Top people take The Times.

This slogan trades on social aspiration: reading “The Times” is presented not merely as a habit but as a marker of belonging to an elite (“top people”). The line implies that the newspaper confers cultural capital—access to authoritative information, influence, and refined taste—while also flattering prospective readers by inviting them to identify with (or join) the socially successful. As a piece of advertising rhetoric, it compresses a status argument into a single sentence: the product is validated by the kind of people who supposedly consume it, and the consumer is validated by the product they choose.