SpaceX’s Milestone, The Dark Side Of Darktrace, And The Top Stories In Innovation In 2020

Plus: Forbes Technology Awards 2020: Geeks Step Up When Governments Fail

Good morning.

In this special edition of the Daily Dozen, the focus is on the top innovators in their various fields—from cybersecurity to transportation, from healthcare to space, and beyond.

Tomorrow, we end the year with a deep dive into finance and lifestyle.

This selection of stories showcases the pioneering, the visionary, and the controversial leaders  from Forbes’ extensive coverage of technology.

In energy, 71-year-old Michael Polsky has ridden wind power to billionaire status. “If you’re just making money, you can only go so far,’’ he said. “When you have a mission, a conviction, you perform on a completely different level. You believe so strongly, you don’t take no for an answer.”

In healthcare, Beam Therapeutics' revolutionary gene editing technology could finally find a cure for sickle cell disease. “The stuff we can do now in genome editing would have seemed like magic five or ten years ago,” CEO John Evans said.

For the first time this year a private company—Elon Musk’s SpaceX, of course—launched NASA astronauts into space, a major milestone in the government agency-dominated field of space travel.

Kurt Rathmann’s ScaleFactor promised small businesses to take care of bookkeeping, bills and taxes, claiming to be powered by AI and $100 million in big-name VC funding. But when the startup folded this year, and Rathmann blamed the pandemic, disgruntled customers and employees had a different story to tell.

Darktrace is one of the U.K.’s hottest tech startups, but its ties to executives tainted in one of Britain’s biggest corporate scandals and a sexual harassment saga—have cast a dark shadow over the $2 billion cybersecurity company.

Billionaire Wes Eden has a plan to return train travel to its former glory days. Key to his vision: tax-exempt bonds to create high-speed train lines modeled on the Paris-to-London Eurostar. “The lack of passenger travel by train in this country is a travesty,” he said. “It’s a gigantic opportunity.”

Bestselling author and former CEO of ecommerce pioneer Zappos.com Tony Hsieh was a pioneering leader, and his death at the age of 46 sparked an outpouring of grief from leading politicians, entrepreneurs and investors who were inspired by his work.

Peloton isn’t the only big player in the home fitness equipment space. Former ballerina Brynn Putnam created Mirror, an interactive workout device that turns any room into an elite gym and built an eponymous $300 million company.

No one knows that good things come in small packages better than Michael Tojner, an Austrian entrepreneur who turned a $40 million investment in a money-losing hearing-aid battery maker into the cornerstone of a 10-figure fortune.

Ultimately, no innovation can be achieved without learning from the past. This profile of epidemiologist Dr. Thomas Tuttle—whose role in tackling the 1918 Spanish Flu was similar to that of present-day Dr. Anthony Fauci in the battle against Covid-19—made a lot of enemies in prescribing social distancing and face coverings, but his methods ultimately worked.