Yaron Brook

Yaron Brook (Hebrew: ירון ברוק; born May 23, 1961) is an Israeli-American entrepreneur, writer, and public intellectual. He is an Objectivist, a former finance professor at Santa Clara University, and the current chairman of the board at the Ayn Rand Institute, where he was executive director from 2000 to 2017. He is also the co-founder of BHZ Capital Management LP.

Brook is co-author, with Don Watkins, of the book Equal is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality. “What we care about is whether individuals are able to rise by merit—and the fact is that many of the policies the inequality critics say will improve mobility actually make rising by merit much harder,” they argue in the book.

Brook supports the work of Alex Epstein (Author of Fossil Future and The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels) and his approach to climate change and human flourishing. Brook argues that free markets and capitalism have the potential to produce real solutions to the negative impacts of a changing climate and that the ESG movement and net zero government policies will have a disastrous impact on human beings.

Brook's activism has been described as "anti-progressive" and he has been criticized by activists for targeting Black Lives Matter and feminist activists. In 2018, a public event featuring Brook and Carl Benjamin as speakers was protested by Antifa activists. Brook has argued that Islamic ideology is contrary to the moral values of contemporary Western societies.