Making a Mint Overnight

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son of an Austrian coffee merchant and his Rumanian wife, Bernhard grew up in Brooklyn. A Phi Beta Kappa, he earned a degree in English from Williams College, then got a job writing theater reviews for TIME in 1925. His pay: $10 a week. Hoping to make more money, Bernhard left after a few months and eventually wandered to Wall Street. There he earned $6,000 a year before losing his job during the Depression. He recalls, "I had a couple of weeks there when I was trying to decide whether to jump off a bridge."

Soon Bernhard had a foothold again, managing money for some clients and working on a stock-rating system, which in 1935 he turned into the Value Line Investment Survey. Today 111,400 subscribers pay Value Line $365 a year for an assessment of 1,700 companies.

Autocratic yet affable, Bernhard lives in the Georgian colonial home in suburban Westport, Conn., that he bought for $55,000 in 1944. He uses a second-floor room as an office, often working a ten-hour day. His stock in Value Line was worth $145 million when the company went public last year.

Neil Hirsch, 36, founder of Telerate Systems, an electronic financial information service. "I was an average kid; I was an average student," Hirsch recalls. "But when I was 21, I realized I had always wanted to make something of myself. I doubted I could be a terrific lawyer or a doctor, but I realized I could make a lot of money." Hirsch's father ran the New York buying office of a family-owned department-store chain. The younger Hirsch spent two years studying business at the University of Bridgeport but then dropped out. While living in a fourth-floor walk-up on Manhattan's Lower West Side, he attended more business classes at Pace University and started hanging out around stock-brokerage offices. It was there that he had the idea for speedily transmitting financial data to individual customers.

In 1969 Hirsch formed Telerate to track the prices of volatile commercial paper, corporate IOUs that are issued by such companies as General Motors, Sears and Household Finance, and send them electronically to customers' video terminals. Some 11,000 subscribers in the U.S. and overseas pay an average of $700 per month for the service. In April, when Telerate went public, Hirsch held shares worth $67.5 million.

Last summer Hirsch moved into a $900,000 apartment on Manhattan's East Side. He now commutes to his 104th-floor office at the World Trade Center in a Mercedes limousine.

Mitchell Kapor, 33, founder of Lotus Development, a computer software company. A Brooklyn-born math whiz, Kapor graduated from Yale at 20, then dabbled as a disc jockey, an instructor in Transcendental Meditation and a mental-hospital counselor. Little commanded his attention until he impulsively traded in his stereo system for an Apple II computer. Within a few months, he wrote two computer programs that create charts and graphs for businesses and sold them to a software distributor for $1.2 million. With royalties from the programs and backing from venture capitalists, he founded Lotus Development in 1982.

Within a year the company's 1-2-3 program, which combines popular business functions like spread-sheet analysis and graphics into one package, became the industry's bestseller at a price of $495. Sales through September: 110,000. Lotus is now the second largest