Howard Lutnick

Howard Lutnick was orphaned young — his mother to cancer while he was in high school, his father to a hospital drug error in his freshman year — and Haverford College carried him through on a scholarship. At Cantor Fitzgerald he became chief executive at twenty-nine. On September 11, 2001, the firm's offices stood above the plane's point of impact: 658 of its 960 New York employees were killed, his brother Gary among them.

Lutnick lived because he was taking his son to his first day of kindergarten. He rebuilt the firm and pledged a quarter of its profits for five years to the victims' families, plus ten years of health care — some $180 million — and its Relief Fund and annual Charity Day have carried on since. A longtime supporter of Jewish causes, from the Park Avenue Synagogue to the Jerusalem emergency service United Hatzalah, he became United States Secretary of Commerce in 2025.