Financial Times Person of the Year

The Financial Times, a British business newspaper, annually nominates a Person of the Year to the person the newspaper has considered has demonstrated considerable influence in a given year. There appear to have been a number of instances (1971, 1979, 1995) when no person was nominated.^[1]

List

In 1999, John von Neumann was chosen as the FT Person of the Century.^[2]

Past recipients:

Year	Choice	Notes	Ref.
1970	Jean Rey	President of the European Commission	[3]
1972	Henry Kissinger	United States Secretary of State	[3]
1973	Faisal	King of Saudi Arabia	[3]
1974	Harold Wilson	Prime Minister of the United Kingdom	[3]
1975	Helmut Schmidt	Chancellor of Germany	[3]
1976	Jimmy Carter	President-elect of the United States	[3]
1977	Anwar Sadat	President of Egypt	[3]
1978	Deng Xiaoping	Senior Vice Premier of the People's Republic of China	[3]
1980	Lech Wałęsa	Leader of the Solidarnosc movement	[3]
1981	François Mitterrand	President of France	[3]
1982	George Shultz	United States Secretary of State	[3]
1983	John R. Opel	CEO of IBM	[3]
1984	Albert Hall	(Representative of) the Army of Unemployed	[3]
1985	Mikhail Gorbachev	Leader of the Soviet Union	[3]
1986	Yasuhiro Nakasone	Prime Minister of Japan	[3]
1987	Margaret Thatcher	Prime Minister of the United Kingdom	[3]
1988	Henry Kravis and George R. Roberts	Founders of KKR & Co. Inc.	[3]
1989	Mikhail Gorbachev	Leader of the Soviet Union	[3]
1990	Helmut Kohl	Chancellor of Germany	[3]
1991	James Baker	United States Secretary of State	[3]
1992	Deng Xiaoping	Paramount leader of the People's Republic of China	[3]
1993	Edouard Balladur	Prime Minister of France	[3]
1994	Bill Gates	Co-founder and CEO of Microsoft	[3]
1996	Rupert Murdoch	Founder and CEO of News Corporation	[3]
1997	Tony Blair	Prime Minister of the United Kingdom	[3]
1998	Alan Greenspan	Chairman of the Federal Reserve	[3]
1999	John von Neumann	Polymath and inventor	[3]
2000	Craig Venter	Biochemist and entrepreneur	[3]
2001	Howard Lutnick	CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and BGC Partners	[3]
2002	George W. Bush	President of the United States	[3]
2003	Jeffrey Immelt	CEO of General Electric	[3]
2004	Eliot Spitzer	Attorney General of New York	[3]
2005	Sergey Brin and Larry Page	Founders of Google	[4]
2006	Lakshmi Mittal	CEO of ArcelorMittal	[3]
2007	Jean-Claude Trichet	President of the European Central Bank	[5]
2008	Barack Obama	President-elect of the United States	[6]
2009	Lloyd Blankfein	CEO of Goldman Sachs	[3]
2010	Steve Jobs	Co-founder and CEO of Apple Inc	[7]
2011	Mohamed Bouazizi	Representative of the Arab youth in Arab Spring	[8]
2012	Mario Draghi	President of the European Central Bank	[9]
2013	Jack Ma	Founder of Alibaba Group	[10]
2014	Tim Cook	CEO of Apple Inc	[11]
2015	Angela Merkel	Chancellor of Germany	[12]
2016	Donald Trump	President-elect of the United States	[13]
2017	Susan Fowler	Software engineer, formerly at Uber	[14]
2018	George Soros	Philanthropist	[15]
2019	Satya Nadella	CEO of Microsoft	[16]
2020	Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci	Founders of BioNTech and co-developers of the Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine	[17]
2021	Elon Musk	CEO of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX	[18]
2022	Volodymyr Zelenskyy	President of Ukraine	[19]
2023	Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen	CEO of Novo Nordisk	[20]
2024	Donald Trump	President-elect of the United States	[21]