Burgess COMMENTARY
It is notable that most of these young leaders are either in the computer IT world or in entertainment. Few are involved with addressing the big issues of our time. Micah White is one of the exceptions, he is engaged with a new direction for protest, which is sadly needed. Jordi Munoz and Leslie Dewan are also exceptions, using technology to create new physical products that have important potential.
Peter Burgess

From its start, the 21st century has been defined by startling events and breathtaking change, shaping a new generation of leaders who see things differently. By The Editors

1-Alexis Ohanian, 31

He started Reddit with a friend nine years ago, and now it’s the dominant media hub for anyone under thirty (fifty-six billion page views last year). And he’s become one of our most outspoken champions of free speech: “My entire career has been built on the understanding that I am not the smartest person in the room,” he says. Getty

2-Tavi Gevinson, 18

Founder—at age fifteen—and current editor of the online magazine Rookie, a virtual campfire around which her fellow digital-native teen women can ask their elders (see the “Ask a Grown Man” videos) and peers how to flirt, cry, look, crush on, fart, ignore, grow older, and, maybe most important, question. Also: a damn good young actor acclaimed for her performances in last year’s Enough Said and in the current revival of This Is Our Youth on Broadway. Getty

3-Sean Parker, 34

Sure, he’s known for being a bit of a douche. But if you were largely responsible for toppling the music industry (Napster), forever changing how we interact with the Internet and fellow humans (Facebook), and legitimizing Justin Timberlake’s acting career (The Social Network), you might be a little bit of a douche yourself. His influence has yet to show any signs of slowing—when he served as managing partner of the Founders Fund, he also got involved with companies like SpaceX, Oculus VR, Airbnb, and Lyft.

4-Edward Snowden, 31

Former NSA contractor. Leaker of classified documents. Activist who dropped one of the biggest rocks into the twenty-first-century pond. Now living in exile in Russia. Getty

5-Kim Kardashian, 34

An avatar of the digital age. Did she knowingly harness the power of narcissism and celebrity obsession through social media and reality TV? Was it the master plan of her mother, Kris Jenner? Whatever it was, this year Kim married Kanye and six million people watched a Keeping Up with the Kardashians wedding special; she posted the most Instagrammed photo of all time; and she started her mobile app, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, which is expected to make $200 million. Go ahead—say she’s famous for no reason.

6-Mark Zuckerberg, 30

More than a seventh of the earth’s population is on Facebook, driving profits from $53 million in 2012 to $1.5 billion last year—and Zuckerberg’s personal wealth to more than $30 billion. Getty

7-Jordi Muñoz, 28

Came to the United States from Mexico with a pregnant girlfriend and while waiting for his green card hacked a Wii remote into a drone and a toaster into a microchipto- circuit-board oven in his garage, thereby precipitating his cofounding of what is now the biggest commercialdrone manufacturer in North America, 3D Robotics, at the age of twenty-three. Facebook

8-Drew Houston, 31, and Arash Ferdowsi, 29

By creating Dropbox—a free idiotproof Web-based filesharing service used by more than three hundred million people—they granted even the most hopeless technophobes access to the Cloud. By developing paid Dropbox applications for four million businesses, they landed in a position to make billions on the inevitable IPO.

9-Beyoncé, 33

She’s the highest-paid black musician of all time, selling 75 million albums and winning seventeen Grammys. But she’s also become a feminist icon by convincing everyone not that the sexes are equal but that everyone is equally inferior to Beyoncé. Getty

10-Brandon Stanton, 30

The bond trader turned photographer behind the wildly popular Humans of New York, a blog containing more than seven thousand street photos of New Yorkers with funny, random, and/or poignant quotes from the subjects, effectively slowed down the ever-accelerating Web, forcing readers to pause, just for a moment, to contemplate our shared humanity. Last year, he turned it into a hugely best-selling book. This year, the UN sent him on a “world tour” to accomplish the same thing with the rest of the planet. Getty

11-Brian Chesky, 33

An art-school student who cofounded Airbnb six years ago and in so doing became one of the high priests of the so-called sharing economy, spreading throughout the land his gospel of “Fuck hotels.” Which he seems to be doing. Airbnb has far more rooms for rent—more than eight hundred thousand in 190 countries— than any hotel chain has had in history. Getty

12-Carl Lentz, 35

Many religions oppose the things that millennials value— like equal rights, contraception, and iPhone use during ceremonial gatherings. But Lentz, the tatted-up Bieberbaptizing pastor of Hillsong NYC, a megachurch that attracts around six thousand young New Yorkers every week, has become the hipster Joel Osteen by embracing the culture war instead of fighting it: “What in God’s name is so insecure that you can’t handle someone else’s view of your establishment?” he says. Facebook

13-Channing Tatum, 34

Actor. Leading man. Like Steve McQueen, only nice. See page 121. Getty

14-Daniel Ek, 31

He became the new boy-king of the recorded-music industry as the cofounder of Spotify, the streaming-music service that houses more than twenty million songs and, since March 2013, has seen its user total (now forty million) increase by fifteen million— ten times the number of physical albums sold in all of 2013. Getty

15-Dave Gilboa, 34, Neil Blumenthal, 34

Cofounders of Warby Parker, the fast-growing (mostly) online purveyor of stylish glasses that cost about a third of what the competition charges. Represents the characteristic millennial thirst for guilt-free capitalism by donating one pair for every pair sold. Getty

16-Ezra Klein, 30

From his first days blogging about politics as a teenager, Klein went on to launch and run Wonkblog at The Washington Post, which made him a star. But then, taking a gamble that his personal brand was more valuable than his ties to a giant legacy media outlet, he quit to start his own richly funded explanatory news site, Vox.com, earlier this year. Getty

17-Jennifer Lawrence, 24

She broke through with Winter’s Bone, really broke through with The Hunger Games, and won an Oscar for her performance in Silver Linings Playbook. She also reminded us that even in an age of toxic celebrity coverage, it’s still possible for a major star to be a human being without getting hounded out of town. Getty

18-Laverne Cox, (The Honorary Millennial*)

She started out, as you’d expect, bullied, growing up transgendered in Mobile, Alabama. Attempted suicide at eleven. Got into performance after that to help her cope. Moved to New York. Picked up stray roles. Played a prostitute seven times. Appeared on I Want to Work for Diddy in 2008, which made her the first trans woman on an American reality TV show. Broke through playing Sophia Burset on Orange Is the New Black, which made her the first trans woman to be nominated for an acting Emmy and then the first to get the cover of Time magazine. She is both of the times and dragging them doggedly forward, heartened by the progress and still pissed by how far there is to go. *Cox’s age is a closely guarded secret, with estimates ranging from somewhere in her early thirties to around forty.

19-LeBron James, 29

He tapped into every Clevelander’s fear that everyone, in the end, will leave Cleveland. And then he made everyone feel better by coming back humbled, to make things right. Getty

20-Lena Dunham, 28

She made her first film, Tiny Furniture, in 2010; got her own show, the beloved/ maligned Girls, in 2012; and received a $3.7 million advance for her memoir. She has no pedestal, no filter, no restraint, often no pants, and has done more than most to normalize the absurdity of the human organism. Getty

21-Leslie Dewan, 29

Having perceived the upside of radioactive waste, she cofounded Transatomic Power Corporation, which has designed a nuclear reactor (and hopes to build one soon) that won’t melt down and could use the hundreds of thousands of metric tons of waste that already exist to power the entire world for seventy-two years. Weeks 1956

22-Matt Rogers, 31

First he developed the software for the iPod and the iPhone at Apple. Then he did the unthinkable and quit to cofound a company that develops . . . thermostats—smart ones you can control with your phone, but still. Everyone thought he was nuts. Then Google bought Nest for $3.2 billion, and now we’re all suddenly checking out old Jetsons episodes on YouTube to get a sense of what we’re in for. Getty

23-Megan Ellison, 28

Instead of adding to the ranks of Hollywood socialites, Megan Ellison took the money of her father, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, and created Annapurna Pictures, a production company that has turned out nine celebrated films in just three years. No passive financier, Ellison personally travels to the set to keep an eye on things, tweeting updates mixed with favored quotes, like “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it” (Voltaire). Getty

24-Micah White , 32

An activist and former Adbusters editor who saw the protests of Tahrir Square and launched the Occupy Wall Street movement—and the wealth-gap debate that’s raged ever since—with a letter that began “All right you 90,000 redeemers, rebels, and radicals out there . . .” He’s since opened Boutique Activist Consultancy. (Motto: “We Win Lost Causes.”)

25-Mike Krieger, 28, and Kevin Systrom, 30

They founded Instagram—the photo app with revolutionary filters that can make an unexceptional Tuesday look like a cherished memory for its two hundred million monthly users. Then they sold it to Facebook for $1 billion even though it made no money, inspiring a wholesale revision of business plans across the Silicon Valley ecosystem. Getty

26-Odd Future, 20s

A group of guerrilla pranksters/artists, with names like Tyler, the Creator; Earl Sweatshirt; and Frank Ocean, that became known first for its cultish, hip-hop, prodigy-oddball online mixtapes. And then, through record deals, riotous concerts, the Internet, self-made freakish music videos, late-night Cartoon Network sketches, and Technicolor clothes, gave voice to thousands of fellow outcasts. Getty

27-Palmer Luckey, 22

When Palmer Luckey was fifteen, he crowdsourced his education by starting Mod- Retro, an online forum for gamers and hackers to come together to help one another modify gaming consoles. When he was eighteen, he built a head-mounted gaming display because he couldn’t find one that didn’t suck. When he was twenty, he crowdsourced $2.4 million (surpassing his Kickstarter goal of $250,000) to fund the Oculus Rift. When he was twenty-one, he sold Oculus Rift to Facebook for $2 billion—a milestone he could at least legally drink to. Getty

28-Raj Chetty, 35

As a sophomore at Harvard, he came up with the theory that higher interest rates can lead to more investment. Later, he set up an experiment showing that supermarket shoppers buy less if they’re shown the sales tax on an item before they buy. His work, which applies big data and experimentation to messy socialpolicy issues from taxes to social mobility, won him tenure at Harvard at the age of twenty-nine and a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2012. Facebook

29-Robby Mook, 34

Two sitting governors (Maryland’s Martin O’Malley and Virginia’s Terry McAuliffe) and two sitting senators have this Democratic campaigner to thank—the only guy who, as one Obama advisor put it, “whipped our ass three times” running Hillary’s successful Nevada, Ohio, and Indiana primary campaigns in 2008. A favorite to run Hillary 2016— if she runs. Getty

30-Sam Altman, 29

Reddit, Airbnb, Dropbox, Scribd: These are just a few of the seven hundred start-ups that Y Combinator has funded and mentored since 2005. Whereas a lot of venture capitalists just dump money on Silicon Valley wunderkinds, YC counsels, helps them develop business plans, and makes key introductions. Altman was a member of the first start-up class, and last February YC cofounder Paul Graham made him the president, believing that of all the tech wizards he’d met over the last nine years, Altman was the one who stood out the most. Twitter

31-Tulsi Gabbard, 33

The American Congress, like America, is becoming more diverse, but Gabbard—a Samoan-born Hawaiian and Hindu surfer—has surely set some kind of record. The youngest state legislator ever elected to office in Hawaii, she left the Hawaii House of Representatives at age twenty- three to deploy with the National Guard and serve a year in Iraq. She was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives in 2012 while remaining a captain in the National Guard. Getty

32-Seth Rogen, 32

Actor, writer, director, frequent pot smoker. Quite possibly the definer, and certainly the embodiment, of the charming millennial slacker. One of the best and funniest (and hardest-working) filmmakers in America. And he’s great on Twitter. Getty

33-Daniel Schwartz, 34

Since naming Schwartz CEO last year, the struggling sixty-year-old Burger King has adopted a start-up mentality: aggressively cutting costs, selling off restaurants to franchisees, and startling Wall Street by launching a merger with Canadian giant Tim Hortons. It’s no longer surprising to see someone under forty running a company, but Schwartz is the first millennial to run such an oldschool brand. Burger King Worldwide, Inc.