From Musk To Snoop Dogg: What TIME 100's 2025 List Tells Us
With no Indians on the TIME 100 Most Influential List 2025, what does the list really say
In 2020, actor Ayushman Khurrana charted on the list of TIME’s 100 most influential people in the world. In 2024, it was Sakshi Malik, India’s first and only female wrestler to win an Olympic medal. In 2021, Adar Poonawalla. Prime Minister Modi has been on the list five times. In 2025? No Indians have made the cut.
It’s an empty moment that for many may be irrelevant, for others a nudge to their nationalistic pride. And for some, it’s an afterthought worth pondering upon. Beyond the sting of exclusion and past the panchayat over representation, many of the names listed this year are familiar to the Indian audiences. Who doesn’t know Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, Scarlett Johansson, Adrien Brody, Ed Sheeran, Hozier, and Snoop Dogg. If their names don’t spark recognition, their faces do.
So, as it happens, absence can be a powerful statement, but it's the presence that shapes narratives. And we are here to talk about that! Who said anything about our sensibilities exclusively being influenced by homegrowns—we have always been a lot that loves validation from our Western peers. But that’s a conversation for another time.
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The pain point is influence is based on resonance more than repetition. Let me explain that better. Pick up your phone, you have influencers telling you what you should wear, you’ve computational models dictating your taste in music.
Think of the last time Instagram’s explorer tab felt like a haunted house of gore and unfiltered chaos. A version of influence forced and not felt through repetition. So much so that, that influence is met with repetition that ultimately feels like resonance.
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And if this tells you anything about being “influenced” today, its subtle, digitized, and deeply contextual. In contrast, the people on TIME’s list aren’t just celebrities or CEOs and thought leaders. They’re signals. They show where the world is heading, the tone, the texture and the ideologies the world is responding to—whether we like it or not. Whether we align with it or not.
That’s why Elon Musk and Hozier are on the same list of 100 most influential people 2025. One is hard to explain with his obsession with futurism and the other crafts songs that soundtrack a generation’s grief and tenderness. Or take Mucci Prada, the creative fashion designer behind Prada and Miu Miu and Reshma Kewalramani, CEO of U.S Biotechnology
True influence is hard to spot. Especially when everything feels so overwhelmingly loud and in your face, a list like TIME 100 matters. It filters out the noise and the repetition. Grabs our short attention spans to make us aware of the real influences genuinely shifting the global narrative.
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Consider the list as a roadmap than focusing on the personalities that have made their way on the list. With their personal achievements, they are also symbolic of something much bigger -the course of humanity; each part of a bigger narrative, signalling what the world values right now and what it reflects.
So, although the list may not draw representation from a nationality and ethnicity, it’s a reminder for us we to address: If influence is what shapes today and tomorrow, what does the TIME 100 tell us about the future we’re already living into?