By Futurist Thomas Frey
The Pattern Nobody’s Recognizing Yet
Elon Musk didn’t become Elon Musk by building better apps. He became Elon Musk by attacking civilization-scale infrastructure problems everyone else considered unsolvable: reusable rockets when aerospace experts said impossible, electric vehicles when they were jokes, solar energy when utilities controlled the grid.
The pattern was specific: hard tech, vertically integrated manufacturing, existential risk tolerance, and rebuilding foundational infrastructure rather than optimizing what exists.
That exact pattern is emerging again—not in someone famous, but in a 26-year-old MIT dropout named Ethan Thornton who’s doing to defense manufacturing what Musk did to aerospace: rebuilding it from scratch because the existing system is fundamentally broken.
Most people haven’t heard of him. But his trajectory suggests he might be the closest thing to “the next Elon Musk” currently operating—not because he acts like Musk, but because he’s running the identical playbook on a different broken industry.
Continue reading… “Ethan Thornton: What He’s Doing to Defense is What Musk Did to Aerospace”