EVA BERNEKE describes her first year at the helm of the world's third-largest satellite company as a "whirlwind." That's an understatement. Since she took over Eutelsat in January 2022, the Danish CEO has become a direct competitor to Elon Musk, been accused by the Ukrainian government of aiding Russian propaganda, and found herself in the thick of bitter Brexit politics-and that's before you even mention the Iranian sabotage attempt.
Despite all that, Berneke gives the impression that she has everything under control. When she arrived at Eutelsat, the French company's bread-and-butter business was beaming TV channels into homes using geostationary satellites, which move at the same speed as Earth's rotation to stay in a fixed position above the planet's surface. The organization she - inherited was stable and solid, she says, but stagnating in an industry that was experiencing radical change. Although Eutelsat was starting to offer satellite internet, the public's shift to streaming was eroding the company's TV revenue.
The entrance of two of the world's richest men into the satellite business-Elon Musk with Starlink and Jeff Bezos with Project Kuiper-was also beginning to change the way incumbents thought about their future. "When you have two of the biggest business innovators interested in your industry, you should expect a little bit of shaking up," Berneke says.
Esta historia es de la edición July - August 2023 de WIRED.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 8500 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición July - August 2023 de WIRED.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 8500 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
Women at the Bottom of the World
They go to Antarctica with dreams of studying the unknown. What they discover there is the stuff of nightmares.
RUSSIAN, GO HOME
WHEN MY COUNTRY WENT TO WAR, I FACED A CHOICE: Flee to a world where the truth might kill me - or seek peace in censored oblivion.
The Fateful Eight
THE STORY BEHIND THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL TECHNOLOGICAL PAPER IN RECENT HISTORY.
Can the Internet's Greatest Authenticity Machine Survive Wall Street?
When thousands of subreddits went dark in protest last summer, it exposed the tension at the core of Reddit - on the eve of the company's IPO. Now that synthetic media is flooding the internet, does the web's most reliably human forum represent a gold mine for investors, or an old-fashioned dumpster fire?
The Unnerving Presence of Javier Bardem
He's known for playing fanatics and murderous psychopaths. In real life, he loves his wife (and Brad Pitt) and cries during E.T.
HAPPY HAUNTING
IN A CHARMING game called This Discord Has Ghosts in It, up to 15 participants at a time gather in a Discord server that has been reimagined as a haunted house. (Of course.) Inside lies a maze of (chat) rooms where each player takes the role of either an eponymous spirit or a paranormal investigator.
THE MYTH OF METAL
How I became a Python programmer - and learned to love our abstract world.
SO YOU WANT TO REWIRE BRAINS
There's a lot to like about brain-computer interfaces, those sci-fi-sounding devices that jack into your skull and turn neural signals into software commands. Experimental BCIS help paralyzed people communicate, use the internet, and move prosthetic limbs.
FOR GIANT LIZARDS, PLEASE HOLD
The sounds of Slack have a secret history.
THE NERD-KING VIBES OF JENSEN HUANG
The Nvidia CEO turned a graphics-card company into a trillion-dollar AI behemoth. Now he wants to transform the rest of the world-health care, robotics, autonomous driving, the works.