Who Do You Think Is the Greatest Entrepreneur of Our Time?

 Who is the greatest entrepreneur of our time: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerburg, Jeff Bezos, Sir Richard Branson, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, Carlos Slim, Charles Koch, David Koch, Michael Bloomberg, Amancio Ortega, Warren Buffet, Ma Huateng, Jack Ma or Elon Musk?

The list above only includes those who are essentially self made. The Koch Brothers father left them a medium sized business. The list only includes those who have accumulated vast fortunes in their lifetimes, and all are worth many billions of dollars. (One exception is Steve Jobs, but to leave him off this list would be a travesty) As of this writing, if you used wealth as the only gauge, you would have Jeff Bezos, the Koch brothers and Bill Gates, in that order

Almost all of these individuals have been disruptive in some way. One could vote for a candidate based on disruption, rather than total accumulated wealth. In this case, you could easily argue that Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk have disrupted the most industries.

Steve Jobs - The personal computer and smart phone have dramatically reduced or killed off print media, cameras, telephones, music on any form of physical media, mail, faxes, typewriters, and even flashlights. More over, it seems without argument that the smart phone is the most important device ever invented.

Jeff Bezos - Amazon has demolished book stores, crushed retail stores in general, and has hurt some service industries. He is also the undisputed leader in cloud storage. Of course, like Musk and Branson, he has set his sites on outer space.

Now consider Elon Musk. Learn more about Musk in my new book, The Elon Musk Method

Elon Musk realized that the end was near for printed phone books and newspaper advertising by local retailers. He created Zip.2 that was the forerunner to Yelp, GoogleMyBusiness, City Search and all other similar online directories.

Musk also realized that banking was vulnerable to the the internet and started X.com which became PayPal, radically affecting the way people pay one another and businesses.

SpaceX was his next venture. SpaceX has taken over the space industry from no less than the US Government and Russia, and now launches more rockets each year than all other countries combined. His StarLink satellites are designed to completely dominate the WiFi business within three years as he launches 12,000 small satellites with broadband capability.

While running Space X, Musk bought into Tesla, and is now CEO of the largest manufacturer of sedans in the US, but more importantly the largest manufacturers of electric vehicles in the world. His success has forced every automaker in the world to make massive investments in electric vehicles.

Tesla is now the world's largest producer of batteries and has created the largest battery in the world. The batteries are made primarily at the largest building (by footprint) in the world. The only competition is Boeing, who has a larger building by total volume. The battery manufacturing is combined with manufacturing of solar panels and integrated solar roofs, and is disrupting the solar energy and roofing business.

Potential disruptions comes from Musk's Hyperloop concept (trains), his Boring Company (highways), and Neurolink (attaching computers directly to humans.)

So, when it comes to disruption of major industries, Musk has no equal. His ability to move into one industry after another and then completely dominate the category or change the way the industry does business is the reason I wrote the Elon Musk Method: Business Principles from the World's Most Powerful Entrepreneur.  

I'm hoping that you will find that many of his methods are helpful to you in becoming more successful as a business owner, manager, or a leader of any organization. 

Now available in Kindle, Paperback, and coming in Audible