“But there was also a lot of brilliance: genius thinking that transformed information, politics, business, and medicine,” The Daily Beast writes. “For all the pain and the angst, centuries from now historians may well measure the last 10 years by our biggest brains and the transformative changes they set in motion. The Daily Beast thought we’d help them with a present-day measure of the greatest minds of our times: the 25 smartest people of the decade.”
The List:
1. Larry Page and Sergey Brin
2. Steve Jobs: Field: Technology; Position: Co-founder and CEO, Apple Inc.; co-founder Pixar; Why He Was Nominated: Famously temperamental and tenacious, Jobs spent the decade battling health problems—and changing the way people work and communicate. He also helped revolutionize design and marketing. Think about his products that weren’t around a decade ago: the MacBook, the iPod, and the iPhone. Think about the music industry without iTunes, kids’ movies without Pixar’s wondrous digital animation, Jobs is responsible for “just about everything cool about computers,” says Daily Beast nominator Christopher Buckley. Fortune magazine, for one, named him the most powerful person in business in 2007 and the CEO of the decade in 2009. Having survived pancreatic cancer in 2004 and, more recently, a liver transplant, Jobs rules his empire like a philosopher king. He often quotes the wisdom of hockey great Wayne Gretzky: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
3. Steven Chu
4. Hillary Clinton
5. Muhammad Yunus
6. Harold Varmus
7. Elizabeth Blackburn
8. David Plouffe
9. Jacqueline Novogratz
10. Elizabeth Warren
11. Jimmy Wales
12. Jeff Bezos
13. Kwame Anthony Appiah
14. Arianna Huffington
15. Manmohan Singh
16. Malcolm Gladwell
17. Nouriel Roubini
18. General David Petraeus
19. Lawrence Lessig
20. Will Wright
21. Karl Rove
22. Michael Bloomberg
23. Ayman al-Zawahiri
24. David Chase
25. Roger Ailes
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As with any list, there are some problems, but we’re satisfied that it took two heads to squeak out a so-called victory over the real, sole smartest man of the decade: Steven P. Jobs.