lieutenant colonel — formerly a Fox News White House correspondent and Good Day New York co-host — who in September 2026 publicly clashed with Karoline Leavitt.
- Timothy Kelly
Trump-appointed federal judge in Washington, D.C., who has twice ordered the White House to restore revoked press credentials — for CNN's Jim Acosta in 2018 and for CNN, MS NOW and Politico in September 2026 — both times on due-process grounds.
- Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary since February 2025: an environmental lawyer and longtime vaccine skeptic whose 2024 independent presidential bid ended in a Trump endorsement — mocked in a September 2026 charity speech over his vaccine stance.
- Kevin Durant
Two-time NBA champion and the only men's basketball player with four Olympic gold medals, who paired a two-decade scoring career with an investing career through Thirty Five Ventures, an early backer of the collectibles platform Alt.
- Kevin McCarthy
Republican congressman from California whose 55th speakership of the U.S. House lasted 269 days — the first in American history ended by a mid-session removal vote. After leaving Congress he joined the board of Anivive Lifesciences, a company developing a Valley Fever vaccine.
- Khalil al-Hayya
Veteran Hamas political leader and its chief negotiator through the Gaza war, elected head of the movement's political bureau in July 2026. Months earlier he sat across from U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, trading condolences as two bereaved fathers.
- Kim Eun-ja
Kim Eun-ja, the real-life Ayla of the Korean War — rescued by Turkish Sgt. Süleyman Dilbirliği in 1950, reunited with him in 2010, and mourned by the Turkish Embassy in Seoul after her death in Incheon at 80.
- Kim Seol
South Korean child actress who played Jin-ju in Reply 1988 and the young Ayla in Ayla: The Daughter of War (2017), then stepped back from acting for gifted STEM education.
- Graham King
British producer of The Departed (Best Picture Oscar) and Bohemian Rhapsody; GK Films president, and producer of the 2026 Michael Jackson biopic Michael.
- Adam Kinzinger
Former Illinois Republican congressman (2011–2023), one of two Republicans on the Jan 6 committee; now leads Country First's "Reveille and Rally" campaign against military personnel at polling places and serves as a CNN senior political commentator.
- Erika Kirk
CEO of Turning Point USA since the September 2025 assassination of her husband Charlie Kirk; former Miss Arizona USA 2012 and host of the Midweek Rise Up podcast, she gave her first major interview to Vanity Fair in September 2026.
- Umar Kremlev
Russian businessman leading the International Boxing Association since 2020. In Sept 2026, ProPublica reported he secretly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars toward Trump Jr.'s Bahamas wedding festivities. Born Umar Lutfulloyev, he took the Kremlev name in 2010 and rose with Kremlin backing.
- Albin Kurti
Kosovo politician and leader of the Vetëvendosje movement; Prime Minister in 2020 and since 2021, re-elected on 13 September 2026. A former political prisoner (1999-2001), his career runs from student activism through a 2020 no-confidence toppling to the 2025-2026 deadlock.
- Jared Kushner
Real estate heir turned Trump adviser: architect of the 2020 Abraham Accords, founder of the Gulf-backed Affinity Partners fund, and since February 2026 Donald Trump's Special Envoy for Peace on Gaza and Russia-Ukraine diplomacy.
- Ashton Kutcher
Actor who became Silicon Valley's most credible celebrity investor; in July 2026 he walked away from Sound Ventures after 11 years to launch a new AI-infrastructure fund with Morgan Beller — and in 2023 he resigned as chairman of his own Thorn anti-abuse charity after backing Danny Masterson.
- Kyle Herrig
Kyle Herrig founded the watchdog group Accountable.US in 2019 and led it as president until July 2023. He now serves as a senior advisor there and as founder and executive director of the Congressional Integrity Project.
- Gen. Christopher LaNeve
U.S. Army general who rose from Defense Secretary Hegseth's senior military aide to acting Army chief of staff in April 2026, after George's ouster.
- Lara Trump
Eric Trump's wife and the only Trump to have run the RNC — co-chair from March 2024 to January 2025 — who then turned down three Senate runs and became the first sitting president's family member to host a TV show, on Fox News.
- Laura Spiekerman
Co-founder of Alloy, the New York identity-decisioning company, whose path ran from a Kenyan mobile-payments startup through ACH payments to a fintech unicorn, with recognition from Crain's and American Banker.
- Lawrence Jones
Fox News co-host of FOX & Friends since September 2023, former enterprise reporter, Campus Reform editor-in-chief, and host of Lawrence Jones Cross Country.
- Karoline Leavitt
Youngest-ever White House press secretary, serving from January 2025 to August 2026 and the first to give birth while holding the job. Now back with the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc., she is hosting the September 29, 2026 unveiling of the America.gov AI portal.
- Lee Kyung-jin
South Korean actress of five decades: 1980s "national little sister" TV star, breast-cancer survivor who refused a mastectomy, and — at 61 — the adult Ayla in Turkey's Oscar entry Ayla: The Daughter of War (2017).
- Don Lemon
Don Lemon: CNN anchor from 2006 to 2023, fired after the "prime" remarks controversy; sued Elon Musk over a cancelled X deal; faced federal charges in January 2026 for livestreaming a church protest; launched The Don Lemon Channel on Swerve TV that September.
- Leore Avidar
Founder and CEO of the alternative-asset marketplace Alt and co-founder of the programmable direct-mail company Lob, who turned a sports-card collecting hobby into a trading platform backed by major venture and sports investors.
- Letitia James
Attorney General of New York since 2019, the first woman elected to the office. She sued Donald Trump and the NRA, investigated Andrew Cuomo, and in 2025 was herself federally indicted — a prosecution that collapsed after the grand jury rejected a new indictment.
- Miriam Levine
The mother of television writer and producer Chuck Lorre (born Charles Michael Levine) — a private person whose public record comes entirely through her son's childhood biography: a homemaker who later worked in retail, in a family whose finances strained when the luncheonette failed.
- Robert Levine
The father of television producer Chuck Lorre, who ran a small luncheonette on Long Island where his teenage son helped out — a private figure with no independent public record.
- Lewis Tice: the festival publicist behind Danger After Dark and Autonomy Pictures
Genre-film publicist who curated the Philadelphia Film Festival's Danger After Dark strand and co-founded Autonomy Pictures with Derek Curl and David Gregory in 2012.
- Fei-Fei Li
Stanford AI professor and ImageNet creator who co-founded World Labs for spatial intelligence; after the governor tapped her to co-write AI policy following the SB 1047 veto, AMD agreed in September 2026 to buy World Labs for $8.2B and make her chief scientist.
- Chuck Liddell
"The Iceman" — former UFC light heavyweight champion (2005–2007) who helped carry MMA into the mainstream; his 2021 arrest ended with no charges and his divorce finalized in April 2025.
- Dave Limp
Blue Origin CEO since December 2023; former Amazon devices chief behind Alexa, Echo, and Kindle. Listed among the tech executives expected at the September 2026 America.gov unveiling in Washington.
- Abraham Lincoln
The 16th U.S. president who preserved the Union and issued the Emancipation Proclamation; in 2026 his legacy became living news, from a new museum under his memorial to his blood-stained gloves' California tour.
- John Logan
Three-time Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Gladiator, The Aviator and Hugo, Tony winner for Red, and writer of the 2026 Michael Jackson biopic Michael.
- Nia Long
Actress of 1990s Black cinema — Boyz n the Hood, Love Jones, The Best Man — and Katherine Jackson in Fuqua's 2026 biopic Michael; Walk of Fame star 2026.
- Laura Loomer
Far-right activist and failed congressional candidate whose April 2025 Oval Office meeting with Donald Trump preceded a wave of National Security Council firings — and who attacked Trump's November 2025 White House meeting with Zohran Mamdani while stopping short of condemning the president himself.
- Chuck Lorre
Chuck Lorre is the American television writer-producer known as the "King of Sitcoms," creator of Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon. In September 2026 he turned a charity award speech into a profanity-laced attack on Donald Trump.
- Serge Losique
Serge Losique (1931–2026), the film professor who founded and ran the Montreal World Film Festival from 1977, fought a 2004 funding war with Telefilm Canada, survived a 2018 tax bill, and directed the festival's final edition that year.
- Anna Paulina Luna
Republican congresswoman from Florida's 13th district since 2023; the Air Force veteran whose response to Nicki Minaj's swatting turned the rapper into an open Trump supporter.
- M. Venkaiah Naidu: India's 13th Vice President and Rajya Sabha Chairman (2017–2022)
M. Venkaiah Naidu served as India's 13th Vice President and ex-officio Chairman of the Rajya Sabha from August 2017 to August 2022, after ministerial stints under Vajpayee and Modi and a term as BJP president.
- Mahmood Mamdani
Ugandan anthropologist and Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University, known for Citizen and Subject, the Makerere Institute of Social Research, and as the father of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani.
- Dee Jay Mailer
Hawaiʻi healthcare and global-health executive who led Kamehameha Schools as CEO from 2004 to 2014 after running the Geneva operations of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and serving as CEO of Kaiser Permanente Hawaiʻi.
- Maj. Gen. William Green Jr.
26th Chief of Chaplains of the U.S. Army and a major general, removed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on April 2, 2026, without a publicly stated reason — the first Army chief of chaplains ever fired.
- Matiur Rahman Mallik
Bangladeshi student activist (1953–1969) shot dead by police during the January 1969 mass-upsurge movement in Dhaka; the anniversary of his death is observed nationally as Mass Uprising Day, and he received Bangladesh's posthumous Independence Award in 2018.
- Jeremiaha Maluze
Duisburg centre-back who reached the Bundesliga via Frankfurt's U21s: 26 Hessenliga games, 3 goals and 10 assists in 2025/26, DFB-Pokal debut in August 2026, first Bundesliga start against Union Berlin the same day his contract was extended to 2031.
- Zohran Mamdani
New York City mayor since January 2026 and former state assemblyman; a democratic socialist whose 2025 upset over Andrew Cuomo drew Trump's "communist lunatic" attacks and funding threats — before an uneasy working relationship formed through White House, February and Gracie Mansion meetings.
- Paul Manafort
The Republican lobbyist who chaired Donald Trump's 2016 campaign before resigning over his Ukrainian cash ledger, was convicted of tax and bank fraud, pardoned in December 2020, and returned to political consulting — most recently on Chris LaCivita's team in Albania.
- Manoj Jha: Delhi University professor turned RJD voice in the Rajya Sabha
Manoj Kumar Jha, a Delhi University social-work professor and Rashtriya Janata Dal national spokesperson, has been a Rajya Sabha MP from Bihar since 2018, was the joint opposition's candidate for Deputy Chairman in 2020, and began a second term in 2024.
- Mark Sandell: Trinity Films co-director and the BBFC Bunny Game standoff
Co-director of London-based indie distributor Trinity Films, whose Trinity X genre label acquired Adam Rehmeier's The Bunny Game — then publicly contested the BBFC's 2011 refusal to classify it.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Co-founder of Facebook in 2004 and chief executive of Meta Platforms. His record spans the record $5 billion FTC privacy order, the 2021 Meta rebrand, 2025 content-moderation shifts, and a rebuilt relationship with Donald Trump.
- Marlon Humphrey
Baltimore Ravens cornerback drafted 16th overall in 2017, a four-time Pro Bowler and two-time first-team All-Pro, and a backer of trading-card platform Alt's $75 million Series B round.
- James Marsh (artist)
British illustrator and painter best known for designing Talk Talk's album covers from 1982 onward, including "Spirit of Eden," whose 2012 retrospective book was reviewed by Record Collector magazine.
- Thomas Massie
Kentucky congressman (2012–2026) and MIT-trained engineer who filed eight articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in September 2026 over the Iran war, then saw the vote shelved past the midterms.
- Jeremy Matlow
Tallahassee city commissioner (Seat 3) known for publicly criticizing the city's response to a corruption scandal and for a still-unresolved 2026 trespassing investigation tied to a tree-removal protest.
- Golden Matonga
Malawian investigative journalist at the Platform for Investigative Journalism–Malawi and ICIJ member since 2021, who worked on the Pandora Papers and FinCEN Files, exposed the Zuneth Sattar bribery network, and became the only African member of ICIJ's global Network Committee.
- Maxwell Hutchinson
English architect, broadcaster and former RIBA president (1989–1991) who founded the humanitarian architecture charity Article 25 after surviving the 2004 Sri Lanka tsunami, and who later became an Anglican deacon.
- Ghislaine Maxwell
British socialite convicted in 2021 on five federal sex-trafficking counts tied to Jeffrey Epstein; serving 20 years. In August 2026 a federal judge rejected her last bid to overturn the conviction as meritless.
- John McClain
Music executive who engineered Janet Jackson's Control and co-executed the Michael Jackson estate from 2009 until his death in May 2026.
- Kayleigh McEnany
White House press secretary under President Donald Trump from April 2020 through January 2021, now a Fox News host co-hosting Outnumbered and fronting her own Saturday program. Her career ran from a Fox News production desk through CNN and the RNC into the West Wing.
- Melania Trump
First Lady of the United States for the second time since January 2025. A former model who keeps a selective public schedule while building a dense policy portfolio around children's welfare, foster care, and combating non-consensual intimate imagery.
- Melanie Stansbury
Democratic congresswoman from New Mexico's 1st district since 2021. A Cornell-trained scientist turned oversight leader who vowed on MSNBC to pursue cabinet-secretary impeachments if Democrats win the 2026 midterms.
- Michael Jackson
American singer, dancer and songwriter known as the "King of Pop"; Thriller (1982) remains the best-selling album in history. Since his 2009 death his estate has earned an estimated $3.5 billion, topping Forbes' dead-celebrity list 13 of 16 years, and bankrolled the 2026 biopic about him.
- Michael Truell
Co-founder and chief executive of Anysphere, the company behind the AI code editor Cursor, who built the Halite programming competition as a Bronx schoolboy before leaving MIT in 2022 to found one of the fastest-growing software companies on record.
- Migos
Atlanta rap trio behind "Versace," "Bad and Boujee," and "MotorSport"; the surviving members reunited in 2026 after Takeoff's 2022 killing.
- Mike Allen
The journalist who turned Politico's Playbook into Washington's most lucrative morning email — roughly $3 million a year — then rebuilt the same franchise at Axios with Axios AM, PM and Finish Line.
- Vladislav Mikosha
Soviet cinematographer and photojournalist whose World War II footage and photographs of the siege of Sevastopol, and later color-photography work for Izvestia and Pravda, were the subject of a 2014 Swedish documentary.
- Nicki Minaj
Trinidadian-born rapper behind three Billboard 200 No. 1 albums. A late-2025 Donald Trump backer turned MAGA surrogate, she spoke at the UN on Nigeria, joined the SBA's Million Dollar Pitch Competition, and told young voters to "vote red" in the 2026 midterms.
- Marsha Miro
Detroit art critic for the Free Press (1974–1995), Cranbrook architectural historian and filmmaker, founding director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), and noted collector of French Art Deco furniture.
- Nikolay Mladenov
Bulgarian diplomat who rose from defence and foreign minister to the UN's top Middle East envoy (2015–2020), then became the Board of Peace's Gaza chief in 2026 — warning that without disarmament progress, the two-state solution would become "practically impossible."
- Matt Mowers
New Jersey Republican operative turned Trump State Department official: a Chris Christie protégé who ran his 2016 New Hampshire campaign, twice ran for Congress in NH's 1st district, and lost the 2022 GOP primary to Karoline Leavitt.
- Oliver Mulherin
Australian software engineer who has worked at the IOTA Foundation, Broadwing, SPARK Neuro, and Meta, and who married OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman in January 2024.
- Markwayne Mullin
The ninth U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security (confirmed March 2026) and former Oklahoma senator, whose move from border enforcer to elections campaigner ended in a September 2026 federal ruling that struck down his conditions on counterterrorism grants.
- Birsa Munda
Tribal freedom fighter (1875–1900) who led the Ulgulan rebellion against British rule in Chotanagpur. He died in Ranchi jail on 9 June 1900 at about 25. Commemorated nationally on Janjatiya Gaurav Divas and featured in Krish, Trish and Baltiboy Season 2.
- Asim Munir
Pakistan's army chief since 2022, promoted to field marshal in May 2025 and made the country's first statutory Chief of Defence Forces in 2026; received a Trump-sons-backed Powerus drone delegation at GHQ Rawalpindi on September 16, 2026.
- Elon Musk
South African-born entrepreneur, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of X, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015, left its board in 2018, and sued the company and Sam Altman in 2024 in a case a jury dismissed in May 2026.
- Satya Nadella
American technology executive and chief executive officer of Microsoft since 2014, who led its cloud-computing pivot, its 2023 hiring of Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, and testified in the 2026 Musk v. OpenAI trial.
- Mira Nair
Indian-American filmmaker behind Monsoon Wedding, Salaam Bombay! and The Namesake — a Golden Lion winner who moved from documentaries to features for creative control, founded the Salaam Baalak Trust and Uganda's Maisha Film Lab, and is the mother of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani.
- Narendra Modi
Prime Minister of India since 2014, sworn in for a third consecutive term in June 2024. In the 117th episode of his radio address Mann Ki Baat (December 2024) he named the animated series "Krish, Trish and Baltiboy" as a favourite among children.
- Kiran Nazish
Pakistani foreign and war correspondent who reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and beyond, then founded the Coalition For Women In Journalism in 2017 after a 2015 breakdown — building mentorship and a press-freedom newsroom covering attacks on women journalists in 128 countries.
- Nicholas Riccio
New Hampshire real-estate developer who owns Riccio Enterprises LLC and more than 15 buildings at Hampton Beach. The husband of former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, he has described a path from homelessness at 18 to owning a multimillion-dollar business.
- Nick Molnar
Australian fintech entrepreneur who co-founded Afterpay in 2014 and led it to a $29 billion Block acquisition in 2022; now heads sales across Block's Square, Cash App and Afterpay businesses.
- Nicole Colombo
Former eBay general manager for collectibles and trading cards who led the marketplace's trading-card business through the 2020 boom, then left in November 2021 to become the first president of alternative-asset platform Alt.
- Lorenzo Nigro
Italian archaeologist and Full Professor at Sapienza University of Rome, whose 2022 reinterpretation of a Phoenician structure at Motya, Sicily, as a sacred pool rather than a harbor drew international coverage.
- Nurunnahar Nimni
Bangladeshi mountaineer and Pubali Bank officer who summited Himlung Himal (7,126m) in 2025 under a breast-cancer awareness banner, then became the third Bangladeshi woman to summit Mount Everest on 27 May 2026.
- Nizami Ganjavi
Nizami Ganjavi (c. 1141–1209) was a Persian poet of Ganja whose five-poem Khamsa reshaped romantic epic poetry in Persian literature.
- Noel Murray: the Arkansas-based A.V. Club critic behind The Bunny Game review
American freelance film and TV critic — a key contributor to The A.V. Club and co-founder of The Dissolve — who reviewed Adam Rehmeier's The Bunny Game as "brutal" and "repellent" but "far from artless, or pointless."
- Norman Foster
English architect and founder of Foster + Partners, 1999 Pritzker laureate and patron of Article 25, known for steel-and-glass landmarks including the Reichstag dome and the British Museum Great Court.
- Jackie Northam
Longtime NPR international correspondent who covered the Gulf War, the Rwandan genocide, and conflicts across the Middle East and South Asia over a four-decade career, retiring in 2026.
- Nuno Santos
Founder of Imaginando, the Braga music-software studio he started in 2014, creator of the DRC virtual analog synthesizer, and co-builder of Harpa Laser — a two-metre playable laser harp that cannot hit a wrong note.
- Chris Olah
Anthropic co-founder who leads its interpretability research; a researcher with no university degree whose blog taught thousands of people neural networks and whose work aims to reverse-engineer what AI models are really doing.
- Omeed Malik
Banker and investor who co-founded the anti-ESG venture firm 1789 Capital; Donald Trump Jr. joined as a partner in November 2024. In April 2025 he was appointed to Fannie Mae's board, and in August 2026 House Democrats demanded 1789 Capital's documents over alleged insider access.
- Tito Ortiz
Former UFC light heavyweight champion (2000-2003) and 2012 UFC Hall of Fame inductee whose contract fight helped trigger the 2001 Zuffa buyout. He later joined the cast of The Celebrity Apprentice, won a Huntington Beach council seat in 2020, and resigned in June 2021.
- Mehmet Oz
Cardiothoracic surgeon and TV host who became administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in April 2025 after a 53-45 Senate vote; before 13 years of The Dr. Oz Show and a 2022 Senate run, he was a Harvard and UPenn-trained vice-chair of surgery at Columbia.
- Ömer Özsoy
Turkish-born theologian who became the first Muslim theology professor at a German university in 2006, holding an endowed Koranic-exegesis chair at Goethe University Frankfurt and advocating historical-critical readings of the Koran.
- Richard Painter
Law professor and former chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush (2005-2007) who became a prominent ethics critic of Donald Trump and ran twice as a Democrat in Minnesota.
- Chris Pappas
Four-term Democratic congressman from New Hampshire's 1st district and 2026 Senate nominee; the restaurant scion who beat future White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt in 2022 and ranks among the House's most bipartisan members.
- Parag Mallick
Stanford proteomics researcher and co-founder of Nautilus Biotechnology whose lab supervised Dario Amodei's postdoctoral cancer-biomarker work — the biological complexity that pushed Amodei toward AI. Known for the ProteoWizard toolkit, single-molecule proteomics, and the "dark proteome."
- Sean Parnell
Decorated Afghanistan veteran and Outlaw Platoon author who became the Pentagon's chief spokesman in 2025 and Pete Hegseth's September 2026 pick for Army secretary amid Senate resistance over abuse allegations.
- Neil Patel
The Daily Caller co-founder and CEO, best known as Tucker Carlson's Trinity College roommate, is first of all a Bush White House man — a longtime aide to Vice President Dick Cheney who ran his policy operation and was nominated to lead the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
- Wazir Ram Singh Pathania
Wazir Ram Singh Pathania (1824–1849), minister of the hill state of Nurpur, led an 1848 armed uprising against the British, was captured during worship and died in exile at Rangoon. A statue unveiled in 2024 honours him, and "Krish, Trish and Baltiboy" Season 2 dramatises his story.
- Patrick Collison
Co-founder and CEO of Stripe, co-founder of the Arc Institute, and Meta board member, who applied the same infrastructure logic that built a payments giant to speeding up scientific research funding.
- Patrick Johnson
Shreveport firefighter and father of House Speaker Mike Johnson who survived the 1984 Dixie Cold Storage ammonia explosion, then spent three decades helping burn patients — co-founding a burn foundation that served over 15,000 families and running a global HazMat training company.
- Zak Penn
American screenwriter, director and TV creator behind X2, The Incredible Hulk, Ready Player One and Free Guy, who co-created the 2026 Big Bang Theory sequel Stuart Fails to Save the Universe — and who publicly calls The Avengers his most overrated film.
- Dmitry Peskov
Kremlin press secretary since May 2012 and a trained Turkologist-translator whose decade in Ankara shaped the man who now frames Putin's answers to the world — from the Tucker Carlson interview to the September 2026 ceasefire arc.
- Peter Greenaway
Welsh painter-trained filmmaker (b. 1942) who calls his films 'paintings with soundtracks'; The Pillow Book was line-produced by Hong Kong's Evans Chan.
- Sundar Pichai
CEO of Google and Alphabet since 2019. In April 2025 he warned a federal court that the DOJ's antitrust remedies would be a "de facto divestiture" of search; in August 2026 he placed Google DeepMind's new chief directly under him.
- Poppy Harlow
American journalist who spent 16 years at CNN, co-anchoring CNN Newsroom and CNN This Morning before leaving in April 2024. Known for business-leader interviews and field reporting — and for two on-air moments bios skip: the 2013 Steubenville verdict coverage and the 2023 "prime" Lemon exchange.
- Ana Luz Porzecanski
Uruguayan-born conservation biologist who directs the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History and co-curated the museum's 2016 exhibition on Cuban biodiversity.
- Martha Raddatz
ABC News chief global affairs correspondent and co-anchor of "This Week": war reporter embedded on dozens of missions, debate moderator in 2012 and 2016, 2026 Fourth Estate Award recipient — and the anchor of a bruising Sept 27, 2026 interview with AG Todd Blanche.
- Johan Raja Lawak
A Malaysian comedian, actor and long-running Hot FM radio presenter, born Mohd Yazid Lim bin Mohamad Aziz, who placed third in the first season of Raja Lawak in 2007 and later pivoted much of his public focus toward entrepreneurship, including a restaurant and a vending-machine business.
- Rama Duwaji
Syrian-American illustrator, animator and ceramicist whose black-and-white drawings of Middle Eastern women appeared in The New Yorker and at Tate Modern. Wife of NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani, she designed key parts of his campaign's visual identity.
- Raymond C. Fisher
Ninth Circuit judge (1999–2020) and early mentor of future federal judge Amir Ali. As LA Police Commission president he steered LAPD reform after the Christopher Commission, and he called his 6–5 extraordinary-rendition ruling in Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan his most important case.
- Riccardo Amodei
Italian-American leathersmith and father of Anthropic co-founders Dario and Daniela Amodei. His 2006 death from hepatitis C — a disease curable within a few years — became, in Dario's own account, the driving force behind his urgency about scientific progress.
- R. H. Richharia
A Cambridge-trained rice geneticist who led India's Central Rice Research Institute, published clonal-propagation research in Nature, and was removed from his post after opposing Green Revolution seed policy in favour of conserving indigenous rice varieties.
- Eric Roberts
Oscar-nominated actor (Runaway Train) with three Golden Globe nominations and 700+ screen credits; a supporting role in Turkey's 2017 Oscar entry Ayla: The Daughter of War; memoir Runaway Train released September 2024.
- Rodleen Getsic: the singer and actress behind The Bunny Game
Rodleen Getsic is an American actress, writer, producer and singer: her vocals carry the climax of Deftones' "Knife Prty" (White Pony, 2000), and she co-wrote, co-produced and starred in The Bunny Game, winning Best Overall Individual Performance at the 2011 PollyGrind Film Festival.
- Roland Busch
German physicist who joined Siemens in 1994, rose through its research, automotive and infrastructure businesses, and has been President and CEO of Siemens AG since February 2021, driving its industrial-software pivot through Xcelerator and the Altair and Dotmatics acquisitions.
- Roli Saxena
Technology executive who rose from AdRoll president to NextRoll CEO in November 2022, leading the company through its 2025 reunification under the AdRoll brand.
- Ron Howard
Academy Award-winning American filmmaker who began as a child actor on The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days before directing Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, and Netflix's Hillbilly Elegy adaptation.
- Ron Ziegler
Ronald L. Ziegler (1939–2003) was President Richard Nixon's White House press secretary from 1969 to 1974. At 29 he was the youngest press secretary in history, a record that stood until 2025.
- Marshall Rothstein
The former Supreme Court of Canada justice (2006–2015) who made Canadian legal history as the first nominee ever publicly grilled by a parliamentary committee — and the mentor who hosted future U.S. federal judge Amir Ali as a law clerk.
- Marco Rubio
72nd U.S. Secretary of State since January 2025 and, since September 2026, the first person in half a century to hold that office together with the permanent national security adviser role — the only second dual-holder after Henry Kissinger.
- Ardavan Safaee
President of French film studio and distributor Pathé Films since 2019, who testified to a French National Assembly committee on how the company changed its on-set conduct policies after handling a 2020 misconduct complaint against a director.
- Sarah Huckabee Sanders
Arkansas' 47th governor and Trump's third White House press secretary (2017–19). In November 2018 she suspended CNN reporter Jim Acosta's White House credentials — restored twelve days later after a court order — and now governs from Little Rock in year three of her first term.
- Sanjay Singh: AAP Rajya Sabha MP from Delhi, from Sultanpur activism to arrest and bail
Sanjay Singh (born 22 March 1972) is an Aam Aadmi Party politician and Rajya Sabha MP from Delhi since 2018, re-elected unopposed in January 2024. A founding-era AAP organiser, he was arrested in the Delhi excise-policy case in 2023 and freed on Supreme Court bail in 2024.
- Sathupati Prasanna Sree
A linguist and English professor from Andhra Pradesh who has created scripts for tribal languages and became vice-chancellor of Adikavi Nannaya University in February 2025.
- Jit Saxena
Massachusetts-based technology entrepreneur who founded and led Applix and then co-founded Netezza, taking both companies public, and who has since served on the boards of numerous data and software startups.
- Eric Schmidt
Former Google CEO (2001-2011) who took a controlling stake in rocket startup Relativity Space and became its CEO in March 2025; early Anthropic investor whose NASA Mars partnership set a 2028 launch target.
- Scott Golding
Former office manager and bookkeeper of the UK charity Article 25, known at work as William Golding, who in December 2015 was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison for defrauding the charity of £260,479, after a prior conviction for theft from Wallace and Gromit's Grand Appeal.
- Sean Penn
Actor-director Sean Penn has documented Ukraine's war from day one: in Kyiv filming Superpower when the invasion began, later loaning Volodymyr Zelenskyy an Oscar, and in 2026 premiering Black Sunflowers — which he asked Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump to watch.
- Sean Spicer
Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, whose six-month 2017 tenure became pop culture, produced the documentary Trump's Front Row Joes and told Politico Playbook in 2026 that the Joes' defections worry him about softer Trump voters.
- Theodore Sedgwick
Massachusetts lawyer who helped write the 1773 Sheffield Declaration, won Elizabeth Freeman's freedom suit in 1781, then served as Speaker of the U.S. House and a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court justice.
- Seth Moulton
Marine veteran and six-term congressman whose October 2025 Senate challenge to Ed Markey ended September 1, 2026, in a 64.9%-to-35.1% primary loss — after he called Steve Witkoff's Carlson interview remarks "insane."
- Shana Merlin
Austin improv performer, teacher, and producer; founded Merlin Works in 2003 and the Merlin Works Institute for Improvisation in 2008; ended classes and shows in 2025 after 22 years while continuing corporate training.
- Shantanu Narayen
Hyderabad-born engineer who led Adobe from boxed software to Creative Cloud subscriptions as CEO from 2007, and was set to hand over to a successor on December 1, 2026.
- Charlie Sheen
Two and a Half Men star fired in March 2011 after publicly attacking creator Chuck Lorre; sober since December 2017, he reconciled with Lorre via Bookie (2023) and told his own story in The Book of Sheen (2025).
- J. Michael Shepherd
An American banking lawyer and executive who led Bank of the West as President and CEO from 2008 to 2016, chaired BNP Paribas USA through 2023, and later joined the boards of CoreLogic and Discover Financial Services.
- Sherrod Brown
Former U.S. Senator from Ohio (2007-2025) and Banking Committee chairman now seeking the state's other Senate seat in the 2026 special election. Known for his working-class brand, his mentor John Glenn — who handed him his Eagle Scout award — and being crypto-industry PAC money's most famous target.
- Tilak Raj Shetty
Co-founder and CEO of Mumbai animation studio Graphiti Multimedia, and co-creator with Munjal Shroff of the animated folk-tales series "Krish, Trish and Baltiboy" — whose Season 2, "Bharat Hain Hum," was co-produced with the Government of India and named by the Prime Minister in "Mann Ki Baat."
- Bill Shine
Fox News producer-turned-co-president (1996-2017) who ran Trump's White House communications from July 2018 to March 2019, then quietly became a NewsNation consultant - a role hidden from staff until 2021, when its exposure triggered a staff exodus.
- Shira Perlmutter
Register of Copyrights since 2020 and a three-decade veteran of copyright policy. The Trump administration fired her the day after her office's AI-and-fair-use report circulated; she has challenged both the firing and Todd Blanche's disputed acting-Librarian appointment in court.
- Munjal Shroff
Co-founder, director and COO of Mumbai animation studio Graphiti Multimedia; co-creator of "Krish, Trish and Baltiboy" and creator of Netflix's "Deepa & Anoop", which won four Kidscreen Awards in 2023; chairman of FICCI's AVGC-XR Forum in 2025.
- Shryder
A pseudonymous crypto trader whose 600,000-token WLFI purchase on Inauguration Day made him the centerpiece of a disputed watchdog claim linking him to North Korea's Lazarus Group — a false positive that froze roughly $95,000 of his tokens.
- Sam Sidiqi
Afghan-American business executive and mountaineer: the first Afghan national to summit both Denali (2021) and Mount Everest (2023). He founded Afghan Peaks, a charity developing skiing and mountain safety in Afghanistan.
- Ramchandra Singh Deo
The last ruler of the former princely state of Koriya who became Chhattisgarh's first finance minister when the state was created in 2000, after an earlier career that included working as a photographer for the filmmaker Satyajit Ray.
- Yahya Sinwar
Hamas's Gaza leader from 2017, Yahya Sinwar spent 22 years in Israeli prisons — learning Hebrew, surviving brain surgery by Israeli doctors — before his 2011 release in the Shalit exchange. Identified as the architect of the October 7, 2023 attacks, he was killed in Rafah in October 2024.
- Sir Quentin Thomas: the civil servant who became BBFC president
Retired British civil servant: BBFC President 2002–2012 and, earlier, the Northern Ireland Office Political Director behind the 1998 Good Friday Agreement; knighted for services to peace.
- Adam Smith
U.S. congressman (D-WA-9) since 1997 and the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee since 2010; in 2026 he built the oversight case against Trump's military moves, from the Iran war-powers fight to a bill blocking the Qatari-gifted 747 from leaving the Air Force.
- Paula Smith
The first wife and business partner of television producer Chuck Lorre, married to him from 1979 to 1992. Britannica places her at the turning point when Lorre traded touring-musician life for television writing.
- Sonia Sotomayor
Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court since 2009, the first Hispanic and third woman on the Court. Her dissent in Trump v. Hawaii cited Amir Ali's amicus brief; she ended the 1994-95 baseball strike as a district judge and wrote the 2025 Glossip majority and the CASA dissent.
- Abigail Spanberger
Virginia's 75th governor and the first woman to hold the office; a former CIA case officer and federal agent who carried a gun daily and became a gun-violence-prevention champion.
- Britney Spears
American pop singer who defined late-90s teen pop, won a Grammy for "Toxic," lived under a 13-year conservatorship her father controlled, and is now the subject of a Universal biopic and a 2026 rehabilitation arc.
- Adam Stafford
A Scottish musician and filmmaker, born in Sunderland and based in Falkirk, who fronted the band Y'all Is Fantasy Island, has released more than a dozen solo albums including a 2020 comeback, and has directed an award-winning music video and the seven-award-winning short film "The Shutdown."
- Joseph Stalin
Soviet dictator (1928–53) who industrialized the USSR through Five-Year Plans and terror, signed the 1939 pact with Hitler, then led the Soviet war effort that broke Nazi Germany.
- John Stankey
Chairman and CEO of AT&T — CEO since July 2020, chair since February 2025 — and an AT&T lifer since 1985 who reversed its media strategy, spinning WarnerMedia into Warner Bros. Discovery and exiting DirecTV to refocus the company on 5G and fiber.
- Elise Stefanik
Republican congresswoman from New York's 21st district (2015-2027) and House GOP Conference chair (2021-2025), who went from Trump critic to fierce defender, became a national figure grilling university presidents on antisemitism, then abruptly exited electoral politics in December 2025.
- Donna Steichen
An American Catholic author from St. Cloud, Minnesota, whose 1991 book "Ungodly Rage: The Hidden Face of Catholic Feminism" became an unexpected bestseller for a first-time author and drew both praise and sharp criticism within the Catholic Church.
- Steve Jobs
The co-founder of Apple who built the Apple II and the Macintosh, was ousted in 1985, built NeXT and Pixar, returned to save Apple with the iMac, iPod and iPhone, and died in 2011.
- Shomari Stone
American broadcast journalist anchoring and reporting for WTTG (FOX 5 DC). From dishwashing and bellman jobs to CBS Miami, WRC, CNBC and FOX 5 — a seven-time Emmy, two-time Murrow winner known for breaking-news coverage.
- Lisa Su
Chair and CEO of AMD since 2014, who turned a near-bankrupt chipmaker valued under $2 billion into a trillion-dollar AI semiconductor company. A MIT-trained electrical engineer, she was TIME's CEO of the Year for 2024 and shared the 2025 Person of the Year "Architects of AI" cover.
- Sualeh Asif
Karachi-born co-founder and chief product officer of Anysphere, the company behind the AI code editor Cursor, who represented Pakistan at the International Mathematical Olympiad before studying at MIT and co-authoring a published proof that Tetris stays NP-hard on narrow boards.
- Sunand Prasad
British architect, co-founder of Penoyre & Prasad, RIBA president from 2007 to 2009 and chair of Article 25 during its 2015 fraud crisis, later made OBE for services to regeneration.
- Daniel Susott
American physician and self-described "hanai" (adopted) brother of Lauryn Galindo whose 2010 and 2019 transfers of a Kauai apartment to her were both voided by federal courts as fraudulent, and who surrendered his California medical license in 2013 amid regulatory allegations.
- Ilya Sutskever
Computer scientist who co-created AlexNet, co-founded OpenAI and served as its chief scientist, played a central and later-regretted role in the November 2023 board vote to remove Sam Altman, and in 2024 left to found the AI-safety company Safe Superintelligence Inc.
- Igor Tanzil
Indonesian creative executive and former advertising copywriter who served as Agate's chief marketing and chief creative officer before co-founding Mythic Protocol, later rebranded Confiction Labs, where he is Chief Creative Officer.
- Elinor Tatum
Publisher and editor-in-chief of the New York Amsterdam News since 1997. A phone call she made days after George Floyd's murder launched the Word In Black coalition; in 2024 she became the first Black woman named Editor & Publisher's Publisher of the Year.
- Taylor Monahan
MetaMask security lead and on-chain investigator who publicly disputed Accountable.US's claim that World Liberty Financial sold tokens to a buyer linked to North Korea's Lazarus Group. Former co-founder of MyEtherWallet and founder of MyCrypto.
- Çetin Tekindor
Turkish stage, television, and film actor who was first famous as a dubbing voice — the Turkish Robert Redford — then won Best Actor awards for Babam ve Oğlum (2005) and played the elderly Süleyman Dilbirliği in the Oscar-entry film Ayla (2017).
- Miles Teller
American actor known for Whiplash and Top Gun: Maverick; cast as attorney John Branca in Antoine Fuqua's 2026 biopic Michael.
- Teresa Leger Fernández
U.S. Representative for New Mexico's 3rd district since 2021; former public-interest lawyer who led the STOP Act and the Chaco Canyon protection bill.
- Anurag Thakur
Five-term BJP MP from Hamirpur, Himachal Pradesh; Union Minister of Information & Broadcasting and Youth Affairs & Sports from July 2021 to June 2024, who launched the "Krish, Trish and Baltiboy: Bharat Hain Hum" trailer in October 2023.
- Thavarchand Gehlot: from trade unionist to Social Justice Minister and Governor of Karnataka
Thavarchand Gehlot — BJP organiser, four-term Lok Sabha member, Union Social Justice Minister 2014–2021, and 19th Governor of Karnataka from July 2021 — ended his governorship in friction with the state government, from the 2024 MUDA sanction to the two-line address of January 2026.
- Peter Thiel
American entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal and Palantir Technologies, co-founded the venture firm Founders Fund, was an early Facebook investor, and was named among the private backers whose funding launched OpenAI in December 2015.
- Thomas Knoll
Co-creator of Photoshop with his brother John: a Michigan PhD student's image-display tool that became the world's standard photo editor, and later the work of a full-time Adobe engineer.
- Larry Thompson
Brooklyn resident whose 2014 arrest and unexplained dismissal of charges made him the petitioner in the Supreme Court's 2022 Thompson v. Clark ruling that federal malicious-prosecution plaintiffs need only show their prosecution ended without a conviction.
- Mark Thompson
Chairman and CEO of CNN Worldwide since October 2023: the former BBC Director-General and New York Times CEO who merged CNN's three newsrooms, cut around 100 roles, launched its first subscription product, and knighted in 2023 for services to media.
- Elaine Tierney
American lightweight rower (b. July 10, 1999) from West Chester, PA: five Temple seasons, then world silver in the lightweight women's pair at Racice 2022 and bronze at Belgrade 2023, both with Solveig Imsdahl — with the exact championship times no other profile consolidates.
- Thom Tillis
Republican U.S. senator from North Carolina since 2015 and former speaker of the North Carolina House (2011-2014). In September 2026 he called on Donald Trump to replace Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, saying he had "never witnessed more inept management" after Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigned.
- Tim Ryan
Former Democratic U.S. Representative from Ohio (2003–2023) and 2022 Senate nominee who lost to J.D. Vance; later declined a 2026 governor run and joined the 2026 National Commission on AI and the Future of the American Workforce.
- Toby Gabriner
Adtech executive who became AdRoll CEO in November 2017, led the 2018 RollWorks split, and renamed the parent company NextRoll in 2019.
- Tom Brady
Retired American football quarterback who won a record seven Super Bowls — six with the New England Patriots and one with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — after being drafted 199th overall in 2000, then became a Fox Sports analyst and an investor in the alternative-asset platform Alt's 2021 Series B.
- Tommy Nicholas
Co-founder and CEO of Alloy, the New York identity-decisioning company he built with Laura Spiekerman and Charles Hearn from a payments-industry frustration into a $1.55 billion fintech unicorn.
- Helen Toner
Australian-born AI policy researcher and interim executive director of Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, who as an independent OpenAI board member voted to remove Sam Altman as CEO in November 2023 and later testified as a trial witness in Musk v. OpenAI.
- Tony Carrk
Executive director of the progressive watchdog Accountable.US; former research director for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign who was quoted by NPR on The Epoch Times' nonprofit tax filings in 2024.
- Donald Trump Jr.
Eldest son of President Donald Trump; executive vice president of the Trump Organization and partner at 1789 Capital. In September 2026 his defense-sector drone investments and a Russian oligarch's funding of his Bahamas wedding drew conflict-of-interest scrutiny.
- Barron Trump
Only child of Donald and Melania Trump; NYU Stern School of Business student (class of 2028) who served as a behind-the-scenes podcast adviser to his father's 2024 presidential campaign.
- Donald Trump
45th and 47th president of the United States; real-estate mogul and reality TV star before politics. In 2026 his power rests on a $400M+ super PAC he publicly claims to control — triggering an FEC complaint — and a family crypto empire Reuters estimates at $2.3 billion.
- Eric Trump
Second son of Donald Trump; Trump Organization executive vice president who runs its golf portfolio and winery, and crypto entrepreneur behind World Liberty Financial and American Bitcoin.
- Ivana Trump
Czech-born businesswoman and first wife of Donald Trump, who left Communist Czechoslovakia through a lawyer-described "Cold War marriage," helped build his 1980s business empire, and saw their divorce finalized by court judgment in 1990.
- Ivanka Trump
The president's eldest daughter, once the unpaid senior adviser of his first White House, has re-emerged as a private deal-maker: co-founder of a food-waste company, a FIFA education-fund board member — and the public face of a contested luxury-resort project on Albania's protected Adriatic coast.
- Tiffany Trump
Only child of Donald Trump and Marla Maples; Georgetown Law graduate whose 2022 Mar-a-Lago wedding to Michael Boulos was followed by the birth of her son Alexander, the 11th Trump grandchild, in May 2025.
- Severino Twinobusingye
A Ugandan senior advocate who won an unprecedented UGX 12.9 billion legal-fees award for a 2011 constitutional challenge, later represented Amama Mbabazi's 2016 presidential election petition, and now chairs the university council of the disputed Karamoja Peace and Technology University.
- Can Ülkay
Turkish director of Ayla: The Daughter of War, Turkey's 2017 Oscar entry. A longtime commercial-film director — the Arda Turan Simit Sarayı campaign, spots for Lipton, Ülker and Türk Telekom — he later directed Netflix's Kağıttan Hayatlar (Paper Lives) and the 2025 spy thriller Uykucu.
- Yuri Ushakov
Kremlin foreign policy aide to Vladimir Putin since 2012 and Russia's lead negotiator in Ukraine-war talks with the United States; sanctioned by Canada, Ukraine and Australia — but not by the US, EU or UK.
- JD Vance
JD Vance is the vice president of the United States, sworn in January 20, 2025. A Marine veteran, Yale Law graduate and venture capitalist from Ohio, he wrote Hillbilly Elegy (2016), won a U.S. Senate seat in 2022, and joined Trump's 2024 ticket after once being a fierce Trump critic.
- Usha Chilukuri Vance
Second Lady of the United States and former trial lawyer; the first Asian American and Hindu American in the role. Her son Alec, born July 19, 2026, was the first child born to a sitting vice president in over 150 years.
- Ioannis Vardoulakis
Greek civil engineer and geomechanicist (1949–2009), Professor of Mechanics at the National Technical University of Athens, known for work on shear-band formation and bifurcation theory in granular materials.
- Vibhor Kapoor
Technology executive who rose through Microsoft, Box, and Adobe to become NextRoll's chief business officer and then its CEO on February 1, 2026.
- Vladimir Putin
President of the Russian Federation (2000–2008; 2012–present), a former KGB foreign-intelligence officer who has led Russia since 1999. He ordered the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine and won a fifth presidential term in March 2024 with 87.28% of the vote.
- Kristen Waggoner
CEO, president and chief counsel of Alliance Defending Freedom since October 2022; argued Masterpiece Cakeshop and 303 Creative at the U.S. Supreme Court before taking the organization's top job.
- Paul Waldman
A political columnist and author — an MSNBC opinion columnist, Public Notice contributor and PN Pod co-host — whose piece "Pete Hegseth will be the next to fall" predicted Hegseth would soon be fired or forced to resign.
- Mike Waltz
32nd U.S. Ambassador to the UN since 2025; former national security advisor removed after the Signal chat scandal; retired Green Beret colonel and former Florida congressman.
- Bashar Warda
Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Erbil, Iraq since 2010; entered the seminary at age twelve, pastored Baghdad's largest parish, coordinated wartime relief for nearly 20,000 displaced Christian families, and founded the Catholic University of Erbil in 2015.
- Lil Wayne
New Orleans rapper whose Tha Carter III sold over a million copies in its first week and won the Best Rap Album Grammy; founder of Young Money Entertainment, the label behind Drake and Nicki Minaj.
- Weidong Guan
Weidong "Bill" Guan, the former CFO of The Epoch Times Association, pleaded guilty in July 2026 to a conspiracy charge over an alleged $67M+ transnational money-laundering scheme run through cryptocurrency and prepaid debit cards; he is scheduled to be sentenced on December 4, 2026.
- Gregory Welch
Federal prisoner whose pro se challenge to his Armed Career Criminal Act sentence made the Supreme Court hold 7-1 in Welch v. United States (2016) that the Johnson ruling applies retroactively on collateral review.
- Michael Whatley
Former Republican National Committee chairman (2024-2025) and Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in North Carolina in 2026.
- Anne White
Wife of UFC president Dana White since 1996; married after knowing him since age 12, she has kept an exceptionally private life — until documented public appearances at the Bellagio in 2024 and the White House in June 2026.
- Dana White
UFC president and CEO Dana White turned a struggling fight promotion into a global sports giant and is a longtime friend and political ally of Donald Trump, from early 2001 events at the Trump Taj Mahal to a UFC card on the White House lawn in 2026.
- Arief Widhiyasa
Indonesian entrepreneur who co-founded and led the Bandung video game developer Agate as chief executive from 2009 to 2022, then became its Chairman and co-founded the web3 gaming company Mythic Protocol.
- Corey Williams
Intellectually disabled Louisiana man convicted of murder at 16 on a false confession and hidden evidence; freed in 2018 after his lawyers' Supreme Court petition exposed fabricated witness summaries and prosecutorial misconduct.
- Kingsley Wilson
Press secretary for the Department of War since May 2025. Her appointment followed controversy over posts flagged by NPR and Military.com and condemned by Jewish civil-rights groups; in the job she has defended Pete Hegseth as a "transformative leader" and run on-camera Pentagon briefings.
- Andrew Witkoff
The son of real-estate developer Steve Witkoff who died of an OxyContin overdose in 2011 at age 22. His father named the Las Vegas Drew resort for him; it was shelved during the pandemic and reopened as the Fontainebleau.
- Steve Witkoff
Billionaire real estate developer and founder of the Witkoff Group who became Donald Trump's special envoy to the Middle East and then his lead negotiator with Russia; led the September 2026 Moscow–Kyiv shuttle with Jared Kushner amid scrutiny over his praise of Putin and his crypto fortune.
- Zach Witkoff
Co-founder and CEO of World Liberty Financial, the Trump-family crypto venture; the son of Trump's special envoy who became the face of the firm while its Emirati deals ran parallel to his father's diplomacy.
- Zach Yadegari
Technology entrepreneur who co-founded the AI calorie-tracking app Cal AI as a high-school senior, scaled it past 15 million downloads, and sold it to MyFitnessPal at 19; now building the health-and-productivity hardware brand Flow.
- Sam Yam
Co-founder and longtime chief technology officer of Patreon, the creator-membership platform; in September 2026 he joined OpenAI to lead its new Creator Product division, bringing two former Patreon executives with him.
- Reuven Yaron
Israeli legal historian (1924–2014), born in Vienna, who trained at Oxford and Aberdeen, taught Roman and ancient Near Eastern law at the Hebrew University, led its law faculty back to Mt. Scopus as dean, and later headed the national library, the Israel Broadcasting Authority and state archives.
- Yiğit Güralp
Turkish screenwriter and creative producer of Ayla: The Daughter of War who won a 2022 court ruling against the film's producer after being sidelined from its PR; his career spans the music industry, hit TV, three features, and a 2023 essay book.
- Volodymyr Zelenskyy
President of Ukraine since 2019, the former comedian who became his country's wartime leader; in September 2026 he entered the war's fastest-moving diplomacy, meeting Trump on the U.N. General Assembly sidelines after U.S. envoy shuttles through Moscow and Kyiv.
- Avni Zogiani
Kosovo anti-corruption activist and founder of the civil-society movement Çohu (2005), later a deputy minister of infrastructure and environment (2020) and of finance, labor and transfers (2023-2025); Front Line Defenders documented threats against him and his family over his work.