Visionaries

Nikola Tesla

It must be in the California water ... the little of which is still around, that is ... but the Golden State seems to breed Golden Boys, such as Elon Musk and Steve Jobs ... visionaries who grab technology by the throat and make it bend to their will. Add the Evergreen State's Jeff Bezos to this cadre and you have the Three Musketeers who are changing our lives ... much faster than many of us can cotton to.

Of these three, the one who seems the most outré to me is Musk. Some of his pronouncements sound a lot like those kooks who used to be pushing cold fusion ... only he delivers often enough to keep us skeptics from saying "ah ha" ! (Example ... recently landing his returning spent SpaceX rocket on a barge.) And Musk just predicted to an enthralled audience that humans would start populating Mars in nine years (shades of JFK) ... see: CNN Article. A little nutty, no? But this guru has been saying and doing nutty things for a number of years now and ... delivering! This keeps us skeptics back on our heels.

Will Musk's auto company, Tesla, manufacture one million electric cars by 2019? Many skeptics, like myself, believe that this is a pipe dream ... particularly if our federal government doesn't keep the subsidy tax rebate tap wide open. And, I suspect that, if the Republicans win the presidency in November, some fiscal sanity might interject itself into this "evil carbon" debate ... after all, as a few sane heads recognize, it is burning carbon that produces most of the electricity that recharges Tesla's sexy status-provoking cars.

Of the other two visionaries, Jobs and Bezos, I think Bezos might have the largest long-term effect on our lives ... if, of course he can keep getting the financial markets to supply the funds to keep his Amazon enterprise going ... and he avoids having a cage match with Trump were he to become president. If Steve Jobs were still alive, I think that he might have used Apple's huge cash reserves to pull another rabbit out of his hat ... something that I doubt that the current CEO, Tim Cook, will be able to do.