Year | Winner | Reason for Selection | Bio Link |
---|---|---|---|
2015 | Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, MD | They pledged to donate 99% of their shares in Facebook stock to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a charitable foundation to support various charitable causes with a focus on "personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities." | Mark Zuckerberg
Priscilla Chan, MD |
2016 | Elon Musk | He is being recognized for his visionary approach to reducing the human carbon-dioxide footprint and alleviating the global warming problem through, among other things, the production of environmentally friendly, electric-powered vehicles (EV). Ultimately, his aim is for humans to replace all pollution-emitting, gasoline-powered vehicles with clean-emission, electric-powered vehicles. | Elon Musk |
2017 | Richard Stallman | He is being recognized for pioneering the free and open source software movement. | Richard Stallman |
2018 | Jeff Bezos | He is being recognized because his launch of Amazon Web Services (AWS) places him on the precipice of changing how the world performs business computing chores. | Jeff Bezos |
2019 | The Unicode Consortium (Unicode, Inc.) | This organization is being recognized because of its creation of a standardized, universal way of electronically depicting all of Earth's written characters, numbers, and symbols coupled with a host of ancilliary tools supporting the standard such as its International Components for Unicode (ICU) and Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) features. | Unicode |
2020 | 1. Dr. Zhong Nanshan, 2. healthcare workers, 3. Zoom, and 4. Pfizer / BioNTech | These 4 winners are being recognized for their unique contributions in the battle against the COVID-19 virus outbreak. | Coronavirus disease 2019 portal |
2021 | 1. Mark Shields, 2. David Brooks, 3. Sir David Attenborough, and 4. Greta Thunberg | Mark Shields and David Brooks are two influential spokespersons whose actions have shown a path towards saving USA democracy from self-imploding. Sir David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg are two influential spokespersons who have sought to save life on Earth from some debilitating and destructive human activities. Carl Sagan famously asked, "Who speaks for Earth?" Sir David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg are two such indviduals who speak for Earth. | Mark Shields / David Brooks / Sir David Attenborough / Greta Thunberg |
2022 | Space Delta 2's 18th, 20th, and 21st squadrons along with the Detachment 2 unit of the USA Space Force | In transitioning the task of space domain awareness (namely, artificial-satellite tracking and artificial-satellite-debris tracking) from the USA Space Force to the USA Deparment of Commerce, these squadrons have performed admirably over the years. | Space Delta 2 |
2023 | President Joe Biden, President Xi Jinping, President Vladimir Putin, and Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un | They are being honored because, given the will, they hold the key to bring peace to the world. | Joe Biden | Xi Jinping | Vladimir Putin | Kim Jong-un |
2024 | José Andrés | He is being honored because of his tireless global effort to feed the hungry during times of crisis. | José Andrés | World Central Kitchen |
2025 | To be announced in December 2025 | To be announced in December 2025 | To be announced in December 2025 |