Samsung’s Lee Jae Yong Makes Fortune’s ‘100 Most Powerful People in Business’ List—Here’s Who Else Made It

Lee Jae Yong, the chairman of Samsung Electronics, has been named one of Fortune’s “100 Most Influential People in Business,” securing the 85th spot. He is the sole South Korean business leader on this prestigious list, recognizing trailblazers shaping industries worldwide.

Fortune evaluated management performance, business soundness, innovation, and social impact to select 100 leaders across 40 industries based on mid-term revenue and profit growth rates.

The magazine described the chairman as “South Korea’s richest person,” noting that he had grown up and trained for a long time to take over the power of Samsung, founded by his grandfather after his father, Lee Kun Hee.

The magazine explained that during the peak of Samsung’s success, Lee was referred to as “Samsung’s heir. “He has acted as the group’s de facto leader since 2014, when his father fell into a coma due to a heart attack.

Fortune noted that while Samsung is the leading global manufacturer of memory chips, it has fallen behind its competitors in the market’s most dynamic segment, including chips used by Nvidia and AI innovators. Also, it has lost ground to TSMC in its foundry business, which produces custom chips for external clients. Despite the stock’s underperformance this year, shares of Samsung Electronics have doubled since 2017.

In this survey, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, took the top spot. Fortune commented that Musk’s broad vision and engineering intuition have made him a recognized leader across various industries and highlighted that he has become one of Donald Trump’s most prominent and significant supporters while dedicating more time to politics, enhancing his competitiveness as a close ally of the president-elect.

Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, a major player in the AI era, ranked second. He was followed by Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, in third place; Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, in sixth place; Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, in seventh place; Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, in eighth place; and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, in tenth place, with global big tech CEOs dominating the top ranks.

Other notable figures in the top ten included Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, who ranked fourth; Jamie Dimon, chairman of JPMorgan Chase, who took fifth; and Mary Barra, chairperson of General Motors, who came in ninth.