Pope joins tech titans on Vanity Fair influential list

The Pontiff was placed at 18th on the magazine’s “New Establishment List” which, since 1994, has “identified the people who have defined the moment – from the Information Age to the dot-com bubble, the financial crisis to the social media tidal wave”.

The list’s top four spots were occupied by tech executives who have played leading roles in the development of artificial intelligence: OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Tesla and SpaceX head Elon Musk and Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang.

By contrast, the magazine cited how Leo, dubbed “His Holiness the Humanist”, had declared in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas on humanity in the age of AI “that technology should serve us, not the other way around”.

Vanity Fair, which claims to exclude heads of state for consideration on its list but seems to have made an exception for the Pope (who is the head of Vatican City), wrote that never before “have the stakes of individual influence felt so high” and said the list is not “a ranking of net worth or follower count but a measure of hard power”.

Pope Leo’s write-up in Vanity Fair included reference to his advocacy for the poor as a missionary in Peru, his crackdown on a group of schismatic Catholics as Pope and divergence from the Trump administration on the United States’ war in Iran. 

“An American pope who prizes the dignity of immigrants and opposes the concentration of economic power in the hands of a select few? He’s bound to get in a few dustups,” wrote the magazine.

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Pope Leo joins tech, political leaders on Vanity Fair list of influential individuals (By Justin McLellan/National Catholic Reporter)