CNBC has released “CNBC First 25,” a ranked list of the 25 people CNBC judges to have had the most profound impact on business and finance since 1989, the year CNBC went live. They have disrupted industries, sparked change and exercised an influence far beyond their own companies.
As CNBC embarks on its second quarter-century, it faces a world completely altered from when it started. Then, the Dow was below 2,400, Wal-Mart didn’t make the list of America’s 500 largest companies and there was no World Wide Web. Only four U.S. companies had annual revenue of more than $50 billion. Today there are more than 50, including upstarts such as Apple Inc. No dictionary contained the words “e-commerce” or “app.” A blog was still archaic slang for a servant boy.
The 25 men and women on the list — from different parts of the world and across different industries — have, for better or worse, been the rebels, icons and leaders in the vanguard of that change.
“We made the decision early on to eliminate heads of government and state from our deliberations. This is a list, after all, about business people, not politicians. It’s about the men and women who, for better or worse, have had the most transformative effect on commerce, finance, markets, human behavior and global culture over the past 25 years,” CNBC’s Tyler Mathisen explains. “This not a list of billionaires, though many of the people on it are. Money is not the measure. Revolutionary, or evolutionary, impact is… You could argue that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web (sorry Al Gore), deserves not only to be in the top 25—as several of our number did—but to be No. 1, as the Gutenberg of our era. In the end, our collective judgment was that Berners-Lee was less a business leader than a computer scientist who transformed how we share information.”
1. Steve Jobs: His creative genius revolutionized not just his industry and its products, but also everything from music and movies to smartphones. He provided a platform for others to create and distribute apps, bringing innovation and change to an even wider sphere. Apple’s co-founder tops our anniversary list of the 25 most transformative leaders, icons and rebels of the past-quarter century. More than any other member of our group of extraordinary entrepreneurs and executives—all outstanding leaders—his vision spurred changes far beyond his industry and put an indelible stamp on the wider culture.
2. Bill Gates
3. Ben Bernanke & Alan Greenspan
4. Sergey Brin‚ Larry Page & Eric Schmidt
5. Jeff Bezos
6. Warren Buffett
7. Oprah Winfrey
8. Mark Zuckerberg
9. Jack Bogle
10. Larry Ellison
11. Rupert Murdoch
12. Jack Welch
13. NR Narayana Murthy
14. Howard Schultz
15. Bernard Arnault
16. Li Ka-shing
17. Carl Icahn
18. Meg Whitman
19. Amancio Ortega
20. Michael Bloomberg
21. Sandy Weill
22. Cher Wang
23. Aliko Dangote
24. Martha Stewart
25. Carlos Slim
Read more about each person here.
MacDailyNews Take: Steve Jobs #1.
