How this list was chosen
Any list of the most influential innovators is a matter of judgement. There is no agreed measure of influence, and whatever the criteria, important people will be missing. This list is unranked, so the order is not a score. It covers people whose work, since the year 2000, changed how large numbers of people live, communicate, work or do science.
The criteria were:
- Reach. Did the work affect many people or a whole industry?
- Newness. Did it introduce something materially new or make an existing idea practical at scale?
- Timing. Did the key work happen mostly in the 21st century?
- Verifiable role. Can the person’s contribution be described accurately without exaggeration?
Technology is almost always a team effort. Credit for a product usually belongs to many engineers, researchers and designers, and the names below are shorthand for larger groups. Influence is also not the same as approval: several people here are admired by some and criticised by others, and this article describes what they did rather than judging it.
The ten
1. Steve Jobs (1955-2011), Apple. Co-founder of Apple in the 1970s, Jobs returned to lead it in 1997. In the 21st century the company released the iPod (2001), the iPhone (announced in January 2007) and the iPad (2010). The iPhone’s touchscreen design and later app store model shaped how smartphones work today. Jobs died in October 2011, and many people contributed to these products.
2. Jeff Bezos, Amazon. Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookseller. His influence on 21st-century technology is partly through Amazon Web Services, which began offering cloud computing services such as storage and virtual servers in 2006, making rented computing power available to businesses of all sizes. This helped change how websites and apps are built and run, and it is part of why a cloud storage service is now ordinary.
3. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google. The two founded Google in 1998, just before the century began, so this entry is included for what followed: Gmail (2004), a mapping service, the Android mobile platform (Google bought the company behind it in 2005) and the Chrome browser (2008). Their search engine and advertising business shaped how people find information and how online advertising works.
4. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook (now Meta). Facebook launched in 2004 from Harvard and grew into one of the largest social networks. Its model of a feed shaped by a recommendation algorithm influenced social networking broadly, along with ongoing debates about privacy, misinformation and mental health. The company renamed itself Meta in 2021.
5. Elon Musk, SpaceX and Tesla. Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. Its Falcon 9 rocket achieved a first-stage landing in December 2015, and reusing boosters has become a key part of how the company operates. Tesla was founded in 2003 by other people, with Musk joining in 2004 as an investor and chairman; he later became chief executive. Both companies had a large effect on spaceflight and electric vehicles. Musk is also a polarising public figure, and views on his wider activities differ widely.
6. “Satoshi Nakamoto,” Bitcoin. The name is a pseudonym, and the real person or group has never been verified. A paper describing Bitcoin appeared in 2008 and the network began operating in 2009. Whatever one thinks of cryptocurrency as an investment, the underlying blockchain technology influenced finance and computing research.
7. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, gene editing. In 2012 the two researchers and their teams published work showing how the CRISPR-Cas9 system from bacteria could be programmed to cut DNA at chosen locations. They received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. This is biology rather than consumer technology, but gene editing tools have become central to research, and ethical debate about their use continues.
8. Geoffrey Hinton, deep learning. Hinton spent decades on neural networks. In 2012, a system built by his students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, with Hinton, did strikingly well in an image recognition contest, an event often cited as a turning point for deep learning. He shared the 2018 Turing Award with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun and a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Hopfield. Many researchers contributed to the field.
9. Demis Hassabis, DeepMind. Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010. Its AlphaGo system defeated the professional Go player Lee Sedol in 2016, and its AlphaFold system advanced the prediction of protein structures. Hassabis shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Jumper and David Baker for protein-related work.
10. Sam Altman, OpenAI. Altman helped start OpenAI in 2015 and later became its chief executive. The company released ChatGPT in November 2022, which brought generative AI to a mass audience and prompted wide discussion about benefits, risks and regulation. The technical foundations came from many researchers in several organisations.
Who is missing
Many deserving people are not listed, including engineers who built the infrastructure, open-source contributors, and founders from regions outside the usual headlines. Others could have been included: leaders of chip makers and mobile networks, developers of mobile payments, and researchers behind vaccines and renewable energy technology. Women and people outside the United States are under-represented in most lists of this kind, a pattern that reflects both history and how attention is distributed.
Reading lists like this critically
When you see a ranking of innovators, ask who made the list, what the criteria were and whether claims such as “inventor of” are accurate. Companies often reflect the work of hundreds of people, and legends tend to simplify. Treat any top 10 as a starting point for curiosity, not a final verdict.