Robin Li is CEO and chairman of China's No. 1 search engine, Baidu, whose Nasdaq-traded shares hit record highs this year. Through acquisitions, Baidu has bolstered its mobile business, and it is working at full speed on the next generation of search through voice and image recognition. After getting an undergraduate degree in information management, Li obtained a master's in computer science in 1994 and worked as a consultant at a subsidiary of Dow Jones. He later joined search engine InfoSeek in Silicon Valley as a senior engineer. Li cofounded Baidu in China in 2000; he's recently become more involved in politics. In 2013 he became a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.