2012

2012 was a year Mark Zuckerberg will remember vividly -- and not just because he turned 28 and married his longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Chan. The year will go down as the one in which Zuckerberg came out from under his hoodie and began to prove his talents as a leader of one of the titans of consumer tech. His rock-star persona helped as he wooed Wall Street and pulled off the biggest Internet IPO in history, raising $16 billion. But we all know what happened next: The stock cratered and Zuckerberg quickly went from idol to villain -- at least … Read more

Over the last 18 years Amazon's Jeff Bezos has built an empire that redefined commerce in the digital age, and in 2012 his mastery of e-commerce continued. The company is expected to generate $62 billion in revenue this year, up from $48 billion in 2011. Fortune crowned Bezos the 2012 businessperson of the year, characterizing him as the "ultimate disruptor."

His disruptiveness first destroyed the traditional retail book industry, and now he is competing with Apple, Netflix, Google, and others to dominate digital music, movie, TV show, and app sales. In 2012, Bezos got more serious about … Read more

Most entrepreneurs are lucky to see a single business succeeding. Jack Dorsey is watching two companies he co-founded succeed -- simultaneously. Twitter became ubiquitous in 2012, with hashtags slapped on seemingly every movie, television show, and sporting event. They became integrated into Apple software at the system level, set new records for the most tweets about a single event, and notched its 500 millionth registered account. Also: the Pope joined up. Meanwhile, payment processor Square signed an important deal with Starbucks that brings Square's seamless payment technology to more than 7,000 stores. Along the way, the three-year-old company … Read more

Facebook's Chief Operating Officer doesn't shy away from ongoing industry chatter about the role of women in technology and business. She fuels it.

Now famous for her success at Facebook and her ultimate ascent to the Facebook board (previously a dudes-only affair) in June, Sandberg's past successes are many, including stints as an economist with the World Bank, chief of staff for the U.S. Treasury Department in the Clinton administration, and as a top ad sales executive for Google.

Sandberg is not only one of the world's wealthiest women, her 2010 TED talk urging women … Read more

He's heard it before and he'll hear it again, so we might as well come out and say it: Elon Musk is real life's Tony Stark. With his high-end electric car company, Tesla, and its mainstream Model S sedan rolling out of its domestic manufacturing base in Fremont, Calif., Musk could take a long nap on his laurels. After all, Tesla could herald a new era for clean car manufacturing in the US.

But Musk's entrepreneurial zeal knows no bounds, driving him to found space-exploration company SpaceX, which sent its first operational flight of the Falcon 9 rocket … Read more

President Obama may have won the 2012 election, but it was FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver who won the hearts of geeks everywhere -- at least those on the Democratic side of the aisle.

Even as most pundits predicted that the race between Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney would be a photo-finish, Silver's algorithm-driven system of interpreting polls correctly predicted the winner in all 50 states, and narrowly missed being perfect in at the Senate level, not to mention having Obama comfortably ahead the whole way. Other poll aggregators correctly foresaw Obama's path to victory, but no … Read more

Hackers had a busy year. People identifying themselves with Anonymous launched a massive hacking campaign against Israel in protest of attacks against Gaza; conducted a DDoS attack against the U.K. Department of Justice in apparent protest over charges against Julian Assange; claimed to have stolen 1.7GB of data from the U.S. Justice Department; defaced hundreds of government and commercial Web sites in China; and targeted Syrian government Web sites -- just to name a few. AntiSec claimed to have stolen millions of Apple device IDs from the FBI, a claim the FBI disputed. And a group named … Read more

In his first full year as Google CEO, Larry Page had plenty to brag about. The company he cofounded with Sergey Brin in 1998 saw its stock hit record highs; its mobile operating system has 1.3 million activations a day; and its first Nexus-branded tablet debuted to strong reviews.

But even if he wanted to brag, for much of the year he wouldn't have been able to. In the summer, Page was hit with a still-unspecified illness that caused him to lose his voice. The bug caused him to sit out the Google I/O developer conference as … Read more

Steve Jobs described Jony Ive as his "spiritual partner" at Apple, as the person who had more operational power than anyone else at Apple except him. In the year following Jobs' death, the pipeline of Jobs-Ive creations launched, including the iPhone 5, iPad Mini, and new iMacs, and Ive gained additional powers under Apple's new leader, Tim Cook. He is not only in charge of Apple's award-winning hardware design, but also the look and feel of the software across all products, following the forced departure of iOS software chief Scott Forstall in October.

The British-born Ive … Read more