Most Powerful

• #1 Viktor Orban
  Hungary Imperial SovereigntyPolitical 21st Century State Power Power: 100
  Viktor Orbán (born 1963) is a Hungarian politician who has served as prime minister of Hungary in two main periods, first from 1998 to 2002 and then from 2010 onward. As the long-time leader of Fidesz, he is known for building a durable governing majority and reshaping Hungary’s institutional landscape through constitutional, legal, and media changes.
• #2 George Soros
  Global FinanceHungaryUnited KingdomUnited States FinancialFinancial Network ControlPolitical Cold War and Globalization Finance and WealthState Power Power: 62
  George Soros (born 1930) is a Hungarian-born American investor and philanthropist whose career joined speculative finance to one of the largest private giving programs in modern public life. After surviving anti-Jewish persecution in wartime Hungary and studying in London, he built a career in New York finance and eventually created the Quantum Fund, one of the most successful hedge-fund vehicles of the late twentieth century. Soros became famous for macro trades that treated currencies, sovereign policy, and investor psychology as one integrated field rather than as separate domains. His fortune then became the base for a vast philanthropic network centered on education, civil liberties, legal reform, and support for open political institutions. He belongs to the history of financial network control because his influence did not stop at portfolio returns. It extended into public debate through the movement of large pools of capital and through private funding that could strengthen institutions, oppositions, media environments, and advocacy ecosystems across borders. His career shows how liquid wealth, when joined to a theory of political change, can become both market force and ideological force.
• #3 Jakob Fugger
  AugsburgEuropeHoly Roman EmpireHungaryTyrol FinancialFinancial Network ControlPolitical Early Modern Finance and WealthState Power Power: 62
  Jakob Fugger, often called Jakob Fugger the Rich, was one of the clearest early examples of private capital rising high enough to shape dynastic politics across a continent. Born in Augsburg in 1459, he inherited neither a crown nor a territorial state. What he built instead was a commercial and financial machine rooted in long-distance trade, mining, metal supply, church finance, and sovereign lending. By the early sixteenth century the Fugger house had become indispensable to princes, bishops, and emperors who required silver, copper, credit, and fiscal coordination on a scale few rivals could match.His significance lies in the way he fused several streams of power that were usually studied separately. Mining revenues supplied cash and collateral. Merchant networks connected German production to Mediterranean and Iberian demand. Loans to the Habsburgs and other rulers turned commercial capital into political leverage. Control over bullion and access to tax streams gave his firm influence far beyond Augsburg. Fugger was not merely a banker in the narrow sense. He was a financier whose decisions affected imperial elections, war finance, church patronage, and the balance of power within the Holy Roman Empire and beyond.He belongs in the study of wealth and power because he demonstrates how finance could become quasi-sovereign before the rise of modern central banking. Monarchs formally ruled, yet rulers who depended on private credit found their room for action shaped by the men who could advance money, restructure obligations, and deliver material resources. Fugger’s fortune was therefore not just large. It was architecturally important. He helped define a model in which concentrated capital, organized across trade and extraction, could influence the political order without openly replacing it.