The growth of the global digital economy cannot be attributed to a single innovation or business. The way people interact, trade, travel, learn and work has changed as a result of the efforts of many pioneers in technology, founders and researchers among others.
Here’s a list of 50 such people whose impact has influenced economies, digital infrastructure and global systems.
1) Tim Berners-Lee
The World Wide Web was created in 1989 by British physicist Tim Berners-Lee of CERN. It was done to ensure easier information sharing among researchers. It revolutionised the way people communicated globally.
2) Vint Cerf
One of the ‘Fathers of the Internet,’ Cerf, co-designed the internet architecture and TCP/IP protocols.
3) Steve Jobs
Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, left in 1985, and then came back to head a series of iconic products. These included Mac and iPhone. Apple is today a major force in the world.
4) Bill Gates
In 1975, while still a Harvard student, Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft. Under his direction, Microsoft developed products like Office and Windows. It also made significant acquisitions like LinkedIn and Skype.
5) Satya Nadella
Microsoft’s chairman and CEO is Nadella. Azure has developed into one of the top cloud computing platforms in the world under his direction.
6) Sundar Pichai
Google increased its dominance in search, artificial intelligence, cloud and mobile ecosystems under Pichai. This impacted information flows worldwide.
7) Larry Page
Together with fellow Stanford PhD candidate Sergey Brin, Larry Page co-founded Google in 1998. He developed the PageRank algorithm that drives the search engine.
8) Sergey Brin
Google was co-founded by Brin. The company went public in 2004 and in 2015 it became part of Alphabet, the parent company.
9) Jeff Bezos
In 1994, Jeff Bezos started Amazon as an online bookshop. It has since grown it into a marketplace for almost everything.
10) Jack Ma
In 1999, Jack Ma co-founded Alibaba Group. He went on to create one of the biggest and most powerful technology enterprises in China.
11) Elon Musk
Tesla, SpaceX, the AI startup xAI, The Boring Company and Neuralink are just a few of the seven businesses that Elon Musk has built.
12) Huang Jensen
In 1993, Jensen Huang founded NVIDIA. It led the way in accelerated computing. The company’s 1999 creation of the GPU transformed computer graphics, PC gaming and contemporary artificial intelligence.
13) Mark Zuckerberg
At the age of 20, Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook. Facebook grew internationally, acquiring WhatsApp in 2014 and Instagram in 2012.
14) Sheryl Sandberg
Sheryl Sandberg turned Facebook into a dominant force in digital advertising. She increased Meta’s earnings from $272 million in 2008 to about $118 billion in 2021.
15) Susan Wojcicki
Susan Wojcicki served as YouTube’s CEO from 2014 till 2023. She began working at Google in its early years and remained there for about 25 years.
16) Reed Hastings
Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix, pioneered customised digital entertainment and subscription streaming.
17) Daniel Ek
Through streaming, algorithms and data-driven discovery, the CEO of Spotify transformed music consumption worldwide.
18) Evan Spiegel
The CEO of Snap made ephemeral messaging and augmented reality filters popular.
19) Brian Chesky
Chesky used a peer-to-peer lodging model to grow the gig and travel industries worldwide.
20) Travis Kalanick
The co-founder of Uber revolutionised global mobility by popularising ride-hailing.
21) Brian Acton
Through WhatsApp, he contributed to the development of one of the most popular messaging services in the world.
22) Pony Ma (Ma Huateng)
WeChat, an all-in-one digital ecosystem essential to China’s social and economic life, was created by Tencent’s founder, Pony Ma (Ma Huateng).
23) Zhang Yiming
He is the co-founder of ByteDance, a Chinese software company known for TikTok. He used short-form video algorithms to transform advertising and world culture.
24) Lei Jun
Jun, the founder of Xiaomi, used high-value, low-cost models to change the worldwide smartphone market.
25) Masayoshi Son
Son provided funding for many significant digital economy businesses through SoftBank’s Vision Fund.
26) Mukesh Ambani
Jio spearheaded the mobile data revolution in India, transforming the nation’s internet economy and speeding up digital inclusion.
27) Narayana Murthy
The co-founder of Infosys, he established international benchmarks for digital talent pipelines, outsourcing and IT services.
28) Shiv Nadar
Nadar’s HCL Technologies contributed to the expansion of India’s software services industry internationally.
29) Hiroshi Mikitani
The creator of Rakuten, Mikitani developed digital loyalty programmes, fintech and e-commerce in Japan and abroad.
30) Satoshi Nakamoto
The worldwide cryptocurrency and decentralised finance movement was started by the unknown inventor of Bitcoin.
31) Vitalik Buterin
The founder of Ethereum, he revolutionised blockchain innovation by introducing smart-contract technology.
32) Changpeng Zhao (CZ)
Through Binance, he accelerated international cryptocurrency trade by creating one of the biggest exchanges in the world.
33) Brian Armstrong
The CEO of Coinbase, he popularised regulation-friendly digital money and cryptocurrency investing in the US.
34) Elizabeth Stark
Stark focuses on the future of decentralised payments and the scalability of Bitcoin through Lightning Labs.
35) Sam Altman
As CEO of OpenAI, he helped bring generative AI to global mainstream use through ChatGPT.
36) Demis Hassabis
The co-founder of DeepMind has headed innovative studies in general intelligence, healthcare AI and reinforcement learning.
37) Dario Amodei
Co-founder of Anthropic, Amodei’s work focuses on safety-centred large-scale AI systems.
38) Andrew Ng
Global AI talent development and industry adoption have been accelerated by Andrew Ng, founder and CEO of Landing AI. He is also the founder of deeplearning.ai and co-chairman and co-founder of Coursera.
39) Fei-Fei Li
Known as the “Godmother of AI,” contributed to the development of the first image recognition systems in the 2000s, which ignited the development of deep learning.
40) Ginni Rometty
Led IBM from 2012 to 2020, steering the company towards high-value tech areas. She strengthened IBM’s focus on hybrid cloud, security, quantum computing, industry solutions and data and AI.
41) Meg Whitman
Whitman is known for growing eBay from $5.7 million to $8 billion in sales during her tenure as CEO from 1998 to 2008. She later led Hewlett-Packard from 2011 to 2015.
42) Marissa Mayer
An American software engineer and business leader, played a key role in Google’s early growth. She later served as CEO and president of Yahoo! from 2012 to 2017.
43) Safra Catz
She is the executive vice chair of Oracle’s board and has previously served as president, chief financial officer, and executive vice president. She played a key role in expanding the company’s enterprise cloud services and global data-management systems.
44) Peter Thiel
PayPal cofounder, he is a general partner at Founders Fund, guiding its major tech bets, including Stripe and SpaceX. He also cofounded Palantir, which listed directly in 2020, and was Facebook’s first major investor.
45) Max Levchin
He is the co-founder and CEO of Affirm, the fintech lender that lets consumers pay for purchases in instalments. Before launching Affirm in 2014, he cofounded PayPal, the social gaming platform Slide and fertility-tracking app Glow.
46) Anne Wojcicki
The 23andMe co-founder helped popularise consumer genomics and data-driven healthcare.
47) Whitney Wolfe Herd
Founder of Bumble, Wolfe Herd expanded digital dating into a women-first, safety-focused model.
48) Patrick Collison
Collison is the co-founder and CEO of Stripe, the platform that enables businesses and individuals to accept online payments.
49) John Collison
Co-founder of Stripe, John Collison helped scale one of the world’s most influential fintech infrastructure companies.
50) Lisa Su
CEO of semiconductor giant AMD, has overseen one of the most remarkable turnarounds in the modern tech industry. The company reported 2024 revenues of $25.8 billion, up 14% year-on-year and a staggering 370% since she took charge in 2014.
The global digital economy is the outcome of decades of innovation, policy leadership and entrepreneurial risk-taking. These fifty figures played distinct roles.