Hood, who this year became the longest-serving CFO at Microsoft since the early ’90s, has collaborated with Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella to reinvigorate the company, making it into the No. 1 cloud-based software supplier, according to KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc. She’s also reshaping the way Microsoft allocates spending and wins contracts by using machine learning tools to predict which types of hiring will have the greatest impact on sales. With one of those tools, the company started analyzing historical data from 750,000 customers to forecast sales opportunities for each product, customer, and city worldwide. Another system Hood installed predicts which customers need more attention and which are at risk of defecting. —Dina Bass

Van Beurden is constantly questioned on the wisdom of pivoting away from oil and gas, Shell’s bread and butter, but he doesn’t see another option. If demand falls in the next decade, as some are predicting, Shell will shrink along with it if his company doesn’t diversify. Of course, Big Oil has tried and failed to become Big Clean Energy, making splashy bets that have left shareholders and environmentalists skeptical. In van Beurden’s view, however, the key is to make small investments in almost every type of low-carbon technology and see what wins. If it’s electric cars, he’s ready: In January, Shell bought a large utility in the U.K. that could help power them. —Kelly Gilblom

On June 26 a visibly shocked Ocasio-Cortez saw on a watch-party TV screen that she’d won the Democratic primary for a district covering parts of Queens and the Bronx. Then 28, the democratic socialist politician had just beaten a powerful 10-term incumbent, Joe Crowley, all but ensuring she’d become the youngest woman ever elected to the House in November. Her surprise primary victory proved to be a bellwether: Women ran and won this fall in record numbers. The freshman class of the 116th Congress will have 36 newly elected women in the House, including 13 women of color, many of whom have made history in their own right. These trailblazers include Cindy Axne and Abby Finkenauer, the first women elected to the lower chamber from Iowa. Sylvia Garcia and Veronica Escobar will be the first Latina congresswomen from Texas, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Jahana Hayes of Connecticut will be the first black women from their respective states. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota will be the first Muslim congresswomen, and Sharice Davids of Kansas and Deb Haaland of New Mexico will be the first American Indian women. —Margaret Newkirk and Arit John

The new locales in Brooklyn, San Francisco, and Washington—and the planned expansion to Boston, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Paris, and Toronto—come after Gelman and her co-founder and chief operations officer, Lauren Kassan, raised $32 million in November 2017, a sign that investors are finally getting bullish on female-led businesses. About 6,000 members pay as much as $2,700 annually for access to the workspaces, speakers and events, food and beauty products, and, as of October, child-care services. The Wing’s first location, in Manhattan, opened in 2016 and was inspired by the women’s club movement of the late 1800s, which sought to provide places to work and socialize. “We remixed and adapted those forms for the 21st century,” Gelman says. —Emma Kinery

Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd.’s free nationwide 4G wireless service started in 2016, instantly roiling the world’s second-largest telecommunications sector. Two years later the subsidiary, which began charging for data in 2017, has 227 million users and has become profitable as it brings connectivity to remote Indian villages. Ambani’s next big bet is on e-commerce, a $30 billion market in India that’s expected to expand to $200 billion in about a decade, according to Morgan Stanley. He’ll say only that the platform he’s developing will combine online and conventional shopping and will leverage Jio wireless users, pitting it against Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc. in India. —Bhuma Shrivastava

BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and Blackstone flocked to ExodusPoint because Gelband provided investors with consistent returns for about a decade at Millennium Management—and because he’s taking only a 13 percent to 17 percent share of profits instead of the standard 20 percent. Many interpret the name of the fund, with its obvious Biblical reference to leaving for the Promised Land, as a way of sticking it to Millennium’s founder, Izzy Englander, with whom Gelband had a falling out before setting up his rival company. About two dozen Millennium employees followed Gelband. Englander tried to stop the poaching, but a three-arbitrator panel ruled that Gelband could hire the individuals in question. —Yalman Onaran

To celebrate her 28th birthday, Swift tested the limits of her power with a creative solution to one of the music industry’s most intractable challenges: scalpers. Artists lose out on millions of dollars to brokers, who use bots to vacuum up tickets and then resell them at inflated prices. So Swift tried a new model, offering tickets to thousands of fans who’d attended previous shows and selling the rest for sky-high prices to lessen potential profit for the scalpers. (The experiment had its detractors, many of whom claimed she was gouging concertgoers.) Right after the North American leg of her tour, Swift took on another foe: Republicans in her home state of Tennessee. On Oct. 7 she threw her support behind two Democrats running for office (one won, one lost), prompting the highest number of voter registrations anywhere in the country in a 24-hour period. —Lucas Shaw

Last year, when Republicans rammed through a controversial tax package stuffed with big cuts for corporations and the wealthy, Scott’s contribution to the overhaul barely drew notice. He’d managed to codify an idea that Silicon Valley luminary Sean Parker and a coterie of lawmakers and policy wonks have been floating in Washington for years. The main perks: Investors who fund businesses or real estate in these zones can defer and reduce taxes on capital gains from previous unrelated investments—and if they keep their money in the zones for at least a decade, they can eliminate taxes on the additional appreciation. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is already investing near New York’s Long Island City, where Amazon.com Inc. recently announced it’s opening a major office, and other companies are setting up dedicated funds for the purpose, some seeking a half-billion dollars. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has predicted that $100 billion in private capital could eventually flow into poor neighborhoods. When Scott toured some of the zones this year, his first stop was his childhood home of North Charleston, where his single mom raised him, working 16-hour days as a nurse’s assistant. Now “communities that have not seen the type of economic recovery that the rest of the country has seen have a chance to be hopeful,” he said in an interview on Bloomberg Television in July. Yet as the final rules take shape, researchers and nonprofits are sounding alarms. They point out that investors could use the tax breaks for projects they would’ve pursued anyway—or that their projects might displace low-income residents, further speeding up gentrification. —Noah Buhayar

Krafcik runs the undisputed leader in driverless-car technology. Waymo, which is developing self-driving software but isn’t building its own vehicle, has deals with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV and Jaguar; the contracts give the company the option to buy 82,000 cars, outfit them with the software, and deploy them as a robo-taxi fleet. “We see ourselves as enablers, not disrupters, in transportation,” he said in an email. Waymo is testing about 600 Chrysler Pacificas on the road, and the majority of those were assigned to a free program for members of the public in Phoenix in April 2017; a limited, paid autonomous ride-hailing service was scheduled to begin in the city in early December. “We’re prioritizing safety and being thoughtful and measured in our launch,” Krafcik said. He’s pursuing other business models, too, including driverless trucks, e-commerce delivery, and public-transportation partnerships. —Alistair Barr

Freeland is a Rhodes scholar, an ex-journalist, a staunch Russia critic, and an avowed defender of NATO, foreign aid, and global trade—hardly Trumpian. So it’s not surprising that there was friction between Canada and the U.S. throughout the negotiations. When President Trump hit Canada with tariffs, Freeland fired back with her own, and her country, rather than Mexico, slowly became his target. Then Mexico struck its own deal with the U.S., pressuring Freeland to do the same to keep the three-country accord in place. Deadlines came and went under threat of even more tariffs. Finally, on Sept. 30, Canada and the U.S. agreed to terms, preserving Nafta, which will be renamed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Freeland isn’t without her critics, who accuse her of needlessly rubbing liberal values in Trump’s face. They also wondered if her occasional grandstanding—she accepted a diplomacy award in Washington, for example, and used her speech to critique Trump’s policies—made Canada a target unnecessarily. Although each country’s legislative body has yet to vote on the deal and some tariffs remain in place, it’s an agreement nonetheless, and it’s made Freeland into Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s star minister. —Josh Wingrove

Her breakout role in last year’s Girls Trip, which grossed more than $140 million worldwide, opened up a lot of opportunities for the actor, who spent time as a foster child and was homeless before making her name on the Los Angeles comedy circuit. She hosted Saturday Night Live in November 2017 (a performance that earned her an Emmy in September), and her memoir, The Last Black Unicorn, spent 16 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. —Anousha Sakoui

• 4 movies (Uncle Drew, Night School, The Oath, Nobody’s Fool; through mid-October, they had grossed more than $145 million combined)
• 1 Super Bowl ad (for Groupon in February)
• 1 presenting role (the Oscars in March)
• 1 leading role in a sitcom (Shay in The Last O.G., which premiered in March)
• 1 role in a music video (a cameo in Drake’s Nice for What, which was released in April)
• 1 hosting gig (the MTV Movie & TV Awards in June)

• In January, Simon & Schuster Inc. will publish her memoir in paperback.
• 4 movies (The Kitchen, Limited Partners, The Lego Movie 2, The Secret Life of Pets 2)
• 1 Netflix comedy special
• 1 animated Netflix TV series (voicing one of the lead characters in Tuca & Bertie)
• 1 HBO comedy series (Unsubscribed is in development)

Ek rescued the music business from its war with the internet. He’s persuaded more than 80 million people to pay a monthly fee for a bottomless library of songs, playlists, videos, and podcasts. Industry sales, once decimated by piracy, have climbed four years in a row. That success allowed Ek to skip the conventional path to an initial public offering: hiring bankers, going on a roadshow to entice potential investors, and then listing new shares within a prescribed price range. Instead, upending decades of standard practice, he chose to do a “direct listing.” Starting on April 3, existing shareholders could sell their stakes with little control over pricing. (Ek did this because he thought the private market had properly valued the company.) The gambit worked. Spotify’s value surpassed $30 billion for several months, boosting Ek’s net worth to almost $3 billion before the company’s stock tumbled this fall in the tech rout. Now Ek is trying to get artists to forgo record labels altogether, which could turn Spotify into the first self-sufficient online music company and transform the industry for a second time. —Lucas Shaw

Sheikha’s six-year-old company has more than 1 million drivers in the Mideast and northern Africa, allowing customers to book bikes, golf carts, rickshaws, and boats, in addition to cars. This has made Careem an attractive potential purchase for Uber Technologies Inc., which Bloomberg News reported in September is in discussions to acquire it for as much as $2.5 billion. Sheikha is also using his clout to support One Million Arab Coders, an initiative that offers online courses in website and mobile-interface development, and he puts on a hackathon in Ramallah and an artificial-intelligence-oriented summer camp in the United Arab Emirates. “Technology is enabling regional economies to leapfrog traditional infrastructure challenges around transportation, banking, and communication,” he says. —Gwen Ackerman

BTS owes its popularity to its willingness to address social issues, mental health, and politics, despite being in a genre often painted as bubble gum. Tickets for its first worldwide stadium tour sold out in minutes, another sign that audiences are ready for bands with Korean sensibilities. Based on BTS’s success, Big Hit Entertainment, which manages the band, is expanding into movies, games, and original YouTube content; in March it said revenue more than doubled last year, to $86 million. —Sohee Kim

At Boeing’s Chicago headquarters in November, Caret recalls the afternoon two months earlier when she put on her best poker face and strolled into an auditorium. Inside, some 300 defense workers were waiting to hear if they’d snapped a losing streak. At stake was a $13 billion deal to build drones that refuel U.S. Navy planes, the first of three bids that would determine Boeing’s future in military aircraft.

In front of the microphone that day in St. Louis—where Boeing assembles its F/A-18 Super Hornet and F-15 Eagle fighters, and where it would build the drone if the bid prevailed—Caret read from an article predicting the company would lose. Then she tacked on her own ending: “And the Navy has selected as its contractor: the Boeing Co.” The place erupted, Caret says, with people jumping on chairs and storming the stage. “Then we were off,” she adds. “We had meetings that night.”

It was the start of a Boeing sweep, as the company won Pentagon contracts to build a training jet called the T-X and to militarize an Italian commercial helicopter to serve as a Bell Huey replacement. The victories were much needed. Although Boeing’s commercial plane business is awash in cash, Caret’s division was struggling when she was named defense chief in 2016.

Caret, whose parents met while working on the Saturn V rocket for NASA, is the latest caretaker of the company’s 101-year military heritage, which stretches from the B-17 Flying Fortress bombers that helped win World War II to the still-flying B-52 bombers that her father worked on as a systems engineer during the Cold War. In 1997 this history entered a new phase when Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas Corp., an acquisition that promised to make its defense division a true equal to its commercial plane-making empire. But trouble began just four years later, when the company missed out on a critical contract for the $406.5 billion Joint Strike Fighter, the largest-ever U.S. weapons program. Business grew patchy into the 2010s, as Congress capped military spending and sales dwindled for the aging fighter lineup Boeing had inherited from McDonnell Douglas. Not long before Caret took over, Boeing lost out on an $80 billion contract to build a stealth bomber that would replace the B-52.

Even the sporadic deals the company has landed haven’t always gone smoothly. In October it blew its latest delivery deadline on a 2011 contract to convert its 767 passenger jet into an aerial fuel-hauler for the U.S. Air Force; cost overruns on the project are approaching $4 billion. Caret’s team has worked to shore up the project and find new sources of revenue, drawing on executives from across the company, including Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg, to help nail down a strategy for its drone and jet contracts.

In placing its bids, Boeing relied on a new manufacturing process it’s honed for more than a decade across its commercial and defense businesses, which the company was convinced could save time and money. While she won’t divulge much about the technology, Caret says it allows factory workers to rivet together the main fuselage sections of the T-X trainer in less than an hour, compared with a day and a half for the Super Hornet. “We wanted to become lean and efficient,” she says.

The new process led Boeing to base its proposals on the potential long-term windfall rather than the costs to develop and build the first batches of aircraft. It aggressively underbid, absorbing a $700 million earnings hit after winning the contracts. The company’s offer of $9.2 billion for the T-X, for example, was less than half the amount the Pentagon had anticipated spending. Boeing is banking on eventually selling and servicing thousands of the aircraft. However, bidding so low is a highly risky and unusual strategy. If the manufacturing savings don’t materialize or there are delivery delays, losses could mount.

The pressure to evolve comes with the job, Caret says. The payoff is a place in history. She gets choked up thinking about how the projects she’s involved with may endure for a half-century or more, much like the B-52s her father worked on. “Somebody asked me how I would know that the strategy we deployed in 2016 was working, and I said, ‘When we start winning,’ ” Caret says. “And these teams, well, they earned this. This wasn’t given to us.” —Julie Johnsson

The funds, which track broad U.S. and international stock markets, were the latest escalation in a long-running price war whose participants include Vanguard Group, BlackRock, and Charles Schwab. That the move to zero was made by Fidelity—a company known for its stockpickers, not its index funds—was a signal that Johnson is willing to take the family business in a new direction. (Her grandfather founded the company.) “We need to find other ways to get people to give us a try,” Johnson told Bloomberg Markets. “Having a no-minimum, no-fee offering seemed like a pretty good way.” Craig Siegenthaler, an analyst at Credit Suisse Group AG, likened the company’s no-fee funds to the free toaster that banks once offered to entice customers. If they become a gateway to higher-cost Fidelity ­products—an actively managed Fidelity fund costs from 75¢ to 85¢ per $100 invested—then Johnson may have hit on a winning formula. —Annie Massa and Charles Stein

Saville has been famous since 1992, the year she graduated art school and painted Propped, one of her fleshy nudes. Early on, Saville, who lives in Oxford, was grouped with other so-called young British artists such as Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas. Recently, in what’s been the most prominent stretch of her career, she’s had a much-lauded solo show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and an exhibition of new work at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. Auction sales might be meaningless to an artist’s bottom line—an anonymous collector sold Propped, so Saville got only a €12,500 ($14,000) resale royalty—but for established midcareer artists, the winning bids can be powerful signifiers. They’re not just market speculation on an up-and-comer; they’re affirmation of a career and a bet on an artist’s future. The collector, the buyer, and the auction house might have set the record, in other words, but the prestige belongs to Saville alone. —James Tarmy

The midmarket leather goods label had struggled in recent years because of heavy discounting and increased competition from Michael Kors and Kate Spade—until Vevers transformed Coach into a full-fledged fashion brand with accessories, clothes, and runway shows. His designs, including the buzzy $795 Rogue bag, have boosted revenue and helped parent company Tapestry Inc., which acquired Kate Spade last year, right its own sales numbers. —Kim Bhasin

After years of shaping policy behind the scenes, Liu has a job leading oversight of China’s central bank, as well as finance and securities regulators, giving him the equally crucial task of reining in the nation’s swelling $34 trillion debt pile. The world got a hint of Liu’s growing importance in January when he represented China at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. He pledged that his nation would make the financial sector more welcoming to foreign companies and reduce levies on imports as a way of marking the 40th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping’s first steps to open the economy. Life got tougher for the Harvard-trained official in May, when President Trump scrapped a trade truce Liu and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin seemed to have pulled together. Since then he’s been active in China’s efforts to deal with the trade war while ensuring that debt doesn’t further overwhelm the country. —Malcolm Scott

When Black Panther hit theaters in February, moviegoers were treated to a $200 million Marvel film with all the usual trappings: good guys, bad guys, car chases, explosions, and futuristic technology. But they were also asked to grapple with themes such as slavery, colonialism, inheritance of ancestral lands—and with how those legacies complicate what it means to be black not only in fictional Wakanda but also in the real world of 2018. Arriving right before this year’s Academy Awards—which were on Year 4 of the #OscarsSoWhite campaign that aims to spotlight the academy’s poor track record of honoring anyone who’s not white—the film was a worldwide smash. Coogler dethroned Straight Outta Compton’s F. Gary Gray as the black director with the highest-grossing movie in history, further dispelling the long-held myth that films with predominantly black casts don’t resonate with wider audiences (much as Crazy Rich Asians did for films with Asian casts). Black Panther is widely viewed as a contender for best picture at next year’s Oscars—so much so that when the academy announced it would delay a new award for blockbusters, the backpedaling was attributed by some to public outcry over the possibility that it would hurt the movie’s chances in the more prestigious category. Next year, Coogler will team up with the Los Angeles Lakers’ LeBron James to make the sequel to the 1996 movie Space Jam. —Jordyn Holman

Ninety-eight percent of ETF managers buy an index of stocks or bonds, but Wood takes a more active approach, picking industry disrupters and raising or lowering her stakes every day. The strategy is working. Two of her six funds are among the 10 best-performing ETFs of the year, out of more than 1,800. Her largest technology fund has returned 16 percent, and another that focuses on DNA technology has gained 18 percent. That’s attracted investor cash, bringing ETF assets to $2.3 billion, up from $843 million at the end of 2017. (Overall, Ark-managed assets are up to more than $6.4 billion as of late November, from $3.2 billion last year.) Wood’s top picks this year include Invitae Corp., a genetic testing company that doubled its stock price, and the cancer research company Juno Therapeutics Inc., for which Celgene Corp. paid $9 billion. —Rachel Evans

Barwell lost his seat in Parliament when May’s gamble on an early election backfired in 2017. So she appointed him to his current job, and against all odds he’s helped keep her in office. Hard as it was negotiating the divorce with Brussels, it proved easier than fighting with various political factions in London. Barwell will need all of his powers of persuasion to get enough lawmakers to back the deal in a crucial vote on Dec. 11. Throughout the Brexit process, he’s deftly kept rebellious Conservatives in check, arguing that if they don’t get in line, they could be fighting for their jobs in fresh elections. Now he’s working to stop pro-Brexit hard-liners from blocking what they see as a sellout agreement in Parliament. For them, leaving without a deal would be better than the close partnership with the EU that May has signed up for. —Tim Ross

After buying Sky, Comcast, the second-largest cable company in the U.S., became a major competitor in the U.K. Entry didn’t come cheap. It paid more than twice what Sky was worth when it first went up for sale in 2016, borrowing heavily to make it happen. But the deal gave Roberts a key victory over his chief rival, Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger, who snatched 21st Century Fox Inc. away in a bidding war this summer. Owning Sky helps Comcast address perhaps its biggest weakness: cord cutting. While Comcast already owns NBCUniversal, home to a movie studio and TV networks such as MSNBC and USA, it’s been losing thousands of cable customers as Netflix Inc., Amazon.com Inc., and other online services entice people to drop their cable subscriptions. Sky, however, is still adding to its 23 million subscribers in countries such as the U.K., Italy, and Germany. The deal is also another sign of how Roberts has transformed the company he inherited from his father into a global entertainment empire that both owns the films and shows people watch and the cable and internet connections that deliver them. —Gerry Smith

In Fortnite, a player uses his weapons and wits to become the last person alive on a rapidly shrinking island. The free game’s cartoonish characters have proved palatable to kids and parents, and its victory dances have been performed by elementary school students and NBA stars alike. Sweeney’s genius was in making Fortnite easily accessible across game consoles and smartphones; avatars, gadgets, and other in-game perks generate revenue. Fortnite’s popularity has also been fueled in part by its battle royal format and its appeal as a spectator sport: The contests are the most-viewed on Twitch, Amazon.com Inc.’s game-streaming service, and the game’s top “athlete,” Tyler Blevins, earns $500,000 a month. Sweeney is pressing his advantage: He’s declined to put Fortnite in Google’s app store as part of a dispute about revenue sharing, a move that threatens the fee structure that Google and Apple Inc. have enjoyed for years. —Chris Palmeri

When Andrés arrived in Wilmington, N.C., on Sept. 15, Florence had already forced thousands of residents to evacuate, caused five deaths, and prompted a nuclear plant shutdown. Working out of two industrial kitchens, his organization fed 20,000 people that day. Two months later, operating out of Chico State University, he prepared 7,000 pounds of turkey and 100 gallons of gravy so families displaced by California’s Camp Fire and emergency workers could celebrate Thanksgiving. Andrés, a Michelin two-starred chef with 31 restaurants in the U.S., Mexico, and the Bahamas, started his charity in 2010 after an earthquake in Haiti. He’s become so expert at providing food service in disaster areas that last year the Federal Emergency Management Agency awarded him about $11 million in grants to continue his work in the aftermath of Maria. In addition to dispensing 3.7 million meals in Puerto Rico and organizing more than 19,000 volunteers, he started the Plow to Plate Partnerships Program, which has bestowed in 2018 more than $384,000 to businesses on the island. —Kate Krader

Weyl, an economist who’s a principal researcher at Microsoft Research New York City, and Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, argue in Radical Markets that we need to harness market forces to achieve social good. They want to fundamentally alter people’s relationship with private property by having them put a price tag on everything they own and list it online. If you want to keep your home, for instance, you’d have to make it expensive, which means you’d be willing to pay more property taxes on it. The government could use this revenue to cut other taxes, which would incentivize commercial property owners not to sit on vacant lots. Another idea, quadratic voting, lets people express the intensity of their preferences. Each voter gets the same allotment of credits to buy votes. One vote costs one token, but two votes cost four, five votes cost 25, etc. People who feel strongly about an issue would have to concentrate their tokens. Blockchain startup Eximchain Inc. plans to use a version of quadratic voting to govern its platform. —Peter Coy

Along with acting roles in Walt Disney Co.’s A Wrinkle in Time and the second season of HBO’s Big Little Lies, which Hello Sunshine co-produced, Witherspoon has started filming a drama series about a morning TV show for Apple Inc. that will air next year and star Jennifer Aniston and Steve Carell. Hello Sunshine also secured the movie and TV rights to five books; organized a nationwide storytelling tour “for and by intersectional, intergenerational women,” according to a press release; introduced podcasts on breakups and life lessons; and started a book club in conjunction with Amazon.com Inc.’s Audible and a video-­on-demand channel with AT&T Inc. Although her book about the joys of Southern living, Whiskey in a Teacup, became a New York Times best-seller, Witherspoon’s most exciting news for longtime fans may be the announcement that she’ll reprise her role as the cult feminist heroine Elle Woods in a third Legally Blonde movie. —Anousha Sakoui

Anyone who’s ever left a job could only wish for the kind of praise Friar’s performance inspired. Although Jack Dorsey is Square’s chief executive officer (in addition to his other gig heading Twitter Inc.), Friar “essentially ran the company” and was “a key architect in building Square’s business model,” wrote Citigroup Global Markets Inc. analyst Peter Christiansen. Friar’s six years at Square “is the stuff of Silicon Valley ­legend,” wrote venture capitalist Bill Gurley of Benchmark, who’s on the board of Nextdoor. On Friar’s watch, Square evolved from a credit card reader for food trucks into a payments-processing company helping more than 2 million global retailers with payroll, loans, accounting, inventory tracking, website building, and more; the company forecasts 60 percent growth this year on more than $3 billion in revenue. Friar hasn’t said much publicly about her new role with Nextdoor. “I am excited to join this extraordinary team where we can build … a force for good in the world,” Nextdoor’s official press release quoted her as saying. Before she left Square, she told Bloomberg Businessweek that she wants her work to have global impact: “I feel like I’m going through my own journey of how to make the world a better place.” —Selina Wang

Outspoken Parkland students such as David Hogg, Emma González, Delaney Tarr, and Ryan Deitsch, who are founding members of March for Our Lives, a pro-gun-control coalition, used youth to their advantage, embarrassing the adults who tried to defuse teen anger with “thoughts and prayers” and other empty gestures. When Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced a visit to Marjory Stoneman, González tweeted: “Good thing I was already planning on sleeping in tomorrow.” In the months following the massacre, they also helped pit corporate America against Second Amendment supporters, using their social media megaphones to needle companies and politicians who, they said, enable such killings. This activism encouraged Delta Air Lines, Hertz, MetLife, LifeLock, and Wyndham Hotel Group to sever ties with the NRA. Citigroup Inc. instituted a policy prohibiting corporate customers from selling bump stocks or firearms to those who are younger than 21 or haven’t passed a background check. Bank of America Corp. stopped lending to companies that manufacture assault-style weapons for civilian use. First National Bank of Omaha stopped issuing an NRA-branded credit card that offered rewards on sporting goods purchases, including firearms. Spurred by these successes, Parkland students and parents tried their hand at politics, with mixed results. A super PAC launched by Parkland families to fund anti-gun-violence candidates sought to raise $10 million but took in only $230,000. That doesn’t mean there’s a lack of enthusiasm for their cause: Of the 307 candidates endorsed by the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, more than 80 percent won their seats. —Polly Mosendz

The turmoil that wracked political establishments across Europe in 2017 (not to mention the U.S. in 2016) is now visiting emerging markets from Mexico to Malaysia, and the wave of poll booth surprises shows no signs of abating. Dominant political parties were shaken, if not cast aside, by popular disgust at their failure to deliver broad-based prosperity. The trend was most recently exemplified on Oct. 29, when a populist former army captain, Jair Bolsonaro, won Brazil’s presidential election and Germany’s pragmatic, centrist chancellor, Angela Merkel, announced a phased political exit. Nostalgic for Brazil’s dictatorship and dismissive of minorities, women, and democratic niceties, Bolsonaro will join a growing camp of populists when he takes office on Jan. 1, including the leaders of Ethiopia, Mexico, Malaysia, and South Africa. The cause of conventional government in emerging markets hasn’t been helped by a strong dollar and rising short-term U.S. interest rates, which suck away funds. Slowing growth in China is contributing to the tough environment for incumbents, too. —Marc Champion

Maijoor’s job is to ensure that European Union investors are treated fairly. The latest update to the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (called MiFID II), implemented by him in January, targets the cozy relationship between fund managers and brokerages, in which funds pay brokers whenever they buy and sell shares—an expense that ultimately comes out of the fund investors’ pockets. Prior to the rules, brokers could bundle those trading costs with other services such as research and swanky conferences, so it wasn’t always clear that fund investors were getting the best deal. Now research and brokerage have to be priced separately. Maijoor, who’s from the Netherlands and worked for the Dutch financial markets regulator before assuming his current role in 2011, has been fighting for decades to reduce barriers to the free movement of money and to bolster the size of Europe’s capital markets. He’s said he wouldn’t be surprised if transparency on trading fees becomes the global standard. —Elisa Martinuzzi

As a co-founder and vice president for marketing at Tinder, Wolfe Herd saw firsthand the cesspool of slurs and all-caps rants that women often had to wade through when they tried online dating. After suing the company and another co-founder for sexual harassment in 2014—the lawsuit was settled without any admission of wrongdoing—she started Bumble. Her belief was that a few tweaks—­verifying users’ identities, banning people who make demeaning comments or physical threats, requiring that it be women who initiate conversations with men—could make the internet safer for women and, by extension, men. (It’s not just for straight people, either; those of all sexual orientations can use the app.) Bumble is now valued at $1 billion and has moved into new corners: Bumble BFF is for women who want to make friends, and Bumble Bizz, introduced in October 2017, helps women establish professional contacts beyond those LinkedIn requests. Next year the company plans to expand into digital entertainment. “We’re focused on being a full-fledged social media platform,” Wolfe Herd says. Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. largely allow users who leave racist or misogynistic comments to continue using the services, but Bumble’s 4,000 moderators have no problem kicking people off. They’ll need good ones when Bumble expands to India. Dating apps are a tricky business there: Violence against women has increased 80 percent in the past decade, and some villages have outlawed women from using social media. Bumble will let women hide their names so they won’t be targeted. “This isn’t an easy move for us, but it’s one where we can have an impact,” Wolfe Herd says. —Claire Suddath

As a member of Congress, Mulvaney famously called the bureau a “sick, sad joke.” That made him a hero to those in the Republican Party and the finance industry who want to neuter the agency, if not kill it outright. To Democrats, especially progressives, having him at the helm has been akin to giving your worst enemy the keys to your house. Mulvaney, who’s also serving as President Trump’s White House budget director, has said he’s worked to transform the bureau from the regulatory crown jewel of liberals (the agency was Elizabeth Warren’s brainchild) into one that “follows the law.” He’s reviewed its enforcement, supervisory, and rule-making functions; he’s frozen data collection; he’s closed open enforcement cases; and he’s directed staff to slash next year’s budget. Mulvaney also wants to curb the agency’s independence by giving Congress, rather than the Federal Reserve, control of its spending and to dilute the director’s power by establishing a commission that would vote on all matters. Kathy Kraninger, a colleague of Mulvaney’s at the Office of Management and Budget, has been tapped to run the agency on a permanent basis. —Elizabeth Dexheimer

Thao wants to take on regional giants such as Indonesia’s Lion Air and Malaysia’s AirAsia Group Bhd. VietJet’s scheduled inter­national capacity is expected to grow as much as 70 percent in 2018, according to the CAPA Centre for Aviation, and the airline has become one of Asia’s largest customers of Boeing Co.’s 737 Max, doubling an order it announced two years ago during a visit to Vietnam by then-President Barack Obama. The expansion further upends an aviation market long dominated by state-owned Vietnam Airlines JSC, as VietJet offers millions of Vietnamese customers who’ve never seen the inside of an airplane the chance to buy a cheap ticket. “I’m most proud of being able to help Vietnamese farmers fly for the first time,” says Thao, who made her first million dollars at age 21 trading fax machines and latex. —John Boudreau and Nguyen Dieu Tu Uyen

Houston—whose company was once known for its lavish décor (a chrome panda statue) and amenities (a corporate chef who’d cooked at a Michelin three-starred restaurant)—reined in spending and invested wisely in product development. He shifted Dropbox’s emphasis away from a file-hosting service for consumers and small teams to one aimed at bigger enterprises. Houston also saved money and allowed for faster file transfers by building his own data centers rather than paying the rising fees that Amazon Web Services wanted. All of this helped boost revenue above $1 billion for the first time last year while trimming losses. It’s a remarkable turn of events: In 2015, Fidelity Investments Inc. and BlackRock Inc. wrote down the value of their stakes amid complaints that Dropbox was upgrading its products too slowly. —Dina Bass

After 20 years of soaring profits and hands-off regulation at Australia’s financial institutions, the commission held its first public hearing in March. The government introduced the body, led by retired Judge Hayne, after the country’s biggest lender, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, was sued for systemically breaching anti-money-laundering rules; Commonwealth settled for A$700 million ($519 million) in June. Despite spending two decades on the bench of Australia’s highest court, Hayne was largely unknown outside legal circles before he was appointed to head the inquiry. Still, his investigation has revealed a shocking string of scandals: Bankers left open the accounts of dead people, charging them automatic fees for financial planning before the accounts were wound down; took cash bribes to facilitate fraudulent mortgages; and misled regulators who tried to investigate wrongdoing. Even with the final report not due until February, Hayne is provoking change. Executive bonuses have been forfeited, and most big banks are rushing to offload their financial planning businesses out of concern that they’ll be forced to. With national elections expected by May and politicians tapping into public disquiet over the scandals, analysts are anticipating a profit slump industrywide in the next year. —Emily Cadman

She’s not tossing Molotov cocktails with anti-Group of Seven demonstrators, but Cunningham understands the financial worries of people who are. She notes that today fewer companies sell shares on public exchanges such as NYSE; the Ubers of the world fuel themselves with privately raised money. “It’s critical that we democratize investment,” she says. “If we focus a lot of energy on the private markets, the everyday investor doesn’t get to take part in that growth.” (Of course, there’s self-­interest at play, too. Private money deprives NYSE of revenue from initial public offerings.) Cunningham has spent her entire career—except for a stint at culinary school—in the industry, starting on the NYSE floor, followed by roles at Nasdaq. She returned to NYSE six years ago, building a reputation as someone who comprehends markets deeply. “Very often, Wall Street and the financial markets are misunderstood as a way for the rich to get richer,” she says. “It’s a way for businesses to scale their products and services and make them available to the masses.” —Nick Baker

● Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon.com Inc. ● Sergey Brin, president, Alphabet Inc. ● Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO, Berkshire Hathaway Inc. ● Tim Cook, CEO, Apple Inc. ● Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of Turkey ● Ronan Farrow, journalist ● Pope Francis ● LeBron James, forward, Los Angeles Lakers ● Xi Jinping, president of the People’s Republic of China ● Kim Jong Un, supreme leader of North Korea ● Emmanuel Macron, president of France ● Theresa May, prime minister of the United Kingdom ● Narendra Modi, prime minister of India ● Robert Mueller, special counsel, U.S. Department of Justice ● Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla Inc. and SpaceX ● Larry Page, CEO, Alphabet Inc. ● Vladimir Putin, president of Russia ● Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia ● Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook Inc. ● Masayoshi Son, CEO, SoftBank Group Corp. ● Donald Trump, president of the United States ● Margrethe Vestager, European commissioner for competition ● Serena Williams, tennis player ● Oprah Winfrey, chairman and CEO, Oprah Winfrey Network LLC ● Jeff Zucker, president, Cable News Network Inc. ● Mark Zuckerberg, chairman and CEO, Facebook