Tim Cook, Elon Musk among Time's 100 most influential people of 2021

Gulf Today Report

Tech honchos like Apple CEO Tim Cook and Tesla CEO Elon Musk are among the list of the 100 Most Influential People of 2021 according to TIME's newly published rankings.

Cook's inclusion comes a day after Apple revealed the iPhone 13 series, Apple Watch Series 7 and upgraded iPads during a virtual event, reports CNET.

In Time's profile, Nike co-founder Phil Knight praised Cook's "character, compassion and courage". He also noted that "Apple stock has gone up 1,000 per cent, making it the most valuable company in the world" during Cook's decade as CEO.

Writing about Musk, Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington said he's "augmenting human possibilities".

"And by doing it all with his relentlessly optimistic, space-half-full showmanship, he's offering a model for how we can solve the big, existential challenges in front of us," she wrote.

DeepLearning.ai founder Andrew Ng gave Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang credit for helping to advance artificial intelligence by directing the company to adapt graphics processing units for more general computing tasks.

"The resulting advancements -- and powerful chips -- laid a foundation that could accommodate much bigger neural networks, the programs behind much of today's AI," Ng said of Huang.

TIME shares an annual list highlighting world leaders, celebrities, tech company executives, authors, musicians, athletes and more.