Seth Hettena
In the run-up to the housing collapse of 2007–2008, houses weren’t merely expensive, they were insanely expensive. Yet just when it seemed that prices couldn’t go higher, some fool would come along and pay an enormous sum for a glorified hovel. You didn’t have to be a genius to realize that American real estate was overvalued. It did, however, take something special to figure out how to make money off the madness. A group of between ten and twenty people did just that, making the bet of a lifetime that author Michael Lewis calls “The Big Short.” More than a century ago, inventor Nikola Tesla saw the potential of remote-controlled weapons in war. In the 1890s, he used radio waves to steer a small boat before a crowd at Madison Square Garden, but when he tried to sell the idea of a remote-fired torpedo to the United States government, the official who listened to the inventor’s proposal “burst out laughing.” Tesla died penniless, a man ahead of his time.