Tim Cook, Elon Musk among Time's 100 most influential people of 2021
Along with the Apple boss and Tesla chief, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and cryptocurrency pioneer Vitalik Buterin also make the list.
Apple boss Tim Cook landed on Time's list of the year's most influential people.
Icons of the tech industry made Time's list of 2021's 100 most influential people, the publication revealed Wednesday. Apple's Tim Cook, Tesla's and SpaceX's Elon Musk, Nvidia's Jensen Huang and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin were among those honored by Time.
Cook's inclusion comes a day after Apple revealed the iPhone 13, Apple Watch Series 7 and upgraded iPads during a virtual event. In Time's profile, Nike co-founder Phil Knight praised Cook's "character, compassion and courage." He also noted that "Apple stock has gone up 1,000%, making it the most valuable company in the world" during Cook's decade as CEO.
Writing about Tesla's and SpaceX's Musk, Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington said he's "augmenting human possibilities."
"And by doing it all with his relentlessly optimistic, space-half-full showmanship, he's offering a model for how we can solve the big, existential challenges in front of us," she wrote.
DeepLearning.ai founder Andrew Ng gave Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang credit for helping to advance artificial intelligence by directing the company to adapt graphics processing units for more general computing tasks.
"The resulting advancements -- and powerful chips -- laid a foundation that could accommodate much bigger neural networks, the programs behind much of today's AI," Ng said of Huang. "In the process, he has helped enable a revolution that allows phones to answer questions out loud, farms to spray weeds but not crops, doctors to predict the properties of new drugs -- with more wonders to come."
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian said cryptocurrency pioneer Vitalik Buterin's work with Ethereum made him more excited about the Internet's potential than ever before.
"From there, a new world has opened up, and given rise to new ways of leveraging blockchain technology -- some of which I've invested in." Ohanian wrote. "Whether it's startups like Sorare reinventing fantasy sports or Rainbow users showing off their NFT collections, none of this would've existed without Vitalik's creation."