New York: Time magazine on Monday named Tesla chief and founder and CEO of the space exploration company SpaceX, Elon Musk, as its person of the year for 2021. Calling him a “clown”, “genius”, “visionary,” “showman,” and “the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars”, the Time said Musk is “aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit.”
Musk recently passed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest person as the rising price of Tesla pushed his net worth to around USD 300 billion. He owns about 17 per cent of Tesla’s stock, which sold for almost USD 1,000 each on Monday.
Citing his embodiment of the technological shifts, Time in an article wrote, “his startup rocket company, Space X, 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 USD 1 trillion. That has made Musk, with a net worth of more than USD 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.”
The article also highlight troubling trends, and noted, “Lately, Elon Musk also likes to live-tweet his poops.” The magazine noted the sway Musk holds over an army of loyal followers (and investors) on social media, who “hangs on his every utterance”.
Citing Musk’s endeavors, Time noted that from his founding of SpaceX in 2002, to his hand in the creation of the alternative energy company SolarCity in addition to Tesla, the most valuable car company in the world.
The magazine emphasizes that its annual acknowledgement is not an award, but rather, “recognition of the person who had the most influence on the events of the year, for good or for ill.”
Though it only became profitable in recent years, Tesla is far and away the world’s most valuable car company, at one point this year crossing the USD 1 trillion market capitalization threshold. Detroit heavyweights Ford and General Motors are worth less than USD 200 billion combined.
Time highlighted Musk’s recent admission to his 66 million Twitter followers that half his tweets were “made on a porcelain throne.” In its profile of the provocative CEO, Time went on to chronicle one of those toilet tweet storms in detail before concluding: “This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit.
(With inputs from Associated Press)
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