High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Louis Orth Kelso (December 4, 1913 – February 17, 1991) was a political economist in the classical tradition of Smith, Marx and Keynes. He was also a corporate and financial lawyer, author, lecturer and merchant banker who is chiefly remembered today as the inventor and pioneer of the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), the prototype of the leveraged buyout invented to enable working people without savings to buy stock in their employer company and pay for it out of its future dividend yield.