Good morning,
On Tuesday, Fortune released its second annual 100 Most Powerful People in Business ranking.
Putting it together pushes us to ask: What exactly is power, anyway? Quantifying who has it, who is gaining, and who is fading is no easy task.
But that’s exactly what our newsroom has grappled with for 28 years, ever since we first launched the Most Powerful Women in Business ranking. Both lists use the same six criteria, evaluating the size and health of a leader’s business, along with their innovativeness, influence, and career trajectories, as well as their impact outside their organizations.
For those reasons, last year’s No. 1, Elon Musk, saw his position slip several spots; he is no longer running DOGE and Tesla’s (No. 43 on the Fortune 500) business needs some repairing. Nvidia’s (No. 31) Jensen Huang replaced him on top for a simple reason: Many of the powerful people below him on the list need his business in order to run theirs.
As my colleague Geoff Colvin writes:
“After decades of naysayers dismissing the value of Huang’s specialized computer chips, that hardware is now the most coveted by companies developing artificial intelligence, arguably the most profoundly important technology ever. That’s why Nvidia is today the most valuable company traded on U.S. exchanges. The other mega-tech CEOs in our top 10 most powerful—Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai—are among those desperately yearning for more of Huang’s chips.” (Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet are No. 14, No. 22, and No. 7, respectively, on the Fortune 500.)
Check out who else made the Fortune 100 Most Powerful People in Business here.