50 Most Daring Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurship isn’t easy. It requires bold action. On the following pages, we spotlight 50 entrepreneurs who dared to go big in the past year—and who can inspire us all to dare even bigger.

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Elon Musk

The Right Kind of Daring?

Two business professors square off on today’s most talked-about founder — and why entrepreneurs should (or shouldn’t!) be like Musk.

Tesla is a well-publicized mess—behind on production, abandoned by its executives, and embroiled in an SEC investigation. Musk, too, often appears to be a mess— increasingly erratic on Twitter, lurching from one PR crisis to the next. But in 2018, his company SpaceX launched and landed a giant rocket (and then booked the first passenger for a trip around the moon), his hyperloop technology scored a contract with the city of Chicago, and his battery-making Gigafactory hit new strides. So is he a model to follow? Our experts square off.

He’s an Inspiration!

by Leonard Sherman,

professor of business, Columbia University

Entrepreneurs are dreamers: To succeed despite the many obstacles ahead, they need to not only have a unique vision, but to also be relentlessly devoted to it. This is what makes Musk such a model worth following. Yes, he may at times be self-destructive, egomaniacal, and quixotic, but he’s also in the pantheon of greatest innovators of all time. May we all be so bold.

Steve Jobs, another flawed genius, might as well have been writing about Musk when he scripted the voiceover to Apple’s iconic “Think Different” TV spot that aired in 1997. It kicked off: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.” And its bold conclusion: “Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”