1/1/2024 0 Comments Astro empires mothershipMarissa Mayer shocked the world when she left Google in 2012 to take the reins at fading internet giant Yahoo. But his singular vision, enthusiasm, and seemingly ruthless business acumen have simultaneously crushed competitors and created new avenues for huge businesses in the process. None of these ideas - e-commerce, e-readers, or faster package delivery - were wholly new when Bezos picked them up. Now Bezos is squeezing every last drop of delay out of Amazon’s supply chain, paying the Postal Service for Sunday parcel runs and promising an army of delivery drones in 2015. And in the face of unprecedented concerns about data access he launched Mayday, a next-level customer service feature that lets Amazon reps literally hijack your tablet. This year, while many of his colleagues took the death of print media as a given, Bezos spent money from his own pocket to buy the Washington Post. The Kindle, which debuted in 2007, became the first explosively popular e-reader. Bezos’ company,, has since its founding as an online bookstore in 1994 completely revolutionized the way millions of people shop. “Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood,” Jeff Bezos has said, and in the course of his two-decade career he’s been plenty willing. Rockets, cars of the future, and a gesture-controlled laboratory all underwritten by a seemingly limitless supply of money? It’s no wonder Musk is frequently called a real-life Tony Stark. Tesla turned its first profit this year, beating giants to the market in the process with a mass-produced, all-electric family sedan.īut Tesla might be the tamest, least surprising thing Musk ends up doing in his career as a billionaire with big ideas: he recently proposed and laid out plans for the Hyperloop, an ultra-high-speed mass transit system. Speaking of expensive, entrenched industries with enormously high barriers to entry, there’s Tesla, the electric automaker founded in 2003. Space travel, historically the exclusive domain of massive government budgets, is suddenly a viable private venture thanks in part to SpaceX. In the years since, Musk has spent most of his time floating preposterous ideas and making good on them one by one.įirst came SpaceX, the commercial space venture that has landed government contracts, hovered a reusable launch vehicle over the Texas skies, and successfully docked a spacecraft with the International Space Station, all with the long-term goal of sending humans to Mars. Anyone except perhaps Elon Musk, the South African-born billionaire who has made no small plans since earning a fortune selling PayPal to eBay in 2002. If anyone on earth said that you’d smirk, write it off, and move on. So without further ado, meet the dreamers, the informers, the noisemakers, the entertainers, the world changers, the old guard, and (yes) the next wave that make up the Verge 50. Whether they made us laugh, think, act, or pause, these are the people in our world right now who are the prime movers. A desire to call out - to showcase - the people who changed our lives this year. That’s the spirit that inspired the Verge 50. But most of all, it’s been a year of the people - a year when it was never more clear that just a single person could change the way we all feel and think. This has been a year of revelations, disclosures, heartbreaking losses, and thrilling wins. It’s hard to remember a year as tumultuous, as exciting, and as surprising as 2013. If we’re going to tell you that you should care about something or someone, we try and make it count. And we certainly don’t do it lightly, if we do it at all. We don’t make a habit of handing out awards, accolades, or unwarranted high fives. We don’t make a lot of lists at The Verge.
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