Great question — some surnames are especially “conjugation-friendly,” meaning they easily take on productive suffixes and prefixes (-esque, -sphere, -dom, -tard, -ist, -ian, etc.) without sounding clunky. The best ones tend to share a few traits:

1. Short, punchy, monosyllabic names

• Thiel, Musk, Trump, Koch, Gates, Jobs, Page, Brin
  → Easy to extend: Muskian, Trumposphere, Jobsite, Gatesian.

• They work because they’re phonetically compact and don’t break when you tack stuff on.

2. Names ending in liquid consonants (-l, -r, -n)

• Thiel, Blair, Blairite; Blairism.

• Kahn → Kahnian, Kahnate.

• Thaler → Thalerian, Thalerdom.

• Liquids make the transition smoother between root and suffix.

3. Names with hard, distinctive plosives (-k, -p, -t)

• Zuck (Zuckerberg), Koch, Beck, Thatch(er), Brock.
  → These sound good with both pejorative and grand extensions: Zuckdom, Kochsphere, Thatcherite, Brocktard.

4. Two-syllable rhythmic names

• Vassar, Lenin, Darwin, Hegel, Foucault, Nietzsche (sort of).
  → Work well with -ian, -ist, -ism, -esque: Darwinian, Vassardom, Foucauldian.

• Not too long, not too short, but still recognizable.

5. Names that are already word-like

• Stone, Church, Hill, Bell, Locke, Marx.
  → Can be conjugated in multiple directions: Stoneism, Churchian, Bellhead, Lockean, Marxoid.

• The fact they overlap with English nouns/adjectives makes them productive.

6. Euphonic or “elastic” endings

• -sky / -ski (Lebowski, Brodsky) → Lebowskian, Brodskyesque.

• -er (Porter, Parker, Spencer) → Porterian, Spencerism.

• -son (Harrison, Johnson) → Johnsonian, Harrisonesque.

7. Less productive (clunky) cases

• Long, polysyllabic names with awkward clusters (e.g., “Schwarzenegger,” “Chandrasekhar”) tend to be harder to adapt, unless truncated (Schwarzeneggery feels silly, but “Schwarzeneggerian” is possible).

• Names ending in vowels sometimes resist suffixes: “Mao” works (Maoism), but “Obamaesque” is less clean.

✅ Best candidates overall:

• Crisp monosyllables (Thiel, Musk, Gates, Koch).

• Snappy two-syllables (Vassar, Darwin, Hegel, Lenin).

• Anglo-Saxon noun-like names (Stone, Locke, Marx).

Do you want me to actually rank modern well-known figures’ surnames by “conjugation potential” (like which sound coolest/meme-iest when suffixed), or keep it more general/linguistic?