AMERICA'S GREATEST INNOVATORS

INNOVATION IS the grease in the economic engine, the sparkle that keeps culture fresh and the key ingredient in nearly every billion-dollar fortune.

- ALEX KNAPP AND MICHAEL NOER

George Lucas

To kick off our yearlong series of special reports celebrating America's 250th birthday, we present the men and women who best embody that creative spirit. All of them are in the mold of the quintessential American innovator, Thomas Edison. That means they aren't just inventors; they're business leaders who bring their breakthroughs to market, transforming entire industries and creating new ones.

To identify the top 250 living innovators (a list of the 250 greatest historic ones are available online at forbes.com/forbes-250), we first tapped the expertise of Forbes' beat reporters, who nominated nearly a thousand candidates. We ran those names by a panel of world-class judges—including Jim Breyer, founder of Breyer capital; tech journalist Kara Swisher; and innovation expert Rita McGrath—who ranked them based on creativity, breadth, engagement, disruption and commercial impact. Then we fed the results into the most revolutionary innovation of our time—artificial intelligence—asking both ChatGPT and Gemini to rank them according to the same criteria. Taking all this into account, Forbes editors then determined the final ranking.

Progress, an inherent innovation corollary, continues. More than one-third of our ranking consists of women and people of color. That's vastly more than would have appeared, using the same methodology, 50 years ago at America's bicentennial and surely fewer than will appear at our tricentennial. Capital, however slowly, chases talent, wherever and whoever it is. Every person here is an American citizen, though many weren't born that way. The United States is a nation of immigrants, and this list reflects that, starting at the very top.

Elon Musk

1. Elon Musk 54