In 2025, people who built their careers by being some form of Very Online are now some of the most powerful people in the world.

Topping the list—as we predicted he would last year—is Donald Trump. The 79-year-old president of the United States quite literally rules by decrees posted to his social network, Truth Social. The US government, meanwhile, is run by a ramshackle crew of former conspiracy theory podcasters, TV hosts, vaccine skeptics, and entertainment moguls. A decade ago, the prevailing advice was to never read the YouTube comments. Today, the human embodiment of YouTube comments are setting federal policy.

Beyond members of the Trump administration (fair warning, there are quite a few on this year’s list), you’ll find some of the usual suspects: China’s state-backed hackers, chaos-making members of “the com” internet underworld, prolific online scammers, and of course, Elon Musk.

Each year, we round up the people who have an outsized role in making the internet era feel like life itself is a relentless, unavoidable comments section—and who cause real-world harm from their digital perch. Here is our list for 2025.

Donald Trump

Donald Trump in 2025 reached what may well be his final form. Unleashed from the shackles of norms, decorum, and checks and balances, Trump's second administration is defined by a relentless pursuit of whatever it is Stephen Miller and Russell Vought think will Make America Great Again. But Trump is still the Poster-in-Chief, spewing an endless stream of attacks, insults, conspiracy theories, and AI slop on Truth Social.

During one particularly prolific night in early December, the president of the United States posted 169 times between roughly 7 pm and midnight at the White House. They included calls for Congress to "TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER" and missives about Honduras' presidential election. Weeks prior, he’d posted that a video reminding US troops that they have a duty to disobey illegal orders was "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH." When the president posts, it’s news—which means virtually everyone in the US must absorb the chaos Trump creates online.

Every day under Trump is like this, just as it has been for the better part of a decade. Cracks in Trump's social media armor have begun to show; Republicans notably pushed back on his callous comments after filmmaker Rob Reiner after he and his wife were found stabbed to death in mid-December. Still, Trump dominates nearly every news cycle and wields ever-expanding power to shape and ruin the lives of people in the US and abroad with a single Truth Social missive. If there's one principle Trump reliably holds, it's this: Never. Stop. Posting.

The Border Czars

The Trump administration's brutal, indiscriminate assault on people not born in the US (and even some who were) defined 2025 life in America: masked agents in riot gear lurking the streets, racially profiling pedestrians, and disappearing friends and loved ones into the bureaucratic tarpit of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection custody. At the center of this profound remaking of America are White House adviser Stephen Miller and Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem.

As deputy chief of staff for policy, Miller is widely considered the "architect" of Trump's anti-immigrant enforcement actions. He's the person who said on television that federal agents would arrest 3,000 people a day—an alleged "quota" that the administration denied existed, at least when forced to confront it in court. Without Miller, it's feasible your social networks—online and off—would be far less saturated with news and videos of lives being torn apart.

Noem, meanwhile, has become the face of the administration's anti-immigrant enforcement policies. The DHS head oversees both ICE and CBP, and is thus directly responsible for how the crackdown on immigrants is conducted. This includes greater social media surveillance, a face recognition app that runs people through government databases, and casting public accountability of federal agents as illegal "doxing." Under Noem, CBP has even proposed subjecting travelers to the US to a review of five years of social media posts.

DOGE

It sounds like the premise of a sleazy cyberpunk novel: A team of largely young, inexperienced operatives connected to some of the most powerful men alive bypass normal background checks to access some of the US government’s most sensitive systems. One of their apparent main goals? Wiring together datasets to create a master database that could be used for a surveillance tool of unprecedented scope.

This is, of course, what actually happened this year, as Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) seized control over much of the federal bureaucracy.

Some of DOGE’s activities got more attention, like a 25-year-old former X employee getting direct access to Treasury payment systems controlling trillions of dollars in payments. Some of it, like demanding God-mode permissions on federal payment systems which it had no obvious right or need to access, got less attention. Much remains entirely unknown. As the aftermath of its initial incursions into federal agencies plays out in a number of lawsuits, though, the most unsettling thing about DOGE is this: Despite claims to the contrary, it is very much not dead.

DOGE affiliates are in place as employees throughout the government, including in powerful information security roles that in some cases give them broad authority to grant access to sensitive systems. More importantly, the aims that DOGE was created to achieve—mass firings, the dismantling of agencies seen as opposed to the president’s policy priorities, and the integration of data from across the government among them—were and remain those of the Trump administration. A hammer can be a tool or a weapon; the danger is in the person swinging it.

RFK Jr.

It’s difficult to grasp the scope of what longtime anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy has done as US health secretary, let alone the damage that comes with it.

A quarter of the staff of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been purged. Hospitals have been told that they will be ineligible for government payments if they offer gender-affirming care to trans youth. Budget cuts have ended clinical trials with tens of thousands of active participants, while the administration proposes slashing funding for the National Institutes of Health by 40 percent. Kennedy stocked a key immunization panel with loyalists and anti-vaccine activists, after which it recommended delaying the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine. A lab studying Ebola was ordered to halt research.

Researchers say that Kennedy’s claims about a supposed connection between Tylenol and autism, for which there is no evidence, could contribute to higher autism rates. (The CDC website was, meanwhile, changed to assert that vaccines may cause autism, which decades of research have shown they do not.) Hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for research into mRNA vaccines was cut. DOGE affiliates were given access to the sensitive data in at least 19 systems in the Department of Health and Human Services, in at least one case without proper security training. The commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration has spent much of the year speculating about whether Covid, Lyme disease, and HIV were cooked up in government labs, and the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is a former talk show host who persistently emails employees telling them to eat less and has suggested that AI can replace frontline health care workers.

Above all, Kennedy has legitimized crank concerns and actual cranks by placing them at the center of the US public health apparatus. Meanwhile, the collapse of institutional structures on which doctors, insurers, and public health officials have long relied is rapidly leading to a balkanization of public health.

Much of what Kennedy has done can be undone: Scientists can be rehired into jobs they never should have been fired from, and funding can be restored to projects that never should have been cut. Whatever happens going forward, though, his legacy will be convincing a large part of the public that settled science around preventing disease is unsettled—something that will be measured in unnecessary illness and death for decades to come.

Elon Musk

In 2025, Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok became a recurring source of public, crisis-level failures that played out in real time on his social platform X. In early July, xAI deleted Grok posts after the bot praised Adolf Hitler and recycled antisemitic tropes, at times insisting it was being “neutral” or “truth-seeking.”

The Hitler episode capped months of erratic behavior from the chatbot. In May, Grok repeatedly injected claims about “white genocide” in South Africa into unrelated answers—ranging from questions about sports salaries to US domestic policy. xAI attributed the behavior to an unauthorized change without much further explanation. Separately, Grok and other chatbots regularly returned Russian state propaganda when asked about the war in Ukraine.

Even as Grok produced repeated factual and extremist errors, it was increasingly treated on X as an authority during fast-moving political events. During the Los Angeles protests over ICE raids, WIRED reporters found that people turned to the chatbot to verify images and videos, only to receive confident but incorrect answers, including by mislabeling photos of federal troops in California as scenes from Afghanistan. Many of these failures unfolded alongside Musk’s growing political footprint inside the federal government. Internal emails obtained by WIRED showed the White House pressing agencies to roll out Grok to federal workers “ASAP,” even after xAI’s chatbot had been pulled from government contracting schedules over its antisemitic outbursts.

Musk’s technological controversies unfolded alongside consequential political interventions, many of them telegraphed on his own platform. In February, as the Trump administration moved to dismantle the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Musk posted that he spent the weekend with his DOGE team “feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” celebrating his work eviscerating what had been the world’s largest foreign aid agency. Later that month, during a televised CPAC appearance, Musk deployed a chainsaw on stage as a hyperbolic metaphor for slashing bureaucracy.

By July, UN human-rights experts were describing the USAID fallout as a “global humanitarian catastrophe,” citing estimates that nearly 100 people were dying every hour, with more than 350,000 total deaths linked to the cuts, including over 200,000 children. While Musk bears responsibility for much of DOGE’s work, it’s the USAID cuts that he so loudly championed online that have had the most devastating real-world impact.

The Com

For the last decade, cybercrime seemed like it was increasingly being offshored to non-extradition countries like Russia, where ransomware gangs run rampant, or North Korea, whose state-sponsored hackers have stolen billions of dollars in cryptocurrency. But one looseknit group, largely made up of US- and UK-based hackers, has proved the exception, with immensely chaotic results.

The com’s branching, interconnected teams of nihilistic and profit-motivated young hackers wreaked widespread disruption this year: One ransomware-focused subgroup known as Scattered Spider breached a series of retailers including Marks & Spencer, costing that UK-based grocery chain more than $400 million by some estimates. Another emerging group within the com known as Scattered Lapsu$ Hunters carried out a supply chain attack exploiting the AI chatbot sales software Salesloft Drift to steal data from hundreds of companies. Finally, in December, hackers associated with the Com known as ShinyHunters accessed 200 million user records from PornHub, extorting the company to pay or they’d dump the highly personal data online.

Despite a string of arrests previous years of many of the Com’s most active members, 2025 showed there appears to be a deep bench of young, malevolent hackers willing to take their place.

China’s “Typhoons”

China’s state-sponsored hacking groups have been a strategic adversary for Western countries for at least 20 years, representing the original “advanced, persistent threat,” to use the cybersecurity industry term. But perhaps never before has the threat they pose felt so advanced or so persistent.

The revelation at the end of last year that one espionage-focused group known as Salt Typhoon had penetrated virtually every US telecom and accessed Americans’ real-time calls and texts stunned the country. The same group continued that telecom hacking in 2025 and was also revealed to have breached the US National Guard for nearly a year.

Another group known as Volt Typhoon represents a more silent, insidious menace, targeting US critical infrastructure with the apparent purpose of preparing for disruptive attack, perhaps timed to China’s future invasion of Taiwan as a means to delay and distract a US response. Both groups have come to be known for their remarkable stealth capabilities, targeting network devices to steal credentials and move through systems without planting any malware that can be detected with Windows security tools.

Neither group has made headlines in recent months. But given their ability to avoid detection, that silence offers little reassurance.

Chen Zhi

The crypto scams that have come to be known as “pig butchering” now represent the most lucrative form of cybercrime in the world, pulling tens of billions of dollars a year from victims around the globe. Worse still, those romance and investment scams are now largely carried out by human trafficking victims, forced laborers trapped in compounds across Southeast Asia run by Chinese-origin gangs who coerce workers with threats of starvation and violence.

This year US and UK law enforcement put a face to that brutal industry: Chen Zhi, the China-born, 37-year-old CEO and Chairman of the Cambodian conglomerate the Prince Group, was alleged in financial sanctions imposed by the US Treasury in October to control at least 10 scam compounds across Cambodia, part of what the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control called “one of Asia’s largest transnational criminal organizations.”

Photos of Prince Group-controlled facilities released with the sanctions showed phone “farms” with walls of cell phones mounted on walls for scamming, as well as apparent human trafficking victims beaten and bloodied by the compounds’ enforcers. As for the Chinese-Cambodian oligarch himself, Chen disappeared when the sanctions were announced and has yet to resurface.

Alex Karp

Though not part of the Trump administration, Palantir Technologies cofounder and CEO Alex Karp has certainly benefited from it. Palantir, a software company that insists it is “not a surveillance company,” received hundreds of millions of dollars in new government contracts this year, including a $30 million contract to provide ICE with “near real-time visibility” on people self-deporting from the United States. It also supports Project Maven, the US military’s massive AI effort.

This has all been fortuitous for investors, who saw the company’s US revenue grow 77 percent from the year prior. It’s also not been without controversy. In May, 13 former employees published an open letter saying that Palantir’s leadership failed to stand up to authoritarianism, and a current Palantir employee threatened to call the cops on a WIRED journalist attending an event that was free and open to the public.

In addition to software contracts, Karp and his company have spent the past year contributing culturally as well. Karp copublished a book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, that accused other tech companies of not being sufficiently patriotic, and Palantir’s surprisingly robust merch store currently touts $14 American flag patches.

Kash Patel

As FBI director, Kash Patel used his personal social media accounts in 2025 as a live broadcast channel for federal law enforcement activity. On X and Truth Social, he shared real-time claims about arrests, terrorism plots, and mass shootings, often before investigators had confirmed key facts.

The pattern drew criticism from lawmakers, local authorities, and current and former DOJ officials, who warned that premature disclosures can risk public safety and undermine criminal cases. In September, Patel announced that a suspected shooter was “in custody” after the assassination of political activist Charlie Kirk; the individual was later released. He repeated the same unforced error in December after a gunman killed two people and wounded nine at Brown University, posting on X that a “person of interest” had been detained, falsely signaling that a campus shooter had been caught while they remained at large.

Both posts fueled confusion during active manhunts, as did an October post claiming the FBI had “thwarted” a Halloween terror plot in Michigan before investigators had verified basic facts, such as whether all suspects had been identified.

The FBI has long maintained a strict policy against commenting on ongoing investigations, a regulation grounded in the idea that early commentary can damage evidence and propagate false narratives. Patel’s social media posts depart sharply from that norm, a shift critics say favors personal exposure over the cautious management of high-profile criminal cases. Patel, who is a former podcaster, has defended the approach as radical openness.