John C. Bogle

Bogle founded Vanguard in 1974 and launched the first index fund available to ordinary investors the year after, an idea Wall Street called un-American because it gave up on beating the market. He structured the firm so that it was owned by its own funds, which is to say by its investors, removing the incentive to charge them more. That single decision cost him the personal fortune his competitors made. His argument, repeated for forty years, is that costs compound against a saver exactly as returns compound for one. He had a heart transplant in 1996, worked two decades more, and died in 2019.