In Atlas Shrugged Ms Rand makes a clear and marked distinction between two key groups of people in the world - between those who make the world work, and those who like parasites feed off the energy, vitality, creativity, and productivity of the former. The one she calls the prime movers, the other she correctly identifies as looters. Eddie Willers is a key character in the first group; not someone with the talent or drive of a Dagny or Reardon, but someone who shares their values and is totally loyal to them to the end.
Interestingly, one of the key antagonists in the book is also one of the least capable individuals, yet one of the most powerful. Elevated to his position by the privilege of birth, corrupted by a life of entitlement and largesse handed to him by others rather than acquired with his own talents and energy, he allowed his envy and greed to consume what remnants of individual character he had left. Rather than accept his position of absolute privilege and allow his character to grow, he cravenly allowed it to deteriorate.
It is James Taggart who is the anti-Willers in the book, who saw in Eddie his own true level of talent, but who in his artificially elevated position rose even higher in the ranks of the looters, whose fall was just as ignominius and thoroughly proper. It was James Taggert who viewed Eddie as a sniveling lapdog, the hapless boob - precisely because he recognized in Eddie himself without the privilege, himself without the opportunity, himself without the energy, the vision, and the willingness to take the risks necessary to become the prime mover his sister was - which is precisely why James Taggart disdained and hated Eddie as he did - because Eddie, he knew, had done far more in his lack of all those things than he ever could with them; and it was Eddie, he knew, who had the strength of character to make at least something of very little. It was Eddie whom James Taggart avoided like the plague - because it was Eddie who concretely revealed his own failings, his own disloyalty, his own sniveling, his own haplessness - all brought on by his own lack of character which he'd abandoned as soon as he recognized that life doesn't happen, success doesn't happen, but must be worked for, and that with whatever resources one has available to them, to make with what they can.
James Taggart is the epitome of greed and materialism in the book - and the logical end to both when allowed to run their course in individuals without the character to recognize their own self-induced sense of entitlement.
That's, in part at least, why I chose the name Edwin Willers. I'm no John Galt; I'm no Hank Reardon. But neither am I James Taggart.