Elon Musk, CEO and founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, has been named the TIME Person of the Year for 2021.
“Person of the Year is a marker of influence, and few individuals have had more influence than Musk on life on Earth, and potentially life off Earth, too,” Time editor-in-chief and CEO Edward Felsenthal said in a statement. “In 2021, Musk emerged not just as the world’s richest person but also as perhaps the richest example of a massive shift in our society.”
The magazine also awarded American gymnast Simone Biles as Athlete of the Year and American singer-songwriter Olivia Rodrigo as Entertainer of the Year.
US President-elect Joe Biden and Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris were jointly named last year’s ‘Person of the Year’. In 2019, that honour was given to the then 16-year-old Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg.
During the year, Musk’s spaceflight company made history in September when it successfully took four private passengers into orbit on the first mission to space with an all-civilian crew. SpaceX was also selected by NASA as one of the space companies to build lunar landing systems that could carry astronauts to the moon by 2024.
On 25 October this year, Tesla crossed 1 trillion dollar market capitalisation, becoming only the fifth company after Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook to reach that mark.
In the accompanying article on Musk, TIME Magazine wrote: “This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, PT Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars.
“His startup rocket company, SpaceX, has leapfrogged Boeing and others to own America’s spacefaring future. His car company, Tesla, controls two-thirds of the multibillion-dollar electric-vehicle market it pioneered and is valued at a cool $1 trillion. That has made Musk, with a net worth of more than $250 billion, the richest private citizen in history, at least on paper. He’s a player in robots and solar, cryptocurrency and climate, brain-computer implants to stave off the menace of artificial intelligence and underground tunnels to move people and freight at super speeds.
“He dominates Wall Street: “The way finance works now is that things are valuable not based on their cash flows but on their proximity to Elon Musk,” Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine wrote in February, after Musk’s “Gamestonk!!” tweet vaulted the meme-stock craze into the stratosphere.”
