Curated playlist
21st-century American engineers
- Elon MuskIn 2001, Elon Musk traveled to Moscow twice to buy missiles, hoping to launch a plant greenhouse to Mars.
- Jon KleinbergJon Kleinberg found that a web page can matter because of where it sends you.
- David ScottDavid Scott dropped a hammer and a feather on the Moon. The Apollo 15 commander did it on live television.
- Satya NadellaOn the 4th of February 2014, Microsoft announced that Satya Nadella would become its chief executive. He was the third person to hold that job, following Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. The choice put a Hyderabad-born engineer at the head of…
- Jensen HuangJensen Huang founded Nvidia in a Denny's booth, where he once worked as a dishwasher. Three engineers pooled $600.
- Jeff BezosJeff Bezos read a single statistic in the spring of 1994. Web usage, it said, was growing at 2,300 percent a year. Within months he had walked away from a senior job on Wall Street to sell books over the internet. He warned many of his…
- Luigi MangioneLuigi Nicholas Mangione is an American man accused of killing a health insurance executive, and the case began with three words on spent ammunition. Investigators found delay, deny and depose written on shell cases and on an ejected…
- Christina KochChristina Koch became the first woman to leave low Earth orbit in April 2026.
- Cynthia DworkA technique built to make junk email costly later helped make bitcoin possible. Cynthia Dwork co-created it.
- Steve WozniakSteve Wozniak, nicknamed Woz, built his first computer in June 1971. A newspaper reporter destroyed it by stepping on the power supply cable. He had built the machine with his friend Bill Fernandez as a self-taught engineering project. It…