How many ceos died on 911

On the 20 th anniversary of the attacks, Lutnick remembers the chaos and tragedy of the day. Among those who died were his brother, his best friend and several people he had hired. Lutnick hurried towards the office after dropping his son, but was floored by a giant cloud of dust and ash tearing through Lower Manhattan as the South Tower crumbled.

Cantor Fitzgerald was making a million dollars a day. Lutnick took an unpopular decision to stop the salary of those who had perished. But for a while, Lutnick was a reviled man.

It was about survival. Lutnick also decided to keep the company going, despite the daily 7-figure losses, and the fear and pessimism in the air. It also hired the children of some of the victims. Not only had I lost my brother, but I really also lost my child. Howard Lutnick headed directly for ground zero, where he spent the next few hours helping to pull the few survivors out of the ruble of the collapsed towers.

That's a devastation that will remain in my heart forever. Edie describes those first few hours after the attack as chaotic. I started thinking about all the people that I felt were more qualified to do this than I was and I realized that they were all gone.

So I said 'okay. Eventually, the survivors met at Howard's apartment. They set up crisis centers at the Pierre and Plaza hotels, where family members could come while they painstakingly worked to figure out who was alive and who wasn't. It was during that process that Howard asked his sister to head what would become the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund.

David Kravette is one of the few Cantor Fitzgerald employees who survived the attack. He had gone down to the lobby to sign in a visitor just moments before the crash. I mean, everyone I worked with for a long time, most of them were dead. It was a sad place to be, and we were in survival mode as a firm.

I actually didn't think we'd make it as a company the first week or so," he said. We had to juggle between rebuilding and also going to funerals.

There was actually an internal website just for funeral schedules. At the time, I thought keeping busy was healthy for me. In the weeks that followed, Howard Lutnick made a difficult decision that tied the fate of the firm to the fate of the Relief Fund: Instead of continuing to pay the salaries of the employees who had died, Lutnick promised to give the families of the Cantor Fitzgerald victims ten years of health insurance and 25 percent of the firm's profits for five years.

It was an incentive for the company to not only survive, but to succeed. The decision was met with some criticism. In her book, An Unbroken Bond , Edie recalls the period as an especially dark one: "I am overwhelmed, frustrated, angry, sleep deprived and hurt I tell Howard that I don't want to do this.

I have not helped him. I want to stop. I want to quit," wrote Edie. Her brother, she says, was rational in the face of the backlash. He said: "At that point it was chaos. I got expelled from the elevator with some colleagues. I crawled around the corner to the stairwell and maybe 30 seconds later one of my colleagues came down to the 43rd floor and we made the decision we needed to get out of the building as quickly as possible. Andrew and his colleagues still had no idea what had happened.

The only logical explanation they had was that the other tower had collapsed into their tower. Now he understands that during the massive second explosion, the jet fuel came down the lift shaft and blew the lift apart. He said: "I am not sure how many survivors there were in the elevator but I was told it had dropped at that point. So we were fairly fortunate to be on the front.

After finding a stairwell, they managed to get to the lobby where port authority officers and fire crews were trying to organise people to get them out of the building. They did not want to waste a minute so they found the east side of the building and headed into the courtyard and then over towards the street. We got knocked down to the floor and we were behind a desk when it blew in over the top of us. Once the dust had settled we made our way into one of the bathrooms and grabbed wet towels and wrapped them around our faces to avoid inhaling smoke.

When we hit the East River we found about a million other people. Andrew believes it was instinct that got him out of the tower in time. I am deathly terrified of heights so that ironically might have saved my life.