From Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos, these 30 personalities defined the 2010s

A person wears a Guy Fawkes mask, which today is a trademark and symbol for the online hacktivist group Anonymous. From 2012.PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images

This is CNET’s list of the larger-than-life innovators and important influencers of the last 10 years.

The first decade of the 21st century introduced us to sweeping mobile and social revolutions largely driven by names like Jobs, Zuckerberg and Bezos. In the second decade that’s now closing, things got a little more… complicated. During those years, a new collection of faces have joined the earlier tech titans to continue moving us into the future. Here’s CNET’s list of the top technology innovators and all-around unavoidable personalities of the 2010s.

Anonymous

More a decentralized collective than a personality, Anonymous was the name claimed by the loose affiliation of hackers who brought “hacktivism” into the mainstream. During the first half of the decade, Anonymous launched attacks against targets like ISIS, the governments of the US and Tunisia, and corporations such as Sony and PayPal. The group’s tactics included distributed denial-of-service attacks that overwhelm a target’s website and knock it offline and compromising private databases to access and later leak confidential information, such as the personal details of members of the Ku Klux Klan. 

In 2019, the group’s prominence has faded somewhat — last year it said it would debunk the QAnon conspiracy theory — but concerns about hacking remain in the forefront, in part because one large collective of unknown activists put it there.  These 30 personalities defined the 2010s:

Julian Assange

The founder of online portal WikiLeaks, Assange had a mission to reveal the secrets of the powerful. It made him an instant hero to many and a wanted man to others (in May the US government charged him with violating the Espionage Act). WikiLeaks started the decade by publishing documents obtained by whistleblower Chelsea Manning between 2010 and 2011, and it supported NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden after he sought refuge in Russia in 2013. To avoid extradition to Sweden on charges of rape — the charges were dropped in 2017, but the case has since been reopened — Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he remained for seven years. 

Despite its founder being stuck in the same building for much of the decade, WikiLeaks still managed to play a role in the 2016 US presidential election by publishing leaked emails that were detrimental to Hillary Clinton and the next year releasing thousands of documents showing how the CIA can hack into phones. The Assange saga is far from over, though. In 2019 he was booted from the embassy by the Ecuadorian government and arrested by London police. He remains in British custody and could be extradited to the US.

Mary Barra

The General Motors CEO became the first woman to lead a major carmaker when she took over in 2014 and has been consistently ranked among the world’s most powerful women over the past decade by Forbes and Fortune. 

Her tenure has been marked by GM’s push to keep up and even eclipse Tesla’s efforts to bring electric and driverless cars into the mainstream. The Chevy Volt EV actually brought a sub-$40,000 EV to market ahead of Tesla’s Model 3, and GM has also invested in ride-sharing technology to help ensure it stays relevant in the future. 

Under Barra, GM is also one of just two global businesses to completely do away with its gender pay gap, according to a study by Equileap.

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