Apple's Jobs tops Fortune's 25 most powerful businesspeople list

Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs has been named as the most powerful businessman by Fortune magazine in a list which also features Lakshmi Mittal, Indra Nooyi and Ratan Tata.

Some are empire builders. Others are hired guns. But if they truly have world-class oomph, they're on Fortune's subjective - yet really quite accurate - list of the most powerful businesspeople in the world, Fortune said.

Jobs took the top spot in Fortune magazine's Power 25 for 2007, published on Tuesday, for having twice altered the direction of the computer industry, Fortune said.

In 1977, the launch of Apple II kicked off the PC era, while the graphical user interface launched by Macintosh in 1984 has been aped by every other computer since, Fortune wrote.

Along the way Jobs conceived of 'desktop publishing,' gave the world the laser printer, and pioneered personal computer networks, the article stated, lauding Jobs for the launch of Pixar, which fostered the development of the technology and a brand-new business model for creating computer-animated feature films.

Computers, Hollywood, music, retailing, and wireless phones. At this moment, no one has more influence over a broader swath of business than Jobs, Fortune stated, noting the success of iPod, iTunes, Apple Stoes and the iPhone.

At No.2 is media mogul Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation. Besides owning The Sun and The Times in the UK, and the Fox network and the New York Post in the US, Murdoch struck a deal this year to acquire the financial news organisation The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and Dow Jones Newswires for which he offered $5 billion.

The WSJ with daily US sales of 1.7 million, is second to USA Today in circulation, and has won 33 Pulitzer Prizes, fourth behind the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.

News Corporation is also the owner of the hugely successful social-networking site MySpace, which was acquired in 2005 for $580 million (£280million). MySpace attracts some 80 million unique visitors per month in the United States alone.

And, with book publisher HarperCollin, leading UK television network Sky TV; DirectTV; 20th Century Fox and the National Geographic Channel in his kitty, it is not surprising that Fortune calls News Corp. ...a global force across the board.

At No.3 is Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and CEO of leading investment bank Goldman Sachs, namely, due to his ability to steer the bank through the subprime crisis and post strong Q3 results at a time when Wall Street firms were taking multi-billion dollar write-offs and heads of other financial institutions were losing their jobs.

Blankfein, who took over last spring, gets credit for helping steer Goldman away from the most damaging investments. And Goldman, which says it has limited exposure to the subprime mess, stands confirmed - for now, anyway - as the smartest bank on the Street, Fortune said.

At No.4 is internet giant Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt who have defied critics who said they couldn't operate their company for the long term.

There's a method to their madness, Fortune said of Google which has revolutionized - okay, massively disrupted - the advertising industry.

And now, Google has set its sights on altering how mobile telephones work, fixing climate change, utterly redefining the very nature of work, that sort of thing.

At No.5 is the Sage of Omaha Warren Buffett who has built Berkshire Hathaway into a massive holding company with interests ranging from underwear to private jets (2006 revenues: $98 billion).

Not surprisingly, CEOs - and athletes, obviously, including LeBron James - venture to Nebraska to consult him. And people everywhere listen to his pronouncements on things like managed earnings (against), stock option expensing (for), and the U.S. dollar (pessimistic), Fortune stated.

Following Buffett at No.6 is Rex Tillerson for running the world's biggest non-state-run oil company Exxon Mobil.

Bill Gates, the iconic technologist, entrepreneur, and business leader of his generation, and for the uninitiated, the founder and chairman of Microsoft, is ranked at No.8.

Gates invented the software industry, masterminded the rise of the PC, and has hung in there as a force on the Internet, Fortune wrote.

At No.8 is Jeff Immelt, chairman and CEO of General Electric (GE), which incidentally is one of the six U.S. industrial corporations to hold a AAA credit rating.

Following Immelt at No.9 is Katsuaki Watanabe, president of Toyota, a company on track to overtake General Motors for good as the world's largest automaker.

Rounding off the top ten is A.G. Lafley, chairman and CEO of Procter & Gamble which now boasts 23 billion-dollar brands, including Tide, Crest, Pampers, Gillette, Olay, Pantene, and the latest addition, Gain laundry detergent.

Corporate heads of Cisco (John Chambers), Hutchison Whampoa (Li Ka-shing), Wal-Mart (Lee Scott), JPMorgan Chase (Jamie Dimon), Hewlett-Packard (Mark Hurd), Boeing (James McNerney), BHP Billiton (Marius Kloppers), Blackstone (Steve Schwarzman), TelMex (Carlos Slim Helu), Cerberus (Steve Feinberg), Walt Disney (Bob Iger) and LVMH (Bernard Arnault) also feature in the list.

Making India proud is steel king Lakshmi Mittal at No.14. A symbol of globalization and Andrew Carnegie of our era billionaire Mittal last year won a bruising battle for Europe's Arcelor to form a company which is three times the size of its nearest competitor having operations in more than 60 countries and employing over 320,000 people.

At No.22 and the only woman in the list of powerful people in business is Indra Nooyi, the chairman and CEO of PepsiCo. Nooyi is the most powerful woman in business...the main architect of the dramatic reshaping of Pepsi that began in the mid-1990s, said Fortune.

At No.23 is Ratan Tata, chairman of Tata Group which is one of India's most venerated family businesses and largest conglomerates. The Group includes India's largest software house, one of its most prestigious hotel chains (the Taj), and sprawling steelmaking operations, as well as leading players in consulting, wireless, and cable services.

The interest generated by Tata's $12.9 billion acquisition of Corus - India's first big-ticket buy overseas - will soon be overshadowed by the much awaited launch of $2,500 car in 2008 that middle-class Indians can afford, Fortune said.

Conspicuously absent in the list are Intel CEO Paul Otellini, eBay CEO Meg Whitman, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who was recently named tech's most influential person.