Time 100: Malala Yousafzai, Barack Obama, Kim Jong-un and Jay-Z all make magazine's list of world's most influential people

They seem like an unlikely group: a school girl from Pakistan, the President of the United States of America, a multi-million selling rapper and the war-mongering supreme leader of a closed socialist state.

However,  Malala Yousafzai, Barack Obama, Jay-Z and  Kim Jong-un were revealed to have one thing in common today, when they made Time magazine's Time 100 list of the most influential people on earth today.

Split into five sections – titans, pioneers, leaders, icons and artists – the list covers people from areas including politics, activism, sport, the arts and science, who have been deemed to change the world for better or for worse.

Alongside Jay-Z in the titans section are fashion designer Michael Kors, Vladimir Putin's close aide Igor Sechin and basketball star Lebron James.

Among those deemed to be pioneers are Bollywood actor and activist Aamir Khan, Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef and the first black president of Brazil's Supreme Court Joaquim Barbosa.

Both President Obama and his Vice President Joe Biden sit in the leaders section alongside US-despising Kim Jong-un and the newly inaugurated Pope Francis.

Malala Yousafzai, who recently enrolled in school in the UK after being shot by the Taliban in her native Pakistan for campaigning for universal education for girls, features as an 'icon' in the list, as do Girls creator Lena Dunham, firebrand footballer Mario Balotelli and Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi.

Artists to make this year's cut include Lincoln director Steven Spielberg, gay R n B singer Frank Ocean and British twice-Booker Prize winning author Hilary Mantel.

Included in this year's online edition of the list are tributes to each figure by another famous face. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg describes Jay-Z as proof "the American Dream is alive and well," while Jodie Foster calls Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence "a gem with a killer stare". Sir Richard Branson praises SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk for "making a clean, renewable-energy future a reality".

To see the full list visit time100.time.com