Most Powerful

• #1 James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin
  CanadaIndiaUnited Kingdom Colonial AdministrationPolitical Industrial Conquest & TributeState Power Power: 100
  James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin (born 1849) is a british imperial administrator associated with Canada and India. James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin is best known for serving as Governor General of Canada and Viceroy of India during a period of reform and empire management. This profile belongs to the site’s study of colonial administration and state power, where influence depends on controlling systems rather than possessing money alone. In the industrial age, command moved through factories, rail, shipping, fuel, banking, and the ability to scale production more efficiently than rivals.
• #2 Samuel de Champlain
  CanadaFrance Colonial AdministrationPolitical Early Modern Conquest & TributeState Power Power: 100
  Samuel de Champlain (born 1574) is a french explorer and colonial administrator associated with France and Canada. Samuel de Champlain is best known for founding Quebec and organizing French colonial alliances and trade in North America. This profile belongs to the site’s study of colonial administration and state power, where influence depends on controlling systems rather than possessing money alone. In the early modern period, rulers and financiers increasingly worked through maritime trade, imperial administration, court patronage, chartered privilege, and expanding fiscal systems.
• #3 Galen Weston
  CanadaUnited Kingdom FinancialIndustrialIndustrial Capital Control Cold War and Globalization Finance and WealthIndustrial Capital Power: 90
  Willard Gordon Galen Weston (1940 – 2021) was a British-Canadian businessman who led George Weston Limited and helped consolidate one of the largest food retail and food production footprints in Canada. He is closely associated with the renewal of Loblaw Companies in the 1970s and 1980s, when store closures, store redesign, and the deliberate build-out of private label brands reshaped how Canadian grocery retail competed. Through the family’s holding structures, he also oversaw a portfolio that combined supermarkets, bakery production, and commercial real estate with luxury department store assets in Canada and Europe. Alongside his corporate roles, he served as chairman of the W. Garfield Weston Foundation, which became one of Canada’s prominent family philanthropies.
• #4 Vitalik Buterin
  CanadaRussia FinancialTechnologicalTechnology Platform Control 21st Century Finance and WealthTechnology Platforms Power: 80
  Vitalik Buterin (born 1994) is a software developer and protocol designer best known as a co-founder of Ethereum, a blockchain platform built to support programmable “smart contracts” and decentralized applications. Buterin became prominent in the cryptocurrency world as a young writer and researcher, arguing that blockchains could be more than payment networks. His Ethereum proposal, published in 2013, helped catalyze an industry centered on tokenized networks, on-chain finance, and open-source governance debates that attracted investors and operators, including figures such as [Marc Andreessen](https://moneytyrants.com/marc-andreessen/).Buterin’s influence derives from a distinctive mix of technical authorship and community credibility. Ethereum is designed to be decentralized, and Buterin does not control the network in a corporate sense. However, as an originator of core ideas and a frequent voice in protocol research, he has had outsized impact on how developers and stakeholders interpret Ethereum’s priorities, security assumptions, and upgrade paths. He has also influenced public debates about how decentralized systems interact with law and social norms. His public work has also included philanthropy and advocacy for cautious, research-driven scaling and governance.
• #5 David Thomson
  Canada FinancialFinancial Network ControlMedia 21st Century Finance and WealthMonopoly Control Power: 77
  David Thomson (born 1957), also known as David Thomson, 3rd Baron Thomson of Fleet, is a Canadian and British hereditary peer and media magnate who leads the Thomson family’s long-running position in information and publishing through his role as chairman of Thomson Reuters. He became the primary family steward after the death of his father, Kenneth Thomson, in 2006, inheriting both a British title and leadership responsibility for a fortune built on newspapers, publishing, and later financial information services. After Thomson Corporation acquired Reuters in 2008, he became chairman of the merged Thomson Reuters, a company that sits at the crossroads of journalism, market data, legal information, and professional services.Thomson’s profile illustrates a form of power that is distinct from both celebrity entrepreneurship and the visible politics of state power. Information services create leverage by shaping what decision-makers can see. Trading desks, corporate counsel, compliance departments, and government agencies rely on data, filings, and news feeds to interpret events and price risk. When a firm becomes embedded in those workflows, it gains a kind of infrastructural centrality: it is not merely selling a product, it is helping define the informational environment in which choices are made. That logic makes Thomson Reuters a natural counterpart to rival ecosystems such as Bloomberg, associated with [Michael Bloomberg](https://moneytyrants.com/michael-bloomberg/).
• #6 Changpeng Zhao
  CanadaChinaInternational FinancialTechnologicalTechnology Platform Control 21st Century Finance and WealthTechnology Platforms Power: 72
  Changpeng Zhao, widely known as CZ, is a Chinese-born entrepreneur associated with Canada and best known for founding Binance, the cryptocurrency exchange that became one of the most powerful platforms in the digital-asset economy. His importance rests on more than personal wealth. Binance occupied a commanding position in price discovery, token distribution, exchange liquidity, custody, and the everyday experience of retail crypto speculation around the world.He belongs in technology platform control because Binance’s power did not come from producing a traditional commodity. It came from creating the digital marketplace where others traded, listed, stored, and discovered assets. A dominant exchange can influence which tokens gain attention, how liquidity concentrates, what fees users tolerate, and which jurisdictions become strategically important. In crypto, the platform often matters as much as the asset.Zhao’s career is especially important because it captures the explosive strengths and chronic weaknesses of global crypto infrastructure. Binance grew with remarkable speed, serving users across borders while outmaneuvering slower institutions and exploiting the ambiguity of regulatory geography. That gave Zhao the aura of a founder operating above conventional national constraints. But the same structure exposed him to intense scrutiny, enforcement actions, and criminal liability.His profile therefore illustrates how platform power can emerge in a field that advertises decentralization while often concentrating practical control in a few exchanges, wallets, and intermediaries. Zhao became one of the most visible embodiments of that paradox: a man associated with an industry that praised disintermediation while depending heavily on the systems he built.
• #7 James J. Hill
  CanadaUnited States IndustrialIndustrial Capital Control Industrial Industrial Capital Power: 72
  James J. Hill (1838 – 1916) was a railroad builder, financier, and logistics strategist whose power grew from the ability to organize transportation on a continental scale. Operating from St. Paul and the northern frontier of American expansion, he built the Great Northern Railway into one of the most consequential railroad systems in North America. His influence reached well beyond rails and locomotives. By controlling freight routes, encouraging settlement, linking grain and resource regions to markets, and coordinating steamship and elevator interests, he helped determine which towns prospered, which commodities moved cheaply, and which regions were integrated into the national economy.Hill’s career represents industrial capital in its logistical form. He did not primarily dominate through factory ownership or branded consumer goods. He dominated through movement. In an age when transport costs could make or break farms, mines, timber operations, and urban wholesalers, the person who controlled routes possessed leverage over entire chains of production. Hill understood this deeply. His railroad strategy was never merely about laying track. It was about building traffic, shaping settlement, and making the railway the indispensable spine of regional development.He became one of the emblematic “empire builders” of the American railroad age, though the phrase can be misleading if it suggests romance rather than power. Hill’s authority came from disciplined cost control, hard bargaining, and the ability to bind vast areas to transport networks he helped govern. His legacy includes impressive feats of organization, but it also includes the concentrated private command over land, rates, and settler expansion that defined much of nineteenth-century railroad capitalism.
• #8 Peter Munk
  Canada FinancialIndustrialResource Extraction Control Cold War and Globalization Finance and Wealth Power: 47
  Peter Munk (1927 – 2018) was a Hungarian-born Canadian businessman who built a career in high-risk, capital-intensive ventures, culminating in the founding of Barrick Gold in 1983. Through acquisitions, project development, and sophisticated financing, he helped turn Barrick into one of the world’s most influential gold mining companies, shaping how modern mining groups manage reserves, political risk, and investor expectations.