Last month, I was a part of the Vistage Executive Summit in Charlotte, North Carolina. I was present as a Vistage member representing my company as one of the sponsors for the event.

Like any Vistage event, there were notable speakers addressing the event. Two well-respected speakers Ryan Avery http://ryanavery.com and Jeffrey Hayzlett http://hayzlett.com were handling the morning and afternoon sessions.

While my team took care of our booth, I headed to the ballroom, intending to make the most out of the learning sessions. During the morning session, Ryan put forth a splendid question to the 260+ CEOs inside the room. He wanted everyone to make groups of two by turning to each other and have one person give the name of a successful leader in the world, convincing the other person of his choice by writing down three traits of the leader. I turned myself to Watts Huckabee Senior, CEO of http://cignetwork.com who is also one of the board advisors for my business, and instantly told him that my choice is Elon Musk – a true innovator, bold, and confident personality. We further had a chat for a few minutes on Tesla and SpaceX headed by Musk and most importantly, our interest to own a Tesla, though the city of Charlotte did not permit Tesla to sell directly here.

Avery got four volunteers to tell him the leader on their list and their three traits. The choices included political leaders, US Presidents and so on. I was the only one who ended up naming a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

It was a natural choice for me, as I have always loved technology, software, and electronics and is an avid reader on the lives of great entrepreneurs. One of my first reads back in school was “The Road Ahead” by Bill Gates. Though I came across substantial contributions by many great entrepreneurs in the world, Elon Musk tops my list as a real innovator in this era.

Premium institutions like NASA, ISRO, JAXA, ESA have existed for a long time. But it was Elon’s wild idea of reusable rockets and plan to colonize Mars that helped SpaceX to advance in spite of all the struggles they went through initially with Falcon1. I have lived in the Silicon Valley for some time; many people think 140 characters of blogging is innovation. I don’t intend to insult Twitter by saying that, but most of the silicon valley entrepreneurs think in the same lines. Being an IT service provider building software products for customers, I come across lots of ideas around software, some that might click and some that might not. Here, we have an entrepreneur after a successful sting with zip2 and Paypal in IT products, now thinking about sending people to Mars or how to make the rockets reusable. This has always been a territory controlled by governments and not an easy plan to convince investors. What’s most impressive is Elon’s bold decisions to move forward after suffering initial setbacks. We have a visionary who thinks about colonizing another planet while reducing space missions cost by a significant factor because we have no idea what might happen to Earth in the future.

SpaceX Falcon Flight Animation

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While many automobile makers were thinking about going green and trying out hybrids, many thought a fully electric car is a crazy idea. Auto manufacturing is not something a newbie can easily get into, so forget about an all-electric car. Along with the right people, it required a powerful leader like Elon to build Tesla to the brand it is today. The very fact that Tesla is the most eco-friendly car in the world is making other automakers understand the fact that they cannot wait long before manufacturing fully electric cars themselves. Google tested self-driving cars on the streets of California a long time back, yet it makes people curious when a production car has at least some of those features. Elon surprised everyone by pushing an over-the-air update for Tesla owners enabling autopilot functionality. His engineering and R&D team will find it fascinating to have a boss who wants to move faster to production. While the Government has to come out with plans on how to regulate auto driving cars, the technology has already arrived. Most of this innovation on production cars also shows the kind of risks Elon is ready to take on his ventures. The reason I am saying this is, we are living in a world where people are waiting to pounce on innovations with negativity and finding faults.

Tesla Autopilot in Real

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While I am writing this, Dubai is planning to implement the World’s fastest mass transit system Hyperloop connecting Dubai and Abu Dhabi. While a trip from Dubai to Abu Dhabi takes over an hour by car, Hyperloop is going to bring it down to 12 minutes!

Hyperloop One Visual Presentation – Dubai

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Hyperloop is the vision of Elon Musk, a technology he developed patent free to help encourage international scientific collaboration on the futuristic concept.

A couple of days ago, The New York times reported: Tesla’s bid on buying Solar City, a company owned by Elon’s cousin is approved by the majority stakeholders of Tesla. Elon showcased beautiful roofing tiles jointly developed by solar city and Tesla which will add up as solar panels so that electricity is a by-product or bonus. The same hints at the fact that a future solar powered car is on the horizon.

While everything from a design concept to a piece of code is being patented, here we have an innovator who is thinking out of the box to help save the planet , motivating the new generation to follow their dreams in scientific innovation.

Since 2002, though, most computer-related inventions have resulted not in fundamental transformation but miniaturization, as with hand-held devices like the iPhone, which combines the pre-2002 functions of laptops and early cell phones. – ROBERT J. GORDON, Wallstreet Journal

I am indeed looking forward to seeing an Elon Musk-innovative-solution that would reduce the cost of building robots to put a robot in every household.

References: Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance, Forbes and Internet.