Not only Elon Musk: 4 people who bring the future closer

1. Bill Gates

Bill Gates is one of the founders of Microsoft and the first Windows developers. Its subsequent versions still hold. What is the most popular operating system? first positions in the ratings of the most popular operating systems for computers.

Now Bill Gates continues to make the world a better and more technological world, but not as a developer or Microsoft leader, but as a free investor and philanthropist. He actively finances technological developments in various fields and talks about them, raising additional money.

For example, the former Microsoft CEO is investing in energy companies seeking to replace the use of enriched uranium-235 in nuclear power with more readily available depleted uranium-238. Bill Gates is also funding the development of gene therapy to combat HIV and investing in artificial meat startups.

Some of these initiatives have already borne fruit. For example, Impossible Foods' Farmed Meat Burgers are served in American restaurants.

2. Pavel Durov

Pavel Durov is known primarily as the creator of VKontakte - the most popular social networks in terms of social networks in Russia. It appeared a little later than Odnoklassniki, but instantly won the position of the main service for communication, replacing the rest of the Internet for millions of young users.

Durov left the company in 2014, but the success was repeated. The second project - already of international importance - was the Telegram messenger. Having nothing at the start but a name and major competitors, Durov developed the main idea: the service should be secure, and the correspondence should be confidential. In an interview with The New York Times, Pavel said that this idea came to him when special forces were knocking on his door, and he did not know how to inform his brother about this without the knowledge of the special services.

The security of correspondence, fast work, built-in cloud service, as well as thousands of stickers, bots and channels have made Telegram popular: more than 200 million people use WhatsApp, WeChat and Facebook Messenger Apps - Global Messenger Usage, Penetration and Statistics.

The messenger continues to improve and acquire new functions. Perhaps, in the spring of 2020, Telegram will launch its own cryptocurrency Gram. In 2018, investors invested $ 1.7 billion in it, Roman Abramovich became one of the shareholders.

As conceived, Gram will become not just another Bitcoin or Ethereum, but a real alternative to Visa and MasterCard. This will be the first mass cryptocurrency, the possession of which can be easily mastered by any messenger user.

3. Jeff Bezos

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is known for Forbes 400: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett remain the richest people in the US not only as the richest man in the world, but also as a visionary investing in advanced technologies.

Bezos founded Amazon in 1994. It was then a small online bookstore. Today it is the world's largest trading platform where you can find almost everything. In addition to sales, Amazon produces, for example, Kindle e-books and Echo smart speakers with its voice assistant Alexa.

The huge flow of orders pushed Amazon to come to grips with improving internal logistics, optimizing warehouses and delivery. To do this, the company began to use artificial intelligence with machine learning. Bezos's entrepreneurial ability also showed itself this time: Amazon began to offer technologies developed and tested on the marketplace to external customers. This is how Amazon Web Services was born. Now, for example, Toyota uses the company's developments. Artificial intelligence is helping the carmaker train self-driving cars.

In 2000, Jeff Bezos founded the private aerospace company Blue Origin. Her goals are ambitious - to return people to the moon. The first lunar landing (so far without people) is planned in 2020.

Amazon is also considered to be a pioneer in the development of unmanned delivery vehicles. Once you get permission from the airline, the sky will be filled with hundreds of drones with the Bezos logo and parcels in yellow suitcases.

4. Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg is one of the developers and founders of the social network Facebook, which is now used by more than 2 billion people. In 2019, the platform began testing the new Libra cryptocurrency. According to financial analysts, Facebook will not take a commission from users for transactions with it, and the rate will be based on the value of units of several currencies at once, which will ensure its relative stability.

However, Zuckerberg is known not only as a successful businessman. He joined the Oath of Giving program, an initiative by billionaires to donate more than half of their money to charity. In 2015, he and his wife Priscilla Chan created the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative - a couple decided to transfer 99% of Facebook's shares to him. The fund's money has already been used, for example, for the treatment and prevention of a large number of diseases, as well as for imaging cells for biological research.

Zuckerberg is funding public schools and education startups like Code.org, which is taking computer science lessons to the next level. He also invested in Vicarious, a startup that studies the functions of the neocortex (a region of the cerebral cortex) and attempts to translate it into computer code. If the company's research is successful, artificial intelligence will be able to match human intelligence.