Fortune Selected the 2019 Global Greatest Leaders, with Pony Ma Listed Fourth

On April 22, Fortune released its chart of 2019 world greatest leaders. Pony Ma, CEO of Tencent, runs the fourth on the list. Bill and Melinda Gates, the cofounders of Gates Foundation are listed as the first.

Pony Ma’s presence on the list has a lot to do with the ever growing influence of WeChat, the almighty social app in China. The app becomes so diverse in functions that even Facebook starts to learn from it.

“Compared with others in China’s boisterous tech scene, Ma keeps a low profile. But his influence has gone global thanks to WeChat, Tencent’s billion-member instant messaging service. WeChat is the epitome of the super-app model, a single interface through which users can pay bills, order food, book tickets, play games, and more,” Fortune commented.

However, Jack Ma doesn’t appear on the list.

On April 23rd, at the 2019 China Green Companies Summit, Ma said, “For the first time in the past two hundred years, the United States has truly regarded China as a real competitor. Right now Tencent is Alibaba‘s competitor. Without Tencent, Alibaba would not have achieved such great improvements today. It works both ways. For Alibaba, Tencent is like a partner.”

It is also interesting to see that, apart from the political and business leaders, there is a 16-year-old girl named Greta Thunberg who’s elected for being an activist. She leads a school strike outside of Riksdagen, the Swedish parliament building, in order to raise awareness for climate change on August 28, 2018.

According to the Guardian, she spoke at a public event in London as Extinction Rebellion protests, “People are slowly becoming more aware, but emissions continue to rise. We can’t focus on small things. Basically, nothing has changed.”

Featured Image Source: Forbes.