Shamelessly stolen off comp.emacs. You can see it at
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&frame=right&th=636e3d0f9a421166&seekm=87y8hn66rk.fsf%40heresy.ainola.jyu.fi#link1

– Richard Stallman (founder of Free Software Foundation) is an Emacs
user. Hint: He is the original author of Emacs, after all. :-)

– Yukihiro Matsumoto (creator of the Ruby programming language) is an
Emacs user. Hint: He said so in a post to ruby-talk mailing list.
Quote from http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/108051:
“I wrote ruby-mode.el; I live in Emacs; I program in Emacs; I debug in
Emacs; I read mails in Emacs; I wrote MUA for Emacs.”

– Jeremy Zawodny (author of “High Performance MySQL”) is an Emacs
user. Hint: He wrote Emacs Beginners’ Howto
(http://jeremy.zawodny.com/emacs/).

– Andrew S. Tanenbaum used elle. It is some clone of emacs. Then

he moved to emacs. He said so in his homepage.
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/home/faq.html “Which editor do you use
for producing books? I used to use elle, a stripped down emacs
clone, but I finally decided to take the plunge and move up to
full emacs.”

– James Gosling, father of Java, currently CTO at Sun’s Developer
Products Group, uses Emacs. Hint: He wrote a C-based Emacs
implementation in 1981 (the code portions of which became GNU
Emacs). … Uh, no. He was one of the reasons that the GPL and
copyright assignments were invented. His code had to be removed
from Emacs and substantial portions rewritten by Stallman,
because he refused to let his stuff get distributed by the FSF.

– Jamie Zawinski, one of the main coders for Netscape Navigator
and one the founders of the Mozilla Foundation, uses Emacs. Hint:
He wrote Lucid Emacs. There’s an Emacs timeline document on his
website, http://www.jwz.org/ … So you can bet your sweet ***
that he is not using Emacs, but rather XEmacs (which is the
successor of Lucid Emacs).

– Guy Steele. Co-inventor of Scheme, author of “Common Lisp the

Language”, co-author of the Java language specification, first
person to port TeX, served on the standards commitees for C,
Fortran, Common Lisp and Scheme. And finally designer of the
original Emacs command set.

– John McCarthy. Inventor of Lisp, one of the founders of AI

research. (proof: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/facts.txt).

– SF writer Neil Stephenson uses Emacs for some of his books

http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html “I use emacs, which
might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.”

– Donald Erwin Knuth (creator of TeX) is an Emacs user. Hint:

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html See that
Fvwm2-config and its screenshot.

– Eric “ESR” Steven Raymond is an Emacs user. Hints: Author of “Learning

GNU Emacs”. See also this: http://www.catb.org/~esr/fvwm2/