Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, meme connoisseur, and the man who seemingly lives on Twitter is Time‘s 2021 Person of the Year.
It was a bit of an easy choice, really: In 2021, Tesla’s soaring stock has propelled Musk into the “richest man in the world” position with a $67 billion buffer between him and the guy in the second place. SpaceX also did well, with numerous successful rocket launches and very few fumbles this year.
And Musk himself was seemingly everywhere, tweeting out memes, selling his houses for hundreds of millions, moving crypto markets with single tweets, selling Tesla stock worth billions (after conducting a Twitter poll about it), and brushing his problems away as they were nothing (notably, though, some of his tweets were horrible).
“For creating solutions to an existential crisis, for embodying the possibilities and the perils of the age of tech titans, for driving society’s most daring and disruptive transformations, Elon Musk is Time‘s 2021 Person of the Year,” the magazine explained.
Born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1971, Musk showed potential from an early age; he coded a videogame at 12 and sold it to a computer magazine for $500. His first major success came in 1999, when Compaq bought Zip2, the company he co-founded with brother Kimbal, for $22 million. Later on, the sale of PayPal to eBay netted him $180 million (Musk founded the company X.com which was merged with Confinity to become PayPal). Even after these successes, Musk never sat still, investing nearly all he had into SpaceX and Tesla. He heads both companies today, and still finds time and energy for side projects such as Neuralink and Boring Company.
Time also published a lengthy interview with the man himself, and a fairly comprehensive overview of the good and not-so-good deeds Musk has done this year.
Time also chose Olivia Rodrigo as Entertainer of the Year, Simone Biles as Athlete of the Year, and COVID-19 vaccine scientists as Heroes of the Year.
