Do you ever wonder who the Albert Einstein’s or Thomas Edison’s of our generation are? If so, Jeff Bezo’s definitely makes the list. Find out what new projects he has in the works, which are likely to be million to billion dollar successes!
Yahoo Finance shares….
Jeff Bezos changed the way we shop, with Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) He transformed how many of us read, with his Kindle e-reader.
He has a few other potentially life-changing ideas, too. In a patent application made public in August 2011, for example, Mr. Bezos is listed as one of two inventors of a “system and method for protecting devices from impact damage.”
The famously secretive Mr. Bezos acknowledged that his name is on the airbag-patent application but declined to elaborate on the air bag. “I can’t talk about the future road map, I’m sorry,” he said in an interview. “I don’t even want to say whether or not we’re working on it.”
Some of history’s greatest innovators have been among its most idiosyncratic, and Mr. Bezos shows signs of fitting that mold. He is the latest businessman to use his fortune to fund ambitious and what some might consider far-fetched plans.
Howard Hughes, after making his name making movies in the 1920s and 1930s, devoted himself to developing and personally testing the world’s fastest planes. Virgin Group founder Richard Branson has attempted to set speed records on sea and in air. Oracle Corp. founder Larry Ellison has competed for the America’s Cup sailing team he backs himself.
David Risher, a former Amazon executive, said his former boss “thinks in decades and centuries…Unlike most of us, Jeff is hard-wired for the very long term.”
Mr. Bezos has already gained some fame with his Blue Origin space-travel project. But the 48-year-old, whose net worth is estimated at $20 billion, is quietly putting time and money into some other less-public side projects that have little or nothing to do with online shopping.
While he declines to discuss his phone air bag, he is a bit more willing to discuss his project to build a 200-foot-tall clock designed to last millennia. He has financed a group, the Long Now Foundation, that is building what he calls “The 10,000 Year Clock” deep inside a mountain on his West Texas property, not far from his rocket-launch site.
It’s like a grandfather clock on a grander scale, Mr. Bezos said. When it’s finished, it will play an elaborate cuckoo-like sequence for the anniversary of every year, decade, century, millennium and 10 millennia.
People who visit the clock when it is finished years from now will also be treated to a daily chime sequence that has been choreographed by musician Brian Eno, who serves on the project’s board.
“The reason I’m doing it is that it is a symbol of long-term thinking, and the idea of long-term responsibility,” said Mr. Bezos, who has spent at least $42 million on the timekeeper. “We humans have become so technologically sophisticated that in certain ways we’re dangerous to ourselves. It’s going to be increasingly important over time for humanity to take a longer-term view of its future.”
Mr. Bezos’s biggest ambitions are astronomical. Last year, he hired undersea experts to scan the ocean floor to find the massive engines that propelled the Apollo 11′s space capsule from Earth to outer space. In March, he wrote on his website that the team had been successful.
The Amazon founder said on the site that he hopes to raise some of the five engines, using private money, and return them to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “NASA is one of the few institutions I know that can inspire five-year-olds,” he wrote. “It sure inspired me and, with this endeavor, maybe we can inspire a few more youths to invent and explore.”
Get the entire article at Yahoo Finance!
No comments:
Post a Comment