Last year, we chose Snap CEO Evan Spiegel as our person of 2017. We anticipated, correctly, that the public-market debut of Snap would bring much more attention to the young company and its co-founder.
This year, we’ve chosen SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son to be the person of 2018—the person we think will have a greater news profile and bigger impact on the global tech industry in the coming year. But we’re choosing him as much for the direct role he’ll play as for what his rising profile symbolizes.