Gordon Gekko

Gordon Gekko is one of the most famous fictional characters of the finance world. His most famous lines, often debated and repeated to this day, come in a scene when Gekko attends the shareholders meeting of Teldar Paper, which has been grossly mismanaged.

"Mr. Cromwell, Teldar Paper has 33 different vice presidents each earning over two hundred thousand dollars a year. Now, I have spent the last two months analyzing what all these guys do, and I still can't figure it out. One thing I do know is that our paper company lost 110 million dollars last year, and I'll bet that half of that was spent in all the paperwork going back and forth between all these vice presidents. The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated. In the last seven deals that I've been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pretax profit of 12 billion dollars. Thank you. I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much."

Gekko’s speech is controversial because it confronts the importance of self-interest in capitalist economies -- an idea that mirrors real-life Adam Smith’s argument in Wealth of Nations: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."