TIME Magazine has chosen the world’s richest man, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, as its 2021 Person of the Year.
Love him or hate him, Musk seems to fit the publication’s criteria for the title perfectly, which is based on an individual’s ability to make headlines and influence the news. Going beyond his more obvious successes such as leading the electric car industry and developments relating to space travel, Musk has also proven that he’s able to move entire markets with a single tweet, something that crypto investors know all too well.
Some of Musk’s more notable achievements in 2021, per TIME:
[…] 2021 was the year of Elon Unbound. In April, SpaceX won NASA’s exclusive contract to put U.S. astronauts on the moon for the first time since 1972. In May, Musk hosted Saturday Night Live. In October, car-rental giant Hertz announced it planned to add 100,000 Teslas to its fleet. The juvenile missives from his unmistakably phallic Twitter avatar came days after one of his rockets launched NASA’s first antiasteroid planetary-defense test; a few weeks before another launched a first-of-its-kind mission to study cosmic X-rays; and amid Musk’s sale of 10% of his Tesla stock, a process that roiled markets, cost him billions and should produce enough tax revenue to fund the Commerce Department for a year. The sale was prompted by a Twitter poll Musk posted in a fit of pique over liberal Senators’ proposals to tax billionaires.
“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,” explained Edward Felsenthal, TIME Magazine’s editor-in-chief.
Source: TIME