Steve Jobs used to say something I've never forgotten: you can tell a lot about a company or person by the heroes they keep.

This WIRED story prompted my question, because I only knew a few people like Anthony Fauci, Al Gore, Ava DuVernay, and Sarah Cooper on this list. @cvdavis ' hero Elon didn't make the list, my heroes Bill & Melinda Gates didn't make it, and I wonder who yours are. (Well I guess I knew about Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai too.)

Meet This Year's WIRED25: People Who Are Making Things BetterThe scientists, technologists, artists, and chefs who are standing between us and species collapse.www.wired.com

My wife's Uncle. Finest man I ever hung out with.

Roden CutlerSir Arthur Roden Cutler, (24 May 1916 - 21 February 2002), known as Sir Roden Cutler, was an Australian diplomat, the longest serving Governor of New South Wales and a recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest award for gallantry "in the face of the enemy" that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth armed forces.en.wikipedia.org

Double bluff.

The legendary Stranglers taking the piss out of Pop TV by totally not giving a toss - with their Heroic Song.

Triple bluff.

Heroes, Bowie and Earl Slick.

For making Art a Lifestyle - or vice versa - and getting other people to fabricate it.

Ed RothEd "Big Daddy" Roth (March 4, 1932 - April 4, 2001) was an American artist, cartoonist, illustrator, pinstriper and custom car designer and builder who created the hot rod icon Rat Fink and other characters. Roth was a key figure in Southern California's Kustom Kulture and hot rod movement of the late 1950s and 1960s.en.wikipedia.org

Jeff Koons and all the other 'facilitators' of art owe him a debt.

I'll chime in slightly sideways.

Me growing up in USSR kinda turned me off heroes as a concept, even before an idea of philosophy being something else than a fanciful name even started to begin to cross my mind. Because in that late stage of USSR the indoctrination was still there (I caught the tail end of all the Oktyabryata and Pioneers youth "movements") and literature for children was still full of various role models harking back to the Great October Socialist Revolution, civil war and the Great Patriotic War; but it was already kinda obvious that many of those were morally controversial (and at times clearly horrific). Not to mention the other "role models" like e.g. Mr. Brezhnev who in his late slightly senile years was putting the "Hero of the Soviet Union" highest state awards on his jacket like trinkets.

Later, it occurred to me that one person's hero is another person's villain, and significantly later it occurred to me that it's much healthier to just not judge [on that axis; or at all]. Ever a sucker for symbolism, I'll give two illustrations. One is a beautiful movie, both cinematographically and because it is literally eponymous with our topic. If you haven't watched it - I can't recommend enough. And another is a little rhyme which I'll try to quote from memory:

Here lies a toppled god,
His fall was not a small one.
We did but build his pedestal,
A narrow and a tall one.

-- from one of the Dune books, attributed to the Tleilaxu

I do have people I admire and respect, though I don't keep a list. Elon Musk would make it off the top of my head and since he has been already mentioned. Richard Feynman would make it. William Gibson would make it. For sure many more people whose name I just do not remember right now, because I just don't have a sorted list like that readily made or even regularly considered. I'm busy enough being me to seriously invest in grooming such a list on a regular basis :)