Time snubbed tech titan and artificial intelligence backer Elon Musk from its annual list of the “100 Most Influential People in AI” – but slapped actress Scarlett Johansson on this year’s cover.
The magazine created a composite image for its 2024 cover showing the photos of 18 AI leaders, topped by Nvidia boss Jensen Huang that also prominently featured the “Black Widow” star.
The second annual TIME100 AI edition, released Thursday, also highlighted leading CEOs, including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, as well as founders and influencers in the fast-growing field.
Yet Musk, who launched xAI last summer and its chatbot Grok has gained traction against rivals like ChatGPT — was conspicuously absent from its pages.
The century-old magazine is now owned by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, whose software company has been a major investor in Anthropic and OpenAI, creating a $500 million AI fund to back emerging companies.
Time’s head-scratching decision to snub the Tesla and SpaceX founder led to an uproar on social media.
“Every person on this top 100 list if asked would say Elon should be on this list,” one user posted on X.
Another user said the affront was proof of Time’s “bias and lack of integrity” and “their personal vendetta against him.”
The billionaire founded Neuralink in 2016, which made headlines early this year when it successfully implanted a brain chip in a paralyzed patient, allowing him to browse the web and play Internet games with his mind.
Just this week, Musk brought Colossus – the world’s most powerful Nvidia GPU supercomputer – online.
“I thought it was cute that Elon Musk wasn’t on the cover of Time’s 100 most influential people in AI,” another social media user posted on X. “I had to check for myself when I heard he didn’t make the list at all. My f*cking car drives itself lol.”
Social media users also questioned the inclusion on the list of Johansson – who scuffled with OpenAI over its alleged use of her voice to train a chatbot without her permission – Bollywood actor Anil Kapoor and YouTuber Marques Brownlee.
The list also included Musk rivals like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg as well as Google boss Sundar Pichai and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
“If the world of AI was dominated by the emergence of startup labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and their competitors in 2023, this year, as critics and champions alike have noted, we’ve seen the outsize influence of a small number of tech giants,” Editor in Chief Sam Jacobs wrote on Thursday. “This year’s list offers examples of the possibilities for AI when it moves out of the lab and into the world.”
Jacobs emphasized that artificial intelligence is a rapidly evolving field – and with those changes come new leaders.
He said 91 of the members of the 2024 list were not on last year’s list, which he called “an indication of just how quickly this field is changing.”
Time did not respond to requests for clarifications on the nomination process.
Its editors and reporters sought nominations from dozens of industry leaders and experts to compile the list, according to a press release.
