Key Sentence:
- Water-start electric taxis are at least a few years old since taking their first passengers.
- But the industry killed its first billionaire: Joby Aviation founder and CEO JobBen Bevirt.
Shares in the Santa Cruz-based Californian company, JoBen Bevirt which went public on Aug. 11 following the merger, closed Tuesday 5.8 percent higher at $10.90, giving the company a market cap of 6.8 billion dollars. And Bevirt, 47, rich $1.08 billion, given the SEC’s statement listing him as controlling 98.7 million shares.
This is a significant milestone for Bevirt, who has been working since 2009 to develop aircraft. That can take off and land vertically in dense urban environments. Such as helicopters, and transition to an efficient flying wing.
As an aircraft to speed up city dwellers with traffic-clogged roads. – and ultimately renders most of this road network useless.
Much of the work on developing the plane was carried out clandestinely on Bevirt’s farm amid sequoia trees on Mount Santa Cruz, Northern California. But he does not dream of the money with which he is working now.
Bevirt grew up in a remote area called Last Chance, in an off-net community where members grow their food. On land owned by his mother Paula Fry, father Ron Bevirt, and author Gurney Norman, the latter, purchased in 1970. Who was a member of the Merry Jokers—known for their sour parties and Magic Bus expeditions in the 1960s. Bevirt was named after the character JoBen in the novel by joker Ken Cassie. Who he believed would treat him like a godfather.
Bevirt told Forbes last year that she first considered building a flying machine in second grade. When she was climbing the steep 4.5-mile road home from school that the bus took her on the left Pacific Coast Highway. “It’s a long-lived hill,” laughed Bevirt, “I’ve been dreaming of a better way.”
Bevirt, who studied engineering at the Universities of California, Davis, and Stanford University. Has a much better chance of fulfilling the $1.1 billion dream Joby Aviation earned from its merger with specialty vehicle manufacturer Reinvent Technology Partners at Institutional Investors.