Earlier this year, we announced our first group of speakers for this year’s Code conference, which is shaping up to be our biggest speaker roster ever in 14 years, with the top names in tech, media, commerce, politics and more.
More Code Speakers: Bill & Melinda Gates; Activists Johnetta Elzie & DeRay Mckesson; Jack Dorsey
More amazing players take to our stage in May to talk tech, media and much more.
Those included: SpaceX and Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk; eBay CEO Devin Wenig; Ford CEO Mark Fields; Google CEO Sundar Pichai; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation CEO Susan Desmond-Hellmann; and Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins. And last week, we added four more for the annual event, held at the end of May in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.: Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and CTO Mike Schroepfer.
Now, it’s time for five more amazing speakers, all dedicated in some way to changing the world for the better, including: Bill and Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey; and activists Johnetta Elzie and DeRay Mckesson.
Since he left his job running one of world’s most powerful tech companies and where she also worked as a top product exec, Bill and Melinda Gates have dedicated their lives to global philanthropy, with a particular emphasis on education and eradicating infectious diseases. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the world’s wealthiest charitable organization, zeroing in on such important issues as empowering women and girls as a way to bring transformational improvements in the health and prosperity of families, communities and societies. The pair sets the overall direction and strategy for the foundation, which has already donated $30 billion to charitable causes.
Activists Johnetta Elzie and DeRay Mckesson are perhaps best known for their online Movement for Black Lives — #blacklivesmatter continues to organize toward sustainable change using social media. Cited in one media report as leaders of the “nation’s first 21st-century civil rights movement, their efforts during protests against police violence in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland have expanded into a range of other projects. That includes the policy platform Campaign Zero and “Mapping Police Violence,” which has collected data on people killed by police during 2014 to bring accountability and attention to a major civil rights issue. (Mckesson also recently announced his candidacy for mayor of Baltimore.)
The pair will appear with Dorsey, who is one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent entrepreneurs, as co-founder of both social communications platform Twitter and online payments company Square. The famous dual CEO has had his hands full trying to turn Twitter around while also taking Square public. Dorsey, who started off his career as an anarchist programmer, is now also on the board of the Walt Disney Company.
There are still more Code 2016 speakers, which we will be announcing in the coming weeks, so look for additional big names to come.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
