YouTube’s Indian-origin Chief Executive Officer, Neal Mohan, has been named TIME Magazine’s CEO of the Year for 2025. In its feature on Mohan, TIME highlighted the profound influence YouTube holds in shaping global culture, noting that the platform now plays a central role in what people around the world watch, learn, and engage with.
“In many ways, YouTube is creating the cultural diet that the globe is beginning to subsist on. Mohan is the farmer; what he cultivates will be what we eat,” the magazine wrote, praising his role in guiding the platform’s direction and impact.
“YouTube provides the soil, and everyone comes and plants whatever nourishing or noxious plants they care to. As the garden takes over more of the planet, even threatening some old-growth forests, whatever grows there becomes what everyone consumes, because it’s what’s available, and often what’s free,” it said.
"The entire dynamics of the entire media industry are changing before our eyes... It's incredibly disruptive, and if you don't adapt, you can be left by the wayside,” Mohan has said.
In 2023, Mohan took over as CEO of YouTube, following Susan Wojcicki. Born in Indiana, USA, he spent the majority of his early years in the United States before relocating to Lucknow with his family in 1985 when he was 12. He noted that learning Sanskrit was "incredibly phonetic and rules-oriented," comparing it to learning computer programming. TIME reports that one of Mohan's fundamental beliefs is making sure that people's voices are acknowledged.