The Most Famous
BUSINESSPEOPLE from Bahrain
This page contains a list of the greatest Bahraini Businesspeople. The pantheon dataset contains 847 Businesspeople, NaN of which were born in Bahrain. This makes Bahrain the birth place of the 0th most number of Businesspeople.
Top 1
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Bahraini Businesspeople of all time. This list of famous Bahraini Businesspeople is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography's online popularity.
1. Esra'a Al Shafei (b. 1986)
With an HPI of 33.81, Esra'a Al Shafei is the most famous Bahraini Businessperson. Her biography has been translated into 16 different languages on wikipedia.
Esra'a Al Shafei (Arabic: إسراء الشافعي, ’Asrā’ ash-Shāfa’ī, pronounced [ʔasraːʔ aʃːafaʔiː]; born 23 July 1986) is a Bahraini civil rights activist, blogger, and the founder and executive director of Majal (Mideast Youth) and its related projects, including CrowdVoice.org. Al Shafei is a senior TED Fellow, an Echoing Green fellow, and has been referred to by CNN reporter George Webster as "An outspoken defender of free speech". She has been featured in Fast Company magazine as one of the "100 Most Creative People in Business." In 2011, The Daily Beast listed Al Shafei as one of the 17 bravest bloggers worldwide. She is also a promoter of music as a means of social change, and founded Mideast Tunes, which is currently the largest platform for underground musicians in the Middle East and North Africa. In 2008, Al Shafei received the Berkman Award for Internet Innovation from the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School in 2008 for "outstanding contributions to the internet and its impact on society." In 2012, she received a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship for her work on the open source platform CrowdVoice.org. She is also the recipient of the Monaco Media Prize, which acknowledges innovative uses of media for the betterment of humanity. In 2014, she was featured in Forbes magazine's "30 Under 30" list of social entrepreneurs making an impact in the world. The World Economic Forum listed her as one of "15 Women Changing the World in 2015." That same year, she won the "Most Courageous Media" Prize from Free Press Unlimited. Al Shafei was selected as a 2017 Director's Fellow at the MIT Media Lab. In 2018 she was chosen as one of BBC's 100 Women. Al Shafei was a keynote speaker at Wikimania 2017. In December of the same year, she was appointed to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. In January 2023, she was appointed to the board of The Tor Project. In April 2024, Al Shafei announced that she was joining SimpleX Chat, a UK-based privacy-oriented messaging provider founded by Evgeny Poberezkin. She left that position to create Surveillance Watch, which was launched later that year. In 2025, she received a Senior Mozilla Foundation Fellowship to expand upon the platform.
People
Pantheon has 1 people classified as Bahraini businesspeople born between 1986 and 1986. Of these 1, 1 (100.00%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living Bahraini businesspeople include Esra'a Al Shafei. As of April 2024, 1 new Bahraini businesspeople have been added to Pantheon including Esra'a Al Shafei.
