MEDIA
Rupert Murdoch
Chairman and C.E.O. // News Corp.

THE IMPERIALIST Murdoch's purchase of Dow Jones and its flagship paper, the Wall Street Journal, brings some needed prestige and an affluent readership to News Corp.'s media mix. It's an addition that could boost advertising rates and help cross-sell ads at other Murdoch properties, like the Fox Business Channel and the New York Post. (Look for Journal content on Fox and in business books published by HarperCollins, which Murdoch also owns.)

But the bottom-line rationale of the Dow Jones deal is almost beside the point: The Journal purchase positions Murdoch—responsible for the Post's "Axis of Weasel" headline and Fox's American Idol—firmly among the ranks of elite American opinionmakers. And he's not stopping with the country's largest business daily: He has recently targeted Newsday, Long Island's profitable daily, and media-industry insiders suspect that he also has his eye on the New York Times. Whether Murdoch tries to buy that paper or simply continues to pound it from his Journal perch, no one will have more influence on what we watch and read. —Kyle Pope

FINANCE
Lloyd Blankfein
C.E.O. // Goldman Sachs

THE GOLDMAN STANDARD Given the current state of Wall Street, Blankfein would win points for simply keeping Goldman Sachs in business. But under his leadership, the firm has done more than merely survive. Goldman was the first investment bank to dive deep into proprietary trading—buying and selling securities for the company's profit in addition to that of its clients. About two-thirds of Goldman's $46 billion in 2007 revenue came from such trades. While other firms have tried to beef up their proprietary-trading operations (most notably Merrill Lynch, under ousted C.E.O. Stan O'Neal), none has done as well with the house's money. Worse, in chasing after Goldman, most Wall Street players made the mistake of overloading on subprime debt and related investments, while Blankfein's traders were circumspect enough to scale back their exposure. On Wall Street, reputations are cemented by such moves. Now watch for Blankfein to solidify his standing. As other financial firms have cut back, he has kept bankers' bonuses flush, winning loyalty and new recruits at a time when his competitors are retrenching. —K.P.

TECHNOLOGY
Paul Buchheit
Co-founder // FriendFeed

EVIL SLAYER Software designer Paul Buchheit was Google employee No. 23 (think of the stock options!) and the creator of both Gmail, the company's popular email service, and the first prototype of AdSense, its highly profitable online-ad program. For most software engineers, these would be accomplishment enough. But perhaps his biggest distinction comes from coining the phrase "Don't be evil," which expresses to the world how the search giant intends to conduct business. Buchheit first uttered those three words in the summer of 2001, during a meeting convened to discuss how Google should communicate its corporate values. As options were written on a whiteboard—boring platitudes like "Honoring your commitments" and "Striving for excellence"—Buchheit grew more and more dispirited until finally he blurted out the phrase. At first, the leader of the meeting placed Buchheit's suggestion at the bottom of the list. "But my friend and I kept advocating for it, and we kept inching it up the list," he says. Then "Don't be evil" took on a life of its own, spreading rapidly through the Googleplex, and ultimately it was included in the company's 2004 initial public offering prospectus. "I wanted to give people license to ask a question that maybe doesn't get asked often enough," Buchheit says. Namely, "Is this the right thing to do?" Buchheit left Google in 2006 and in 2007 became a co-founder of FriendFeed, a startup that lets people know what Web content their friends and family are sharing. He is also, appropriately, an angel investor. —Rodes Fishburne

AUTOMOBILES
Ratan Tata
Chairman // Tata Group

MASS TRANSIT Ratan Tata believes the future of the auto industry rests in the hands of people who don't yet drive. Besides snapping up Jaguar and Land Rover, his company, the Tata Group, is developing a car that will cost just $2,500. By shipping it in parts to dealerships, Tata will spend relatively little on factories and labor. The model won't be sold in the U.S. but has the potential to radically alter the market for manufacturers here. Tata-inspired followers are already revving up their engines: Nissan-Renault is partnering with India's Bajaj Auto to develop a car by 2010 that will sell for less than $3,000. But except for Ford India, U.S. companies can't produce a model this cheaply. Which means they risk being run over. —Jessica Liebman

FINANCE
Jamie Dimon
C.E.O. // J.P. Morgan Chase

BEAR HUNTER Visionary is a term that's rarely used to describe Jamie Dimon, a sometimes brash brass-tacks banker who grew up in Queens, New York. Yet he now may shape the future of Wall Street. The takeover of Bear Stearns by his bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, was hailed for preventing a potential meltdown in world markets. Grumbling from Bear shareholders and a negotiating snafu prompted a fivefold jump in the fire-sale price. But the deal is still a huge boon to J.P. Morgan's hedge fund and other businesses, and the best part is the safety net: The Federal Reserve will back $29 billion of Bear's riskiest debt. A decade after being ousted from Citigroup by his mentor, Sandy Weill, Dimon, 52, is at the top of the financial world and has since reconciled with Weill. "I'm very proud of him," Weill said after the deal was announced. "What he did was something great for the whole financial industry, preventing God knows what." —Jeffrey Cane

GLOBAL FINANCE
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
Managing director // World Bank

DEBT THREAT In little more than two years as finance minister of Nigeria (Africa's most populous country), Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala transformed its finances, established anticorruption efforts within the cabinet, and wiped out its $30 billion in debt with a $12 billion payment funded by soaring oil revenue. Today, as a managing director of the World Bank, she's responsible not only for the rest of Africa but also for Europe and parts of Asia. Her attempts to reform some of the harshest and most dysfunctional economies in the world have won her fans ranging from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to Bono. —Felix Salmon

ENVIRONMENT
Jeff Immelt
C.E.O. // General Electric

GREEN MONSTER When General Electric announced the debut of its Ecomagination program, skeptics derided it as an empty gesture. Yet the effort has blunted criticism from environmentalists and proved to be an effective business strategy—much as C.E.O. Jeff Immelt promised. Unveiled in mid-2005, the initiative vowed to increase revenue from green products, improve the company's energy efficiency, and decrease greenhouse-gas emissions. So far, so good. G.E. sold $14 billion worth of Ecomagination products in 2007—from low-energy appliances to L.E.D. traffic lights—and reduced emissions by 4 percent. Other big companies have taken notice. Wal-Mart replaced the fluorescent lightbulbs in its refrigerated display cases in about 500 stores with G.E.'s L.E.D.'s, which emit less heat and will reduce Wal-Mart's energy bill by nearly $3 million a year. —J.L.

BIOTECH
James Thomson
Anatomy professor // University of Wisconsin

SKIN GAME First James Thomson created a controversy; then he resolved it. In 1998, Thomson became the first scientist to isolate human stem cells, which can develop into any tissue in the body and thus have tremendous medical potential. Researchers are currently working to figure out how to "instruct" these cells to replace damaged tissues. But the science has been bogged down in controversy, because until recently the cells could be harvested only from embryos. Last fall, Thomson, 49, announced that he had caused a human skin cell to revert to a stem cell that was virtually identical to those found in embryos. The achievement could open the floodgates of investment. How soon might this bear fruit? "In my lifetime," Thomson says. —David Ewing Duncan