The most influential people of 2025

Zohran Mamdani: A socialist takes New York

“We cannot have a socialist” running “the greatest capitalist city in the world”, observed one Wall Street financier just before November’s mayoral election. Get used to it, said The New Yorker. On New Year’s Day, Zohran Mamdani will become the first avowedly socialist mayor of New York, and its first Muslim leader to boot, following a meteoric rise. A year ago, most had never heard of the youthful Assembly member from Queens. But Mamdani’s rising star – on a platform of soaking the rich to fund rent freezes, free bus travel and universal child care – has proved unstoppable.

Donald Trump, who once called Mamdani a “100% Communist lunatic” and threatened to deport him, changed his tune when he met him, staging a surreally chummy press conference with his charismatic fellow populist. “As well as coming from nowhere” to win New York, Mamdani has “succeeded in setting” America’s domestic economic agenda in 2025, making the issue of “affordability” the watchword of his slick TikTok campaign. Born in Uganda, Mamdani, 34, arrived in New York aged seven. His unremarkable CV since might suggest he’ll struggle to run a city with “the economy of a medium-sized nation”, says The Economist. And his hands are tied: the state legislature seems unlikely to pass his full $9 billion package of tax hikes. But the city’s fate ultimately depends on whether Mamdani shows “a pragmatic streak”, says The Wall Street Journal – or views “his mission” as “creating a socialist lab experiment”.

Javier Milei: El Loco stands at a crossroads

Argentina’s chainsaw-waving “libertarian firebrand” Javier Milei narrowly escaped financial meltdown this year – helped by a $20 billion lifeline from the Trump administration to avert a currency crisis and “Make Argentina Great Again” – before pulling off a surprising landslide in the country’s midterm elections, says Bloomberg.

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Nicknamed “El Loco” (The Madman) as a teenage goalkeeper, Milei has often seemed determined “to perpetuate this reputation with his egotistical boasts and brutal attacks on critics”, notes The Washington Post – not to mention “his crazy hair, cloned dogs and claims of expertise at tantric sex”. Yet since coming to power in 2023, the results of his far-reaching free-market reforms have been impressive, says The Economist. Inflation is down from 211% to around 30%, the poverty rate has fallen and “the budget has been wrestled under control”. Milei is now moving towards a floating peso and removing most capital controls. The process has been painful, but voters have kept faith with his vow “to jolt” Argentina “out of more than a century of statism and stagnation”. Markets, in turn, have celebrated, judging the prospect of Milei’s re-election next year now more likely. “Rev up the chainsaw!”

Much could yet go wrong. Milei is now at a crossroads, Carlos Malamud, a Latin America specialist at Madrid’s Real Instituto Elcano, told the Financial Times. “He has everything he needs, if he gets it right… to lead a deep transformation of Argentina.” But if “arrogance gets the better of him again”, all bets are off.

Sanae Takaichi: Japan’s Iron Lady

The new Japanese premier, who made history in October when she became the country’s first female PM, has proved a gift for headline writers. Known for her love of hard rock and motorbikes – and citing Margaret Thatcher as an inspiration – Sanae Takaichi has gone “from Iron Maiden to the Iron Lady”, says Sky News. But she has taken a battering at the hands of bond markets. Since taking power, and shocking investors with a “low quality” fiscal expansion of $135 billion – “including such gems as rice vouchers and subsidies for fossil fuels” – yields on Japanese debt have “spiked wildly across the maturity curve”, says The Telegraph. The risk that this could escalate into a major crisis in Japan’s historically sedate $12 trillion bond market “has sent tremors” through the markets.

When it comes to dealing with Donald Trump, she appears to have learned from her mentor, the late Shinzo Abe, that “flattery, deference” and golf-related “gold-plated gifts” were the way to go. “Takaichi’s smorgasbord of giveaways” may make a “mockery of Thatcherism”, but she does share some traits with her heroine. “Like the late Iron Lady, she has little patience for other career women,” says The Telegraph. She belongs to Nippon Kaigi, “a nationalist nostalgia movement that fights feminism and harks back to the Samurai ideal of women as the anchor of home and family”. Still, unless she is careful with bond-market vigilantes, Takaichi runs the risk of comparison with another UK Conservative prime minister – Liz Truss.

Liang Wenfeng: The hedgie who shook the world

The entrepreneur behind DeepSeek began 2025 with a shot that rang around the world, says Fortune. Billions of dollars were wiped off the value of Silicon Valley’s AI titans in January when the unknown Chinese start-up revealed its prowess at developing cutting-edge AI at a fraction of the cost – raising doubts, that have lingered all year, about the gargantuan sums being spent in the West. “Whether by chance or design”, the launch of DeepSeek’s R1 coincided with Donald Trump’s inauguration, says Time, creating “a powerful narrative” that China had “matched America’s best with just a fraction of the computing power”. It was hardly the best start in Washington to a year of tight trade negotiations.

Liang Wenfeng, 40, who hails from a village in southern China, isn’t a computer whizz so much as a financier. After graduating from Zhejiang University, he co-founded the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer in 2016 – originally using AI as a trading strategy to predict market trends and help make investment decisions. In 2021, says the Financial Times, Liang began buying thousands of Nvidia chips as “an AI side project”. At the time, local business partners viewed this as “a quirky hobby”. But when he started DeepSeek in 2023 – and began challenging local rivals ByteDance and Alibaba – they sat up. DeepSeek has spent its short corporate life having to work around successive US bans on the export of vital chips to China. The upshot, says the South China Morning Post, is that Liang has become one of the most forceful drivers of China’s push for technological self-sufficiency.

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