When you open Instagram, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram and a key figure at Meta who controls how content is shown to over two billion people. He’s not a celebrity, but he holds more power over what you see than most TV network bosses ever did. Before he ran Instagram, he worked on Facebook’s news feed. That’s where he learned how to make people keep scrolling — not by adding more posts, but by figuring out which ones make you pause, react, or share. Today, he’s the one deciding whether a small business gets seen or a viral moment fades into silence.
His work touches everything from how athletes like Sadio Mané, a Senegalese football star whose private life and goals go viral on Instagram connect with fans, to how news about Travis Kelce, an NFL tight end whose injury updates spread fast across feeds reaches millions before official reports drop. Even when Sergio Busquets, the Spanish midfielder who retired after the 2025 MLS season posted his farewell video, it was Adam’s algorithm that decided whether it showed up in your feed or got buried under cat videos and memes. He doesn’t write headlines, but he decides which ones matter.
He’s also the reason why some posts feel rushed, repetitive, or oddly personal. His team tweaks the system constantly — not to push ads, but to keep you engaged. That means sports highlights, political moments, and even wedding photos from Mali or Uzbekistan get pushed differently depending on what’s trending. When a global outage like the AWS outage, a technical failure that knocked out Snapchat and other apps in October 2025 happened, Instagram stayed up — because of the infrastructure he helped build. He’s not in the spotlight, but when something breaks online, he’s the one people blame or thank.
You won’t find Adam Mosseri on stage at conferences or posting selfies. But every time you swipe, you’re interacting with his choices. He doesn’t create the content you love — he decides which of it survives. And that’s why, whether you realize it or not, his work shapes how you understand the world — one scroll at a time. Below, you’ll find real stories from around the globe that moved through his platform: football rivalries, political fallout, injuries, retirements, and more — all shaped by the invisible hand behind your feed.
Instagram, led by Adam Mosseri, is forcing a major UI overhaul that prioritizes Reels and DMs in the bottom navigation bar, with a mandatory rollout by December 1, 2025, affecting all 2.1 billion users worldwide.