The 68 Most Powerful People on Earth

Most Powerful People on Earth

Some say that power and money are moral dangers, as they can easily turn into vices. We agree. Put power in the hands of an uneducated, undisciplined person and….run! Forbes did one really interesting study to find who are the most powerful people on our planet today. By powerful they didn’t mean ‘having a good influence’, but ‘having a lot of influence’.

The first thing that Forbes did was to establish which domains will be taken into consideration when making the study. This is how they narrowed their list to major religious figures, heads of state, entrepreneurs and even outlaws. Then, after checking their financial resources, the number of followers (for religious VIPs for instance), the number of employees (for entrepreneurs, of course), the number of spheres in which their power affirms itself and many other numbers, they came up with a list that is at least interesting if not controversial.

Some rankings are quite surprising, and some important people, like the founder of IKEA or the director-general of BBC didn’t even make it on the list. So who would you expect to be the first name on the “Most important people in the world” list?

United States’ president Barack Obama? Guess again. Obama ranked second and left enough room for Hu Jintao (president of People’s Republic of China) to make it to the top. Our guess is that you are equally curious to find out who is the least famous (No. 68) of the most famous people. His name is
and he is the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.

Other names that can be found on the list are the founder of Facebook (No. 40), the executive editor of The New York Times (No. 50), and some criminal faces like Osama Bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaida (No. 57),  Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar (No. 63), suspected to have been involved in the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, or Joaquín Guzmán (no. 60), a big drug trafficker in Mexico.

If the subject really grabbed your attention and you want to find out more about the most powerful people on Earth, just follow the link here and continue your reading.