ccording 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 environ-
ment 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 contem-
poraries, visionary leaders who took theirA
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TECHNOLOGYAUGUST 2019