Have you ever wondered what are the favourite songs or playlists of the most influential people in the world?

Do VIPs listen to music like us? What their public playlists reveal

Ever wondered which are the favourite songs or playlists of the world's most influential people? Thanks to the "Panama Playlist", today we know. The information does not come from hacker attacks or privacy violations, but - as the anonymous creator of the playlist explained - was simply aggregated from already public data. In fact, by default, Spotify makes all user-created playlists public, unless you actively change your privacy settings. The platform has announced legal action, but has not denied the veracity of the tracks featured.

In 2025, the playlist is the heir to the old cassette mixtape. It has become an essential tool for listening to and discovering music. While we can create it according to our tastes, the artificial intelligence of platforms such as Spotify does the rest: it proposes new tracks to us through playlists such as 'Discover Weekly' or 'Release Radar', processed by algorithms that analyse our listening behaviour in detail. If we listen to an artist A, and another user listens to A and B, it is likely that we will also be proposed B. Not only that, if we prefer songs with a certain rhythm or tone, we will receive others with similar characteristics. This complex system is submitted to all users, even famous ones.

The Panama Playlist has revealed some surprising music preferences. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has a playlist made up of songs discovered on Shazam, an idea I had too, with titles like "I Don't Wanna Wait" by David Guetta and OneRepublic or "Get Ur Freak On" by Missy Elliott. Brian Armstrong (CEO of Coinbase) has looped the same song for seven hours, but he also likes Whitney Houston's 'Greatest Love of All' and Lady Gaga's 'Shallow'. US Vice President J.D. Vance ranges from boy bands with 'I Want It That Way' to Daft Punk's 'Get Lucky'. Finally, Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram, listens to "River" by Leon Bridges and "The Dock of the Bay" by Otis Redding in his "Hang" playlist.

In an era when public identity is constructed mainly through the social and digital dimension, even a simple playlist can become a mirror of the personality of those who create it, helping to shape collective perception. Music choices, seemingly trivial, can arouse empathy, curiosity or even distrust, bringing the viewer closer or further away - a phenomenon that is even more evident when those involved are figures of power, politicians or opinion leaders, whose public image is played out even in the most personal details.