TIME

Overview

TIME is the American news magazine founded in 1923 by Yale graduates Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, the first weekly news magazine in the United States (Associated Press via phys.org; Business Standard). Since 2018 it has been owned personally by Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne, who paid $190 million in cash and say they do not get involved in the magazine’s editorial decisions (Associated Press via phys.org; Associated Press via TriCity Record NM). Its best-known franchise is the annual Person of the Year selection, a tradition dating to 1927 honoring the person or thing that most shaped headlines over the previous 12 months; in December 2025 the magazine named the “Architects of AI” its 2025 Person of the Year (Associated Press via TriCity Record NM).

Founding

Time was started by Yale University graduates Henry Luce and Briton Hadden and first went on sale in March 1923 (Associated Press via phys.org). Founded in 1923, it was the first weekly news magazine in the United States (Business Standard). The magazine set out to tell the news through people, a formula that made its covers — long dominated by single-person portraits — among the most recognizable in publishing.

The Benioff ownership

Meredith Corp. announced the sale of Time magazine to Marc Benioff, one of four co-founders of the cloud-computing pioneer Salesforce, and his wife Lynne in September 2018, nearly eight months after Meredith had completed its purchase of Time Inc. (Associated Press via phys.org). The price was $190 million in cash, and the sale was expected to close within 30 days (Associated Press via phys.org; Business Standard).

Two terms of the deal matter for how the magazine is read today. First, the Benioffs bought Time personally, and the transaction was unrelated to Salesforce, where Benioff was chairman, co-CEO, and co-founder. Second, Meredith’s announcement said the Benioffs would not be involved in day-to-day operations or journalistic decisions, which would continue to be made by Time’s executive leadership team (Associated Press via phys.org). Benioff told The Wall Street Journal at the time that he and his wife were investing in “a company with tremendous impact on the world, one that is also an incredibly strong business. That’s what we’re looking for when we invest as a family.” (Associated Press via phys.org). Meredith president and CEO Tom Harty said the company was pleased to have “found such passionate buyers in Marc and Lynne Benioff for the Time brand,” adding that “for over 90 years, Time has been at the forefront of the most significant events and impactful stories that shape our global conversation” (Associated Press via phys.org).

The sale continued a pattern of old-line media institutions being bought by wealthy tech founders: The Washington Post had been purchased by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2013 for $250 million (Associated Press via phys.org). Like other print magazines, Time had been contending with declines in print advertising and newsstand sales (Associated Press via phys.org).

The 2025 Person of the Year: “Architects of AI”

In December 2025, TIME named the “Architects of AI” its Person of the Year, citing a year in which the potential of artificial intelligence “roared into view” with no turning back (Associated Press via TriCity Record NM). “For delivering the age of thinking machines, for wowing and worrying humanity, for transforming the present and transcending the possible, the Architects of AI are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year,” the magazine said (Associated Press via TriCity Record NM).

The magazine was deliberate in honoring people — “the individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI” — rather than the technology itself (Associated Press via TriCity Record NM). One cover image, resembling the 1930s “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” photograph, showed eight tech leaders seated on a steel beam: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, AMD CEO Lisa Su, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, who had launched her own startup World Labs the previous year. A second cover showed scaffolding surrounding giant “AI” letters rendered to look like computer components (Associated Press via TriCity Record NM).

Five of the eight — Musk, Zuckerberg, Huang, Altman, and Su — were already billionaires with a collective fortune of $870 billion based on Forbes estimates, much of it accumulated during the previous three years of AI fever (Associated Press via TriCity Record NM). Editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs wrote that 2025 was the year AI’s full potential “roared into view, and when it became clear that there will be no turning back or opting out” (Associated Press via TriCity Record NM). The magazine noted the attendance of AI company CEOs at President Donald Trump’s inauguration earlier in the year as a herald of the sector’s prominence (Associated Press via TriCity Record NM).

Jacobs also placed the choice in the selection’s own history: the magazine has named not just individuals but groups, and on rare occasions a concept — the endangered Earth in 1988, the personal computer in 1982. “The drama surrounding the selection of the PC over Apple’s Steve Jobs later became the stuff of books and a movie,” he wrote (Associated Press via TriCity Record NM). AI had been a leading contender for the 2025 slot in prediction markets, alongside Huang and Altman, with Pope Leo XIV, Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani also in the mix (Associated Press via TriCity Record NM). The 2024 honoree had been Trump after his second White House win, and the 2023 honoree Taylor Swift (Associated Press via TriCity Record NM).

The choice reflected the personal convictions of its owner as well: Benioff, one of the co-founders of Salesforce, has called AI “probably the most important” technological wave of his lifetime, while repeatedly saying he does not get involved in Time’s editorial decisions (Associated Press via TriCity Record NM).

What this profile does not claim

• It does not state Time’s current print cadence; no full-read tier1 or tier2 source this session verified a change to every-other-week publishing.
• It does not describe the TIME100 lists, TIME France, or other brand extensions; they were not independently verified from a full-read source this session.
• It does not give circulation or readership figures.
• It does not trace the full corporate history of Time Inc. or its predecessors before the 2018 sale.