Doja Cat
A new kind of star
BY BAZ LUHRMANN
I’ve worked with all kinds of artists, but with a certain few you connect on a deeper level. For me, Doja Cat is one of those artists. She’s at the top because she works to bring everything she does to the highest possible level. When she started to work on “Vegas” for Elvis, Elvis was relegated to a Halloween costume—he wasn’t influential to the younger generation. But Doja and her producer Yeti Beats understood the importance of translating “Hound Dog” for a new audience. For them, it was an act of translating the roots of Black music.
Doja is a true child of the internet, creatively plugged into the kind of social connection that I’m generationally incapable of understanding. She is personally connected with her fans, and that allows her to understand and feed back to them. She can’t be boxed in. She’s a rapper, a singer, a performance artist—she’s the canvas on which she expresses a character or an idea. There’s no “brand” to Doja Cat. You never know what she’s going to do next, and that’s exciting.
Luhrmann is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker
MrBeast
Viral creator
BY MARK ROBER
The best engineers I knew at NASA were the ones who could break a complex problem down to first principles. They could strip away the noise, reduce a problem to its essence, and find the solution. Jimmy Donaldson—known online by the handle MrBeast—is able to do that too. The path to in real life or paying for the eye surgeries of 1,000 blind people. He doesn’t really understand small thinking or complacency. I don’t know what he’ll do 10 years down the road, but I know it won’t be status quo.
