Who has been the best CEO of the year? It is not an easy question to answer. Nonetheless, for the past three years The Economist has tried. No gauge is perfect. But we start with 1,200 big companies and look at their shareholder returns adjusted for industry averages. Ranking by that metric gives us a top ten. Then we work to whittle down the list. Chief executives who were simply lucky get excluded. So do those who enjoyed blistering share-price growth but blundered in other ways.

This approach has produced previous winners of Jensen Huang of Nvidia and Alex Karp of Palantir. This year, for a nice change, the winner is no AI guru. But he has benefited from one of the big business trends in 2025. And his success has garnered attention from across the world (though sometimes of an unwelcome, violent sort).