Time magazine‘s most influential person of the year is Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old computer whiz behind the social media network boasting close to 600 million members worldwide. Zuckerberg is a year older than Time’s first Person of the Year, Charles Lindbergh, and he is the most recent entrepreneur to be featured on the venerable magazine cover, after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos won Person of the Year in 1999.
Time’s Richard Stengel explained in an essay why the magazine chose Zuckerberg: “For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them (something that has never been done before); for creating a new system of exchanging information that has become both indispensable and sometimes a little scary; and finally, for changing how we all live our lives in ways that are innovative and even optimistic, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME’s 2010 Person of the Year.”
Last year, the Person of the Year honour went to Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the United States Federal Reserve. In 2008, Barack Obama won the award.
