Bloomberg's top 50 people who defined global business in 2017

1 Nikki Haley
US Ambassador to UN

On September 11, Haley pushed through a Security Council agreement to impose the toughestever sanctions on North Korea, limiting the country’s oil imports and banning its textile exports, which will deprive Pyongyang of what Haley estimated is 90% of its export revenue.

2 Bobby Kotick
CEO, Activision Blizzard

Kotick raised $240 million selling 12 franchises for the first city-based professional esports league, testament to the seriousness with which the traditional sports universe is viewing competitive gaming.

3 Mohammed bin Salman
Crown prince, Saudi Arabia

In November, the prince ordered the arrest of 11 cousins and dozens of current and former officials and prominent businessmen in a play to consolidate power.

4 Ken Frazier
CEO, Merck

By being the first executive to resign from Donald Trump’s American Manufacturing Council following the president’s divisive comments on Charlottesville, Frazier all but ordained the group’s dissolution.

5 Lilly Singh
YouTube star and author

Singh transformed herself from Internet personality to media mogul with How to Be a Bawse, which hit No. 1 on the New York Times business book best-seller list in May while she was on an 11-country tour

6 Masayoshi Son
Founder, Softbank

Son raised $93 billion to create the largest-ever technology investment fund, a pool of capital that will let him bet on the future of ride-hailing, artificial intelligence, connected devices, satellites, and the integration of computers and humans

7 & 8 Jill Soloway & Patty Jenkins
Creator and executive producer, transparent and I love Dick; director, wonder woman

Soloway scored seven additional Emmy nominations for Transparent and inked a threeyear deal with Amazon Studios to develop a slate of 20 original series and feature films. The first woman to helm a studio superhero movie and only the second to oversee a $100 millionplus budget, Jenkins dominated the international box office: Wonder Woman has made $822 million and counting, smashing a record for the highest-grossing movie with a female director.

9 Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski
Senators, Maine and Alaska

The two Republicans repeatedly stymied their party’s attempts to undo Obamacare, saving 22 million Americans from losing their health insurance in one version of the repeal legislation.

10 David Siegel and John Overdeck
Co-founders, Two Sigma

By using computer-driven quantitative analysis, Siegel and Overdeck have amassed a portfolio of $50 billion, up from $35 billion in May 2016, while traditional fund managers such as John Paulson and Paul Tudor Jones have suffered steep losses.

11 Yoshiaki Koizumi
GM, entertainment planning and development department, Nintendo

The Switch, which marries home and portable gaming, is revolutionising the industry, sending Nintendo’s stock soaring 96% since the system launched in March.

12 Diane Greene
Senior VP and Cloud chief, Google

In the past year, Google’s cloud sales grew more than 80%, outpacing industry leader Amazon, according to Synergy Research Group.

13 Marty Chavez
CFO, Goldman Sachs

Chavez, who shifted to his new role from chief information officer in January, is now Goldman’s top investor liaison for an unusually public plan to produce an additional $5 billion in revenue through 2020, and he’s leveraging the company’s massive database of financial data to better communicate with shareholders.

14 Marillyn Hewson
CEO, Lockheed Martin

In May, Saudi Arabia signed a $15-billion contract for a missile defence system that Lockheed developed on Hewson’s watch—the same one South Korea deployed when Kim Jong-un started lobbing missiles over Japan.

15 Geoffrey Hinton
Chief scientific adviser, Vector Institute

Toronto’s $180-million artificial intelligence research centre will shore up Canada’s claim to being an AI superpower and nurture Hinton’s reputation as the field’s top expert.

16 Agnes Gund
Philanthropist

Gund seeded a fund with $100 million to reduce prison populations and plans to double the endowment in the next five years.

17 Marcos Galperin
Co-founder and CEO, Mercadolibre

Latin America’s dominant ecommerce platform saw revenue increase 61% this year, the fastest pace in a decade, as Galperin expanded into financial services.

18 Margrethe Vestager
EU Competition Commissioner

In June, Vestager levied a €2.3 billion ($2.7 billion) penalty on Google, the highest antitrust fine the EU has imposed on a company, solidifying her role as enemy No. 1 of US Internet titans.

19 Richard Pazdur
Director, US FDA Oncology Center of Excellence

Pazdur’s department at the FDA is increasing the rate at which cancer drugs are approved, with medications that fight the illness making up 31% of novel-drug approvals through mid-November, up from 27% last year.

20 Francesco De Rubertis
Co-founder, Medicxi Ventures

De Rubertis’s reputation for halving the time it takes for a return on biotech investments has Silicon Valley eager to get in on a $300-million fund he’s raised for late-stage startups.

21 David Autor
Economist, MIT

Autor’s research illuminated the devastation of US manufacturing by cheap goods from China since 1990, which led to reduced overall fertility while raising the share of births by teens and unmarried mothers, in some areas by a halfpercent.

22 Aliko Dangote
CEO, Dangote Group

Africa’s richest man announced plans to invest $4.6 billion over the next three years in boosting food production in his native Nigeria.

23 Susan Fowler
Editor-in-chief, Increment

After the former engineer at Uber chronicled its gender discrimination and workplace chaos, the company commissioned an independent investigation that recommended 47 steps to reform its cultural values.

24 Ashley Judd, Rose McGowan, and Lauren O’Connor
Whistleblowers

In the wake of an October New York Times story detailing accusations of a decades-long pattern of sexual harassment by film producer Harvey Weinstein, more than 40 powerful men in entertainment, media and politics have been similarly accused, exposing a pattern of abuse that’s upended those worlds.

25 Marc Lore
President & CEO, Walmart E-commerce US

Lore engineered U. sales growth of at least 50% in each of the first three quarters, reversing poor online performance and giving Walmart relevance in a space ruled by Amazon.com.

26 Scott Pruitt
Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency

After years of battling the EPA from the outside, Pruitt is now fighting it from within, slashing the agency’s 15,000-member workforce by a third and proposing a repeal of curbs on carbon dioxide emissions to spare companies what it says are $33 billion in compliance costs.

27 Jordan Peele
Founder, Monkeypaw Productions

Horror-comedy Get Out, Peele’s directorial debut, took in $252 million worldwide on a $4.5-million budget and established the 38-year-old actor, writer and producer as Hollywood’s most trenchant satirist.

28 Igor Tulchinsky
Founder and CEO, Worldquant

WorldQuant started the year with 4 million predictive trading algorithms and expects to have 6 million more in its library by yearend, bolstering its reputation as the rising star among quant hedge funds.

29 Beatrice Fihn
Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Executive Director, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)

The Swedish lawyer was central to the adoption in September of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, an agreement that has 122 nations on board—and will, once 50 ratify it, become international law, creating potential financial consequences for companies and countries that help produce nukes.

30 Andrew Zobler
Founder, Sydell Group

Zobler’s London hotel, the Ned, measures 320,000 square feet—an almost unheard-of size for a property that retains a luxury boutique feel—and bolsters his reputation as a catalyst for global urban revitalisation.

31 Robert Mueller
Special Counsel, US Department of Justice

His probe into whether candidate Donald Trump or his associates colluded with Russia has made him Washington’s ultimate power player; the investigation continues to ensnare advisers, including former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who’s charged with allegedly laundering $18 million and other crimes.

32 Anthony Tan
CEO AND Co-founder, Grab

Grab has 72% of the ride-hailing market in Southeast Asia, positioning the company as a key brick in the region’s anti-Uber bulwark.

33 Rachel Maddow
Host, The Rachel Maddow Show

Feeding blue-state America a nightly ration of anti-Trump red meat has expanded her audience 75% year over year.

34 Vitalik Buterin
Inventor, Ethereum

Ether, the digital currency Buterin created to allow users to access his ethereum blockchain software, gained more than 3,600 in value in 2017, a sign that investors still see the network as a potentially revolutionary tool despite security concerns.

35 Jeff Bezos
CEO, Amazon

His acquisition of Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion showed that Bezos isn’t content with Amazon merely being the No. 1 online retailer.

36 Paul Gaudio
Global Creative Director, Adidas

Gaudio’s inventiveness led Adidas to overtake Nike’s Jordan brand for the No. 2 spot in US sneaker sales, a rapid rebound for the German sportswear giant.

37 Luhan Yang
Co-founder, EGenesis

Using Crispr gene-editing technology, EGenesis overcame a major hurdle on the path to animalto-human organ transplantation, removing 62 viruses that humans are susceptible to from 40 pig embryos.

38 Raphael Bostic
President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

In June, Bostic became the first black and first openly gay person to head one of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks, committing to an agenda of workforce development and financial literacy.

39 Michel Barnier
EU Chief Brexit negotiator

The former French foreign minister has united Europe’s fractious governments around a set of principles for Britain’s withdrawal from the EU— primarily a demand that the UK fulfill its financial obligations, which could entail more than €50 billion ($58.7 billion) in transfers to member nations—and adhered to them doggedly.

40 Adam Silver
Commissioner, NBA

Thanks mostly to its national TV deal, the NBA saw revenue for the season ending in June grow an impressive 23% from the previous year, another sign that Silver’s stewardship has put the league squarely in the vanguard of professional sports.

41 Mary Barra
CEO, General Motors

Barra saved GM $1 billion in annual capital expenses by getting the company out of Europe and India, and redirecting that money to new technologies and markets.

42 Jerry Brown
Governor, California

In July, Brown signed legislation to extend the state’s cap-and-trade programme through 2030, ensuring that California would continue to generate revenue selling emissions permits—one think tank in San Francisco puts it at $24 billion— and further cementing his role as the US politician most aggressively combating climate change.

43 Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla and Space Exploration Technologies

Tesla’s Fremont, Calif., factory could be turning out 5,000 Model 3 sedans a week by spring as part of Musk’s ambition to transform Americans into an electric-car-driving, spaceship-traveling species.

44 Chancelor Bennett (aka Chance the Rapper)
Musician

Bennett won three Grammys for Coloring Book, his self-released album that’s stayed on the Billboard 200 for more than 75 weeks and has
been streamed more than 1.5 billion times, according to Nielsen.

45 Luisa Ortega Díaz
Former Chief Prosecutor, Venezuela

In the months before Ortega Díaz’s ouster in August, her office started about 2,000 investigations into violence and rights abuses surrounding antigovernment demonstrations throughout the country, opening up a deep fissure in Chavismo.

46 Charif Souki
Chairman, Tellurian

Tellurian’s stock has rallied about 800% since August 2016, when Souki took the first steps toward positioning the company as one of the US’s main shale gas exporters.

47 Natasha Lamb
Director of equity research and shareholder engagement, Arjuna Capital

The activist investor prompted major US companies to close the gender pay gap, with Starbucks saying women earn 99.7% of what men earn doing similar work.

48 Martin Lau
President, Tencent Holdings

Lau helped steer Tencent to a market capitalisation of more than $400 billion, making it one of the 10 largest companies in the world.

49 Alessandro Michele
Creative director, Gucci

Michele’s bold, Instagram-adored styles sent moribund sales at the fashion house skyrocketing more than 45% this year.

50 Russian botnets

Facebook’s revelation that fake Russia-linked accounts reached 126 million people from June 2015 to August 2017 showed the depths of the information warfare campaign being waged through social media in the US.