I find it strange that Daniel Weinreb, Guy Steele and Richard Stallman are on this list. Steele co-wrote ?macs with David Moon and John Kulp. Dan Weinreb was a beta tester on ?macs before Stallman joined the project, and he would later become the first one to write an Emacs in a lisp (EINE). Stallman, of course, created GNU Emacs. Putting them on a list with Assange and Zuckerberg is ridiculous.
It's a list of people who are (1) famous AND (2) Emacs users AND who would still be famous if they were not Emacs users. Weinreb, Steele, and Stallman all fit this. Also, you make it sound like Stallman wasn't involved in Emacs from the start. In fact, Stallman and Steele wrote the FIRST Emacs. Everyone else you named came after.
"Frustrated, Steele took it upon himself to the solve the problem. He gathered together the four different macro packages and began assembling a chart documenting the most useful macro commands. In the course of implementing the design specified by the chart, Steele says he attracted Stallman's attention.
"He started looking over my shoulder, asking me what I was doing," recalls Steele.
For Steele, a soft-spoken hacker who interacted with Stallman infrequently, the memory still sticks out. Looking over another hacker's shoulder while he worked was a common activity at the AI Lab. Stallman, the TECO maintainer at the lab, deemed Steele's work "interesting" and quickly set off to complete it.
"As I like to say, I did the first 0.001 percent of the implementation, and Stallman did the rest," says Steele with a laugh.
The project's new name, Emacs, came courtesy of Stallman.[1]
I think Coders at Work, by Peter Seibel, also talks a little about this in one of the interviews.
[1] Free as in Freedom