TECHNOLOGY
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According to the American Enterprise Institute ( AEI ), only 60 of the Fortune 500 companies listed in 1955 still retain their place amongst the business elite . While for some of these companies , the decline was inevitable , for many it reflects their reluctance to embrace disruptive trends that have radically transformed the business environment and the nature of consumer demands .
In their wake has come a new generation of corporate titans including tech giants like Facebook , Amazon and Netflix who have rapidly become the dominant players in their respective industries . While many of these companies had humble beginnings as startups , once they went public , they began to adopt a more corporate mentality in order to deliver regular profits for shareholders . Tesla Founder and CEO Elon Musk is a high-profile critic of this trend , saying that : “ Being public puts enormous pressure on Tesla to make decisions that may be right for a given quarter , but not necessarily right in the long-term .”
Indeed , part of what marks Elon Musk out as such a successful entrepreneur is that he has retained his entrepreneurial spirit despite Tesla now being one of the biggest companies in the world . Many of his contemporaries , visionary leaders who took their
AUGUST 2019