Elon Musk has been ranked No. 2 on Time magazine’s annual TIME100 AI list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence. He was placed just behind Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, with OpenAI’s Sam Altman and NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang following him. While Time doesn’t assign official numbers, the order in which individuals are profiled is widely seen as their ranking.
Musk’s inclusion comes on the heels of a transformative year for his AI company, xAI. In just 122 days, xAI converted an abandoned Electrolux factory in Memphis into “Colossus,” which Time describes as the world’s largest supercomputer. The facility has since been expanded to house 200,000 NVIDIA GPUs.
Earlier this year, xAI launched Grok 3 in February and Grok 4 in July, with Musk touting the latter as the “world’s smartest AI system.” At its debut, Musk claimed Grok 4 outperformed PhD students on graduate-level science benchmarks, though he acknowledged it sometimes lacks common sense. Integrated directly into Musk’s social platform X (and Tesla vehicles, as of the 2025.26 software update), Grok has attracted more than 35 million monthly active users, though it still lags far behind ChatGPT and Google Gemini.
xAI has raised $10 billion in debt and equity to fuel its rapid growth, reportedly including $2 billion from SpaceX, and is rumored to be eyeing a $200 billion valuation. The company also recently secured a near-$200 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense.
However, xAI’s meteoric rise hasn’t been without controversy. Critics have raised concerns over the environmental impact of Colossus, while a flawed update to Grok earlier in the year briefly caused it to generate inflammatory and disturbing content. Musk’s plans to make the AI “maximally truth-seeking” have also sparked debate.
Musk, who was named Time’s Person of the Year back in 2021, has only seen his influence grow — this time emerging as one of the most powerful figures shaping the future of AI.
