I'd like to play devil's advocate for a moment. Many of us would have agreed on Zuckerberg and Netflix on this list back in 2006 and probably on Linus as well.

I'd like to play devil's advocate for a moment. Many of us would have agreed on Zuckerberg and Netflix on this list back in 2006 and probably on Linus as well. Some of us would have even been pretty vocal in defending Blu-ray and/or HD-DVD. Maybe at this very moment someone is not convinced that Steve Ballmer should be on the list. The fact that 5 years later some events altered the course for some of these guys' projects doesn't negate on the arguments put forth to include them. We already know what Hastings and Zuckerberg did to stay relevant. Torvald's inclusion is explained as being by design. That is, Linus himself is designing the growth of his baby toward as much self-sufficiency as possible. Lucky for us there was the Bitkeeper debacle and he had to pull his ass out to give us Git. Right now the kernel is at version 3.0, most distros out there (including Ubuntu) still uses something like 2.6.xx and people are nonetheless very happy. I'd say, seen from a purely Linux angle, it would make Linus a lot less relevant. Now, something that would've made CNN look much better 5 years after posting this, would have been to moderate their zeal by excluding stuff like "But as respected as they might be for their past achievements, their best days are behind them", especially when covering the ever changing tech business.