PROFILE: TIME “100 Most Influential” List: Salman Khan

Bangladeshi-American Salman Khan on TIME’s “100 Most Influential People” List

Image: Jamie Chung/TIME

Salman Khan
By BILL GATES Wednesday, Apr. 18, 2012

The aspiration of is to give every kid a chance at a free, world-class education. The site has over 3,000 short lessons that allow kids to learn at their own pace. Practice exercises send students back to the pertinent video when they’re having trouble. And there’s a detailed dashboard for teachers who use Khan Academy in their classrooms.
Early pilot programs in California classrooms show terrific promise. I’ve used Khan Academy with my kids, and I’m amazed at the breadth of Sal’s subject expertise and his ability to make complicated topics understandable.
Gates is an entrepreneur and philanthropist and a co-founder of Microsoft


  1. A different way of looking at this list, from The Atlantic’s Robert Wright:

    Here is Time’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world, released today. Am I the only one who finds a lot of these names either new or only vaguely familiar? Dulce Martinez? Harold Hamm? Sara Blakely?

    Turns out Blakely is a plucky entrepreneur who started an undergarment company and became fabulously wealthy. She specializes in shapewear, and I guess shaping is by definition a form of influence. But my question about Sara Blakely is: How many nuclear weapons are under her control? Vladimir Putin has thousands, and he’s not on the list.

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s