The biggest tech personalities of 2014

Apple CEO Tim Cook took the company to new heights; Whatsapp founder added billions to his fortune; and Jack Ma became the richest man in China. Here are the five people in tech who created headlines this year.

Apple CEO Tim Cook took the company to new heights; Whatsapp founder added billions to his fortune; and Jack Ma became the richest man in China. Here are the five people in tech who created headlines this year.

Tim Cook:
Tim Cook started working for Apple 16 years ago and worked his way up. But it was only in 2014, three whole years after Steve Jobs' death that the Apple CEO finally came out of his predecessor's shadow and entered a whole new market with the Apple Watch. He also made a statement for LGBT rights by coming out of the closet himself.

Jan Koum:

When Facebook bought his app for $19 billion in February, Whatsapp CEo and co-founder Jan Koum catapulted to number 62 on the Forbes list of the richest Americans in 2014. His worth? About $7.5 billion.

Satya Nadella:

India-born Nadella ended Steve Ballmer's long run as the CEO of Microsoft in February. With radical new changes to the next version of Windows, iPad and Android versions of Microsoft Office and a brand new gaming console, the XBOX One, Nadella managed to rouse the slumbering giant that Microsoft had turned into.

Jack Ma:

In September, Ma's Chinese e-commerce company, Alibaba, became one of the world's most valuable tech companies at $25 billion after it went public. In November, Ma became the richest person in China with a net worth of $29.7 billion.

Marques Brownlee

Brownlee isn't a CEO. He is, according to Google's Vic Gundotra, 'the best technology reviewer on the planet right now.' Brownlee's YouTube channel, MKBHD, has more than 1.5 million subscribers and nearly 130 million views on his videos about nearly every gadget you care about.