Forbes published its Innovator 250 list on February 11, a ranking of 250 living Americans the publication considers the country's most consequential innovators. Elon Musk took the No. 1 spot. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang landed at fifth. OpenAI's Sam Altman came in at sixth.
The top 10 looks like this: Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, George Lucas, Huang, Altman, Phil Knight, Martine Rothblatt, Ted Turner, Vinod Khosla. If you're counting, that puts the architects of the current AI spending boom right alongside the guy who made swoosh-branded sneakers and the man who invented CNN.
The methodology is the weirdest part
Forbes started with about 1,000 nominees submitted by its own reporters. A judging panel scored them on criteria like creativity, commercial impact, and what the publication vaguely calls "engagement." The panel included VC Jim Breyer, tech journalist Kara Swisher, and Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath.
Then Forbes did something odd: it fed the nominees into ChatGPT and Gemini, asking both AI models to rank the candidates using the same criteria. Editors merged the results.
So the list that places AI leaders atop America's innovation hierarchy was partly assembled by AI. Forbes called this "human-machine collaboration," which sounds better than "we let the models grade their own creators." Whether Altman and Huang rank higher or lower because the AIs recognize their bosses is anyone's guess, but the circularity is hard to ignore.
A wealth ranking in a different font
Forbes described innovation as "the grease in the economic engine" and stressed that honorees aren't just inventors but leaders who bring ideas to market. The criteria favor scale: you don't just need to build something, you need to build a business around it that reshapes an industry.
This framing explains some choices that might otherwise puzzle. George Lucas at No. 4, above Nvidia's CEO, makes sense if you weight merchandising empires and ILM's decades of influence. Phil Knight at No. 7 has a case built on global supply chain reinvention. Martine Rothblatt at No. 8 is the genuinely surprising pick, recognition for her work in biotech and satellite radio.
But the criteria also mean the list skews toward people who already top Forbes' own billionaires index. Musk, currently worth around $684 billion according to Bloomberg, isn't just the top innovator here. He's the richest person alive. Bezos at No. 2 is the world's third-richest. The overlap between "most innovative" and "most wealthy" is doing a lot of work, and Forbes doesn't seem too bothered by it.
Musk, for his part, responded to the ranking on X with a single word: "Cool."
Who's on and who's missing
The list spans 250 slots, from Musk at the top to Taylor Swift at No. 250, where Forbes credits her with reshaping the music industry through re-recordings and touring economics. Over a third of the list consists of women and people of color, a data point the publication highlighted. All 250 are American citizens, though many were born abroad, including Musk (South Africa), Huang (Taiwan), and Sergey Brin (Soviet Union).
Fei-Fei Li, whose ImageNet work underpins most of modern computer vision, sits at No. 91. CRISPR co-discoverer Jennifer Doudna landed at No. 84. Kris Jenner is No. 218, which generated exactly the kind of online commentary you'd expect.
What's absent is almost more telling than what's included. Dario Amodei, who leads Anthropic, doesn't appear to crack the top tier despite running one of the most prominent AI safety labs. The list favors people who've already built giant commercial moats over those still in the company-building phase.
The Innovator 250 is the first installment of a yearlong Forbes series tied to the America250 initiative, a bipartisan effort around the country's semiquincentennial. Forbes says five more lists will follow throughout 2026, each covering a different aspect of the national story.
