Financier Ivan Boesky, who died Monday, was at the center of an insider-trading scandal in the 1980s but he may be best remembered for the movie character he partly inspired: Gordon Gekko, the villain in Wall Street. "Greed is all right, by the way," Boesky said in a 1986 commencement speech at the University of California, Berkeley. "I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself." His remarks were echoed in Gekko's famous "greed is good" speech."
- Boesky, who often worked 18-hour days, made his fortune "betting on stock tips, often passed to him illegally in exchange for suitcases of cash," the New York Times reports. He "brought an aggressive style to the once-sleepy world of arbitrage, the buying and selling of stocks in companies that appear to be takeover targets," per the Times. His nicknames included "Piggy" and "Ivan the Terrible."