National Post - Financial Post Magazine
BIG PICTURE
It’s never been easier to become a billionaire, but changing the world is a lot harder than it looks.
Fa med entrepreneur El on Musk was stoic in mid-January when one of his Space X missions ended with the wrong kind of bang. After successfully delivering a satellite into orbit for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the company the founder of Tesla Motors Inc. created to enable him to retire on Mars, brilliant ly landed its supposedly re usable Falcon 9 rocket upright on a drone ship. But the rocket unexpectedly fell over and exploded thanks to landing gear mal function. That hurts, even if you are worth an estimated US $19 billion. But Musk, who fancies himself a real-world Tony Stark( a.k.a. Iron Man ), remained positive, pointing out on Twitter that this wasn’ t the first RU D, or rapid unplanned disassembly, as his company strives to perfect rocket re usability .“Well, at least the pieces were bigger this time !” he added.
Like Amazon. com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos (worth about US $60 billion ), who is engaged in a private-sector space race with SpaceX, Musk knows that changing the world is never easy. Then again, it has never been easier, at least according to venture capitalist John Sculley, best known as the former head of Pepsi Co. Inc .( where he won the cola wars) and Apple Inc .( where he won a war of wills with Steve Jobs ).
A record 1,826 people (including 197 women, also an all-time high ), with an average net worth of US $3.9 billion, made the Forbes list of billionaires last year. The number of self-made billionaires on the list is 1,191, but Sculley expects this exclusive club to swell in numbers over the next decade thanks to a shift in market power toward consumers and the disruptive power of the cloud, mobility, data analytics and the Internet of Things.
“Never before have we had four major areas of affordable and accessible technology all growing at exponential rates ,” Sculley says. “The ability to take advantage of all these things at the same time is the game changer of all game change rs .” Sculley recently published a book of advice on how to build billion-dollar companies. Called Moonshot, which is the Silicon Valley term for a product or service that changes the world, the book predict san increasing number of established companies will go the way of East man Kodak Co. as visionary entrepreneurs take advantage of the tools available to reset established industries.
But think again if all you have is a traditional business plan that aims to take on existing players by introducing incremental improvements to some product or service. According to Sculley, every industry will soon face an adaptive innovator who plans on raising the customer-experience bar by at least tenfold. Now, before you dismiss Sculley as the guy responsible for Jobs leaving Apple, keep in mind that the company’ s revenue increased to US $8 billion from US $800 million under his watch. Sculley’ s vision of the future is also supported by his brothers Arthur and David—and they just happen to be the former head of J. P.M organ’ s Private Bank and the former CEO of H. J. Heinz Co ., respectively.