Business Insider recently released its list of the most powerful people in the world, and 12 of our top 50 were innovators, CEOs, and influencers from the tech world.
To determine the ranking, we considered more than 100 of the most influential players in business, politics, and entertainment, and evaluated their influence using metrics in four major areas: economic power, command, newsworthiness, and impact— a subjective measure that captures how important they are in their respective spheres.
We then narrowed down the list to just those in the tech industry, adding eight tech stars that narrowly missed our top 50. (You can read the full methodology here.)
Read on to see the 20 most powerful people in tech.
Editing by Alex Morrell with additional research by Andy Kiersz.
20. Reed Hastings
Title: Cofounder and CEO, Netflix
Country: US
Age: 55
As the founder and CEO of Netflix— the streaming media service that’s made over 100 million hours of movies and TV available to users and has produced a slew of award-winning original television series— Hastings has redefined what it means to watch and create TV in 2015.
Although Netflix's stock has been a roller coaster since going public in 2002, its shares hit a record high of $126.45 in August — a more than eight-fold increase from its IPO — and the company today is worth more than $50 billion.
Hastings, who has a net worth of more than $1.25 billion, isn’t only changing the experience for viewers, he’s also enhancing the lives of his employees. This summer, the company, which already offers unlimited vacation, instituted up to a year of paid maternity and paternity leave for its employees, paving the way for other forward-thinking companies to follow suit.
19. Reid Hoffman
Title: Cofounder and chairman, LinkedIn
Country: US
Age: 48
Reid Hoffman has been involved with several of the world's most prominent tech firms. Hoffman started his career in 1994 as a product manager at Apple and later served on the board and as executive vice president for PayPal. In 2003 he cofounded LinkedIn, the professional networking service that has more than 400 million members in over 200 countries and is worth $32 billion.
Today, Hoffman's a partner at storied VC firm Greylock Partners, where he has advised and worked with tech stalwarts like Facebook and Airbnb. He's become one of the most well-connected and experienced investors in tech, and young entrepreneurs and executives hang on his every word, whether he's offering management advice or sharing lessons he's learned from early career failures.
Last year, the self-made billionaire — whose net worth is at least $5 billion, according to Wealth-X — coauthored the best-selling book “The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age,” and this fall, between his work at Greylock and LinkedIn, he’s teaching a class on startup success at Stanford with Silicon Valley fixtures John Lilly, Allen Blue, and Chris Yeh.
18. Peter Thiel
Title: Cofounder and chairman, Palantir
Country: US
Age: 48
PayPal cofounder, early Facebook investor, and bestselling author of “Zero to One” Peter Thiel has a fortune of over $2.3 billion and is one of the tech industry's most revered investors. Though he sold most of his Facebook stock following the social media company’s IPO in 2012, the billionaire still has his hand in several projects across Silicon Valley. Most notably, his secretive big-data company Palantir, which was valued at $20.2 billion after raising a $100 million round of funding in October.
Thanks to Thiel and investments from his venture capital firm Founders Fund, several other startups have come to fruition since 2005 as well, including home rental site Airbnb, ride hailing service Lyft, and music streaming app Spotify.
Thiel also runs the Thiel Foundation, which awards a annual crop of 20 young entrepreneurs $100,000 each to chase their business ideas. Ever unconventional — he notoriously hates suits and doesn’t hire MBAs— one of Thiel's requirements for his fellows is that they forego or drop out of college for two years to pursue the program.
See the rest of the story at Tech Insider