Astor Review Awards 2026 · Influence
Digital Creator of the Month
Five who moved the room — not the biggest audiences, the people who changed what others understood.
Influence · Digital Creator of the Month
Not the biggest audience. The ones who changed what people understood.
Follower counts are the least interesting thing about influence. The five below were chosen on a different basis: did people’s understanding of something genuinely change because of the work these individuals put into the world? All five have made something complicated accessible to people who would otherwise have been locked out of it.
Spent years at the centre of applied AI — Stanford, OpenAI, director of AI at Tesla — then did the thing almost nobody at that level does: he started teaching, publicly and for free.
A chartered accountant who began by teaching a small number of students and now reaches millions — doing more than almost anyone to make Indian retail investors literate about what they are buying.
Writes and speaks about money, failure and career decisions with a candour that is unusual in a category built largely on projected success.
Built her work around an unglamorous argument: that ordinary, profitable, existing businesses are a more reliable path to ownership than founding a startup.
Built one of the most listened-to business interview programmes in the world by removing the format’s usual defence mechanisms — asking about failure, health and doubt as readily as strategy.
Selection is editorial. Full citation on page 17 of Issue 01.