The 100 People Who Are Changing America

WHAT HE'S CHANGING: The 42-year-old Oxford-educated financial journalist starts fires with Gawker, his media-gossip site, but it's his pronouncements about the state of the Web — such as a decline of 40 percent in ad spending — that have proven so frighteningly accurate and made him the oracle of online publishing.

NEXT FIGHT: Surviving the recession. So far, he's been ruthlessly successful: Denton has been slashing his Gawker Media sites to the bone and upping their profits.

KEY QUOTE: "Our role is as editors of the huge volume of brain fart that's injected into the Web every minute."

SEE THE CHANGE: Gawker

Photo: Matt Haughey

WHAT HE'S CHANGING: Jones fuses social justice, economic prosperity and climate change into potent political fuel. He wants to see urban areas partake of both green jobs and their ecological benefits. In 2007, he told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, "If you say these four words, you'll keep the Democratic majority in the House for the next 20 years: Clean Energy Jobs Bill."

FRIENDS SAY: "He has a great heart, a brilliant mind and a mission," says Al Gore. "The solutions to the climate crisis are also the solutions to the economic crisis."

KEY QUOTE : "There are either going to be a whole lot more green jobs, or we're going to have a dead planet."

SEE THE CHANGE: Van Jones' Official Site

Photo: Courtesy of the House Committee on Education and Labor

WHAT HE'S CHANGING: Romm, a former official at the Department of Energy, loves to take on global-warming foes on his blog, Climate Progress. A fellow at the Center for American Progress, he attacks dinosaurs like George Will and the false promise of carbon offsets ("rip-offsets," he calls them) with equal aplomb.

FRIENDS SAY: "Joe combines two qualities you don't often find together," says David Roberts, a blogger at Grist. "A deep knowledge of technology, policy and science along with genuine moral passion."

NEXT FIGHT: Calling bullshit on anyone who tries to derail carbon legislation.

SEE THE CHANGE: Climate Progress

Photo: Center for American Progress

WHAT HE'S CHANGING: The elitism and waste of design. Starck virtually invented concepts like the "boutique hotel" with his interior designs, and his low-cost line of products for Target has become ubiquitous.

SUDDEN DEPARTURE: The French legend said he planned to retire from the industry by 2010, announcing, "Everything I have created is absolutely unnecessary."

NEW GREEN BEGINNINGS: In partnership with the industrial company Pramac, Starck designed a home wind turbine that he claims can supply up to 80 percent of a home's energy needs for around $1,000.

SEE THE CHANGE: Philippe Starck Official Site

Photo: Lovekin/Getty

WHAT HE'S CHANGING: Last fall, Musk's breathtakingly ambitious space-exploration company, SpaceX, successfully launched its first rocket into orbit. Musk's other startup, Tesla Motors, the maker of $109,000 all-electric sports cars, is having a tougher time, recently lobbying for $350 million from the federal government to keep the Tesla Model S afloat.

NEXT FIGHT: Launching the Model S, a $60,000 all-electric sedan.

ENEMIES SAY: "He's a terrible CEO," says Martin Eberhard, Tesla's founding CEO.

KEY QUOTE: "I've never had a failure, and I'm not going to add one now."

SEE THE CHANGE: SpaceX

Photo: Guastella/WireImage

WHAT HE'S CHANGING: With a relentless drive to succeed that recalls that of the oilman in his There Will Be Blood, the 38-year-old Anderson has built one of the most diverse and impressive résumés in film, from the porn-tastic Boogie Nights to the ambient Punch-Drunk Love.

SIDE JOB: Directed wife Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen in a play he co-wrote last summer in Los Angeles.

KEY QUOTE: "I'll rebel against powers and principalities, all the time. Always, I will."

Photo: DeGuire/Getty

WHAT HE'S CHANGING: This game-design god has simulated cities (SimCity), people (The Sims) and worlds (Spore), but what he's really doing is spawning artificial existence.

FRIENDS SAY: Playing a demo of Spore, Robin Williams said, "I'm putting together a creature that would make Darwin say, 'Hey, I'm not taking acid ever again!'"

ENEMIES SAY: "I hate it so far," sociologist William Bainbridge said of Spore. "It seems like a cutesy children's game."

NEXT MOVE: Crossing over to TV; there's been talk of a Sims show for years.

SEE THE CHANGE: SimCity, The Sims and Spore

Photo: Buckner/Getty

WHAT HE'S CHANGING: In a sedate field, Joachim is pushing for a radical green rethink of the American city in the 21st century. An architect and urban planner at Brooklyn's nonprofit Terreform 1, Joachim wants to open up cluttered streets by creating a soft, stackable City Car that would be shared like a Zipcar.

NEXT MOVE: Exploring inter-skyscraper blimp ferries and weaving energy-efficient houses into existing trees.

KEY QUOTE: "I give a voice for people and things that can't necessarily speak for themselves, like trees and wildlife. Or the residents of Harlem."

SEE THE CHANGE: Terreform 1

Photo: Dan O'Connor

WHAT SHE'S CHANGING: Since Sloan founded Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington in 2003, CREW has exposed the Bush White House's decision to delete millions of e-mails and the failure to collect nearly $1 billion of international aid after Katrina. She's now battling the Fed to disclose who got $2 trillion in taxpayer-backed loans.

SIGNATURE MOVE: In January, CREW forced the Secret Service to disclose visitor logs to the White House that Cheney and Co. had tried to keep secret.

NEXT FIGHT: Holding the Obama administration to its own high ethical standards.

SEE THE CHANGE: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics

Photo: Courtesy of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

WHAT HE'S CHANGING: Former Sopranos writer Weiner's Mad Men is set in a whiskey-soaked advertising office in the 1960s, but it's the most innovative show on television, a meticulous study of capitalist manners in a fragile (Cuba, missiles, JFK) America.

FUN FACT: Worked as a producer on Andy Richter Controls the Universe.

KEY QUOTE: Weiner chose Madison Avenue as a subject because "it's a great way to talk about the image we have of ourselves, versus who we really are. And admen were the rock stars of that era — creative, cocky, anti-authority."

SEE THE CHANGE: Mad Men's Official Site

Photo: Tran/FilmMagic