Who’s the best choice for Person of the Year in Tech?
There really aren’t very many people with the kind of
industry-changing vision that, say, Steve Jobs had. When you get right down to
it, Jobs was unique; he possessed both the vision to dream up successful new
ways of doing things and the power to
make them come true.
That’s not to say that there aren’t some leaders doing amazing
work today. In only 18 months as Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella has briskly brought
his vast corps of employees into an open, coherent new era of design and
products. Mark Zuckerberg continues to guide Facebook with an impressively
unwavering hand. Uber, led by CEO Travis Kalanick, is still shaking up the transportation
world with a series of bold and often controversial moves.
But Elon Musk, man. He doesn’t do a lot of press, so the public
doesn’t track him as they might any other kind of rockstar.
But in 2015, this
44-year-old South African native won over a lot of skeptics in a lot of areas:
Tesla Motors (CEO and Owner). Musk continued to defy
history by making Tesla that most improbable of entities: a successful new American car company. Tesla has sold
90,000 of its gorgeous, pricey Model S cars. This year, Tesla launched the
gull-wing Model X crossover; added self-driving features to the Model S via a
software upgrade; and began offering battery packs for homes.
SpaceX (CEO, CTO, Founder). Musk also managed to found a private
rocket company, SpaceX, which continues to raise eyebrows (and to partner with
NASA). In 2015, it raised $1 billion in funding from Google and Fidelity; launched
its first vehicle beyond Earth’s orbit, the Deep Space Climate Observatory; and
asked the government for permission to launch 400 satellites for the purpose of
supplying wireless Internet to the entire world.
HyperLoop (idea). In 2013, Musk proposed a
super-high-speed train-in-a-tube called the HyperLoop. Its cars would float on
a thin cushion of air, thus eliminating friction and reaching peak speeds of
760 miles an hour. It would be immune to weather, its cars can’t crash, and it
would require very little power. It could take passengers between San Francisco
and Los Angeles in 35 minutes. (That’s normally a seven-hour drive.)
This year, the Hyperloop project gained a lot of speed. A
call for design submissions generated 700 entries; a corporation was formed
(Hyperloop Technologies); and the development of one-mile and five-mile test
tracks got under way.
The Hyperloop idea has been derided and dismissed by all
kinds of engineers and experts who’ve found insurmountable flaws with the
economics, construction politics, and scientific feasibility.
But it’s unwise to bet against Elon Musk. He’s shown more
than once that he can bring implausible but breathtaking high-tech projects to
life, and even make them profitable.
What’s exhilarating is that, underlying each of his
initiatives, you can sense a desire to change the world for the better. Tesla’s
all-electric cars move us away from the disastrous long-term effects of
gas-powered cars; the Hyperloop could diminish the need for expensive,
polluting air travel; and Musk has said that one of SpaceX’s long-term missions
is to give humanity a Plan B by hurrying our outreach to Mars.
Musk has that rarest combination: the technical smarts, the
business acumen, and above all, the moonshot-caliber imagination to make world-changing
technologies a reality. It’s for that reason that we’re naming Elon Musk Yahoo
Tech’s Person of the Year.
David Pogue is the founder of Yahoo Tech; here’s how to get his columns by email. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s poguester@yahoo.com. He welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments below.
This puzzle consists of four hinged pieces which can be folded one way to a square and the other way to an equilateral triangle. Master puzzler Henry Dudeney demonstrated a wooden model before the London Royal Society in 1905.
This is a pure bismuth crystal. The heaviest element that is not radioactive (ok technically it is but it’s half life is like 9 orders of magnitude older than the universe so it really doesn’t count.) Probably my favourite crystal structure, even if you forget the colour. Surprisingly, bismuth is also super-not-toxic. You can actually eat the stuff and it’s often in indigestion remedies. Fascinating element, all round.
