Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has retained his top ranking on Vanity Fair magazine’s annual “New Establishment” list which weighs the influence of personalities in technology, entertainment, business, media, politics and more.
The list of 100 people kicks off by noting that “in 2017 it seems that everyone is in everyone else’s business” and that the list “foreshadows the coming battles as various industries, and the titans who captain them, increasingly weave together into one.”
Nowhere is that more evident than at No. 1 with Bezos, during a year in which his company gobbled up the Whole Foods grocery chain and continued to scare everyone else with the prospect that they might be next.
VF said that Bezos’ “crowning achievement” was his brief reign as world’s richest person, after he overtook Bill Gates for that distinction for just a few “brief, glorious” hours, as the magazine put it.
The $13.7 billion Whole Foods acquisition is listed as evidence of “Vulcan chess mastery,” and Amazon’s plans for a $5 billion second North American headquarters falls under the “big number” distinction. And finally, perhaps because he’s not enough of an outsized personality, Bezos gets a nod for “evidence of bionic engineering” thanks to those images of his bulging “Buff Bezos” biceps at the Sun Valley retreat in July.
The establishment list is loaded with familiar names from the world of tech and business. VF calls it “a harbinger of what the world will look like during the next quarter-century — and the people who will dictate that future.”
Here are some notables:
No. 2: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook: Rumors of a presidential run even as the leader of the social media juggernaut has to explain what the hell happened with all that Russian fakery during the 2016 election.
No. 3: Tim Cook, Apple: Moved up eight spots from No. 11, despite getting dinged for playing nice to President Trump and relying so heavily on iPhone to carry the business.
No. 4: Larry Page, Alphabet: Could gain ground on Uber and autonomous-vehicle race thanks to lawsuit over intellectual-property theft.
No. 5: Elon Musk, Tesla / SpaceX: He’s running the world’s most valuable car maker at the same time he’s launching rockets into space and landing them back on earth.
No. 9: Reed Hastings, Netflix: Could “Netflix and Chill” become “Just Any Streaming Service and Chill”? Perhaps, as Amazon and Apple boost spending, and Disney pulls its content from the platform.
No. 12: Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook: Reportedly turned down the Uber CEO job, and her “defiant anti-Trump moment” came in donating $1 million to Planned Parenthood after president’s threat to defund the organization.
No. 28: Evan Spiegel, Snap: His company went public but shares took a hit when Facebook’s Instagram Stories jumped into the space to attract Snapchat’s users.
No. 34: Marc Lore, Walmart: Amazon’s biggest competition in selling stuff to people who need more stuff, Lore sold Jet.com to the big box chain and raked in $243.9 million in pay last year because of it.
No. 42: Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber: The longtime leader of Bellevue, Wash.-based travel giant Expedia jumped ship to try to steer Uber back in the right direction as its new CEO. It’s “a role that will require him to clean up its toxic corporate culture, bring together warring shareholder groups, and figure out how to make money,” VF said.
No. 50: Jack Dorsey, Twitter: No kicking Trump off Twitter is cited as “rare evidence of mortality” for Dorsey, who moved up 19 spots. Keep an eye on the social platform as 140-character rants get twice the space.
No. 54: Satya Nadella, Microsoft: The CEO has a new book and he thanks to a bet on the cloud, took the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant’s market valuation to an all-time high, above $500 billion. And he’s not done yet: Nadella will headline the GeekWire Summit next week in Seattle.
