Short answers, pulled from the story.
Peter D. Adkison is an American game designer and businessman best known as the founder of Wizards of the Coast. He served as the company's CEO from 1993 to 2001 and is also the current owner of Gen Con, a major yearly game convention.
Adkison founded Wizards of the Coast on the 23rd of May 1990 while still working as a systems analyst at Boeing. The name came from a suggestion by his friend Terry Campbell, drawn from a guild in one of their role-playing campaigns.
Adkison asked game designer Richard Garfield to develop a game cheaper to produce than Garfield's proposed board game RoboRally. Garfield combined the concept of baseball cards with a card game, and the result was Magic: The Gathering, released in 1993, which started the collectible card game genre.
Adkison paid approximately US$30 million to purchase TSR, including the payment of its debts. Wizards of the Coast announced the acquisition on the 10th of April 1997.
Adkison had been developing a Dungeons and Dragons MMORPG, but Hasbro folded the rights to D&D computer games into Hasbro Interactive and sold them to Infogrames. Unable to publish D&D computer games, Adkison submitted his resignation, effective the 31st of December 2000.
Adkison purchased Gen Con from Hasbro in May 2002. He had been attending the convention since 1992 and has said he has "always loved" Gen Con.