The 50 Who Matter Now

In our second annual ranking, Business 2.0 has compiled an unabashedly subjective list of people, products, trends, and ideas that are transforming the world of business.

Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos
CEO, Amazon.com

Rank: 12

Why he matters: Bezos has run a wildly successful Web company for more than a decade, but he's not resting on his laurels: Having built the world's largest online bookstore, he's now trying to become the largest provider of back-end support and services for fledgling Internet companies.

Amazon's Simple Storage Service seems far removed from its core retail business, but Web 2.0 companies have embraced the pay-as-you-go product as an alternative to building their own server farms. Nevertheless, analysts worry that despite the company's pioneering roots and massive technology infrastructure, it lags behind competitors like Google and Yahoo. But don't count the Web's old man out just yet; Amazon's first-quarter profit of $111 million was up 118 percent from last year.

Adelson

Calacanis

Bianchini

Iacobucci, Raburn

Graham

You

Williams

Musk

Melton

O'Reilly

Edmond

Zell

Huffington

Fake Steve Jobs

Walsh

Draft

Zuckerberg

Branson

Nooyi

Ambani bros.

Phillips

Negroponte

Hundt

Friis, Zennstrom

Cogan

Rosedale

Fadell

Kao

Arrington

Stephenson

Miyamoto

Eberhard

Agile software

Li

Diller

Chizen

Hurd

Wales

Bezos

McAndrews

Watanabe

Chambers

Schwarzenegger

Decker

Murdoch

Jacobs

Moritz

Private equity

Jobs

Google trio
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Most stock quote data provided by BATS. Market indices are shown in real time, except for the DJIA, which is delayed by two minutes. All times are ET. Disclaimer. Morningstar: © 2018 Morningstar, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Factset: FactSet Research Systems Inc. 2018. All rights reserved. Chicago Mercantile Association: Certain market data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. Dow Jones: The Dow Jones branded indices are proprietary to and are calculated, distributed and marketed by DJI Opco, a subsidiary of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and have been licensed for use to S&P Opco, LLC and CNN. Standard & Poor's and S&P are registered trademarks of Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC and Dow Jones is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. All content of the Dow Jones branded indices © S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC 2018 and/or its affiliates.