People in business

Captains of industry is an expression used to refer to the people who head and run companies,

but it sounds rather old-fashioned at a time when some business leaders are media figures like royalty or rock stars. These business leaders may be tycoons, magnates or moguls: rich and successful people with power and influence who head organizations. These words are often used in combinations like property tycoon, media magnate or publishing mogul.

Peter Morgan, director general of the Institute of Directors, said captains of industry were as entitled to the same sort of pay as 'stars' in any other profession.

Parretti, son of a Sicilian olive merchant, worked as a waiter at the Savoy Hotel and on the QE2 before his sudden appearance as a Hollywood mogul. Where, the money for this came from, nobody knows.

John D Rockefeller, the oil magnate who founded Standard Oil and made big oil truly big.

The Hong Kong property tycoon is paying Olympia & York £25 million for a partnership in a 39-storey New York office block through his Concord Property and Finance Group.

Hoping to join these business leaders, perhaps, are the entrepreneurs who start up new businesses and whizz-kids, people with talent, perhaps talent to move up in an organization quickly.

High rollers are rich, successful people not necessarily at the top of an organization, and yuppies are young middle-class professional people who like to be seen spending money, although they are less visible now than in the boom years of the 1980s, when the word was invented.

The Maxwell brothers see themselves as professional managers rather than buccaneering entrepreneurs.

Grigori Lavlinsky, the whizz-kid economist who collaborates with colleagues from Harvard on multibillion-rouble plans for economic revival.

...the high-rollers of the 1980's: bankers, brokers, admen, property moguls, people who had made their fortune in the boom years.

Scott is painted as a yuppy arriviste flying out to French chateaux in private planes for weekends with French advertising executives.

Business organizations need accountants to keep track of the money coming in and going out of the business. Journalists often refer, slightly offensively, to accountants and other numerate specialists as bean-counters or number-crunchers. The experts who run the computers on which the numbers are crunched are sometimes referred to as nerds or techno-nerds: very informal words used insultingly, especially by people who don't like or know much about computers

Bean-counter and number-cruncher arc also spelt as two words.

Techno-nerd is so spelt as one word or two words.

The reason for America's robot failure is that we have bean-counters running our companies. The Japanese have engineering and manufacturing people.

...an army of number-crunchers from the accountancy firm Touche Ross.

.. .although most of the nerds who break unbidden into other people's computers have more in common with Pee Wee Herman than James Bond.

For the ambitious, the true believers and the techno-nerds, the Strategic Defense Initiative was the place to be.