The 100 Most Powerful People in the World: Surprising Dominating Power Across Global Finance, Big Tech, Geopolitics, Entertainment & More
Who really runs the world -and what does that actually mean for your life, your money, and your future?
This provocative, highly readable book maps the hundred most powerful individuals on the planet and shows how they pull three hidden levers that shape everything else: money, code, and story. Presidents and central bankers. Tech titans and AI lab chiefs. Sovereign-wealth bosses and Wall Street CEOs. Pop superstars and sports icons whose tours move GDP. Together, they form a real-time operating system for the world-one that most of us feel but rarely see.
Instead of reheated headlines or conspiracy theories, the book offers a clear, narrative-driven tour through the structures that actually matter:
How a handful of asset-management and banking CEOs can quietly reroute trillions in other people's money into or away from countries, industries, and causes.
How the leaders of Big Tech and frontier AI now function as unelected infrastructure ministers for search, cloud, chips, and models-deciding who gets access to the capabilities that will define the next decade.
How cultural figures like Taylor Swift and Beyonc , and the "girl economy" around them, became macro-economic forces big enough to move local job markets, inflation data, and political narratives.
Across vivid profiles, the book tracks central bankers fighting inflation, AI labs racing to define the limits of machine intelligence, sovereign-wealth funds buying global sport and gaming, cyber commanders defending the world's wires, and philanthropists quietly reshaping health and education for billions.
In the final chapters, the book steps back from the individual stories and distills the core lessons:
Why modern power is less about owning things and more about controlling flows-of capital, data, attention, and legitimacy.
How money, code, and story fuse together in moments of "polycrisis," when pandemics, wars, climate shocks, and technological disruptions interact.
Where the system is structurally biased toward wealth and incumbents-and where there are still narrow but real chances for movements, regulators, and new builders to change the rules.
Whether you're a founder, investor, policymaker, or simply someone who feels the world is being run on a script you never got to see, The 100 Most Powerful People in the World gives you the clearest available map of who is actually at the controls-and what, if anything, the rest of us can do about it.
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