No ‘Time’ for Musk
Tech titan excluded from mag’s top 100 AI leaders
Time magazine 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 fastgrowing field.
Yet Musk, who launched xAI last summer and its chatbot Grok, gaining traction against rivals like ChatGPT, was conspicuously absent from the issue.
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.
“Disclosures are included throughout the TIME100 AI list for any companies mentioned that are backed by Salesforce Ventures, the corporate venture-capital arm of Salesforce, where TIME’s owner and co-chair, is CEO,” a Time spokesperson told The Post.
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.”
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.
“This year’s list offers examples of the possibilities for AI when it moves out of the lab and into the world,” Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs wrote.