Elon Musk has been named Time’s 2021 ‘Person of the Year,’ as Tesla and SpaceX reach new heights

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, has been named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2021, a year in which his electric car company became the most valuable carmaker in the world and his rocket company soar to the edge of space with an all-civilian crew.

Musk is also the founder and CEO of SpaceX, as well as the founder and CEO of the brain-chip startup Neuralink and the infrastructure firm The Boring Company. This year, Tesla’s market value surpassed $1 trillion (roughly Rs. 75.8705 trillion), making it more valuable than Ford Motor and General Motors combined.

Tesla manufactures hundreds of thousands of vehicles each year and has avoided supply chain issues better than many of its competitors, all while encouraging many young consumers to switch to electric vehicles and legacy automakers to shift their focus to EV vehicles.

“Elon Musk is TIME’s 2021 Person of the Year for creating solutions to an existential crisis, embodying the possibilities and perils of the age of tech titans, and driving society’s most daring and disruptive transformations,” the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Edward Felsenthal, said.

“Even Elon Musk’s space explorations are a direct descendant of the very first Person of the Year, Charles Lindbergh, who the editors chose in 1927 to commemorate his historic first solo transatlantic airplane flight over the Atlantic.”

From hosting Saturday Night Live to tweeting about cryptocurrencies and meme stocks, which caused massive price swings, Musk has dominated the news and amassed over 66 million Twitter followers.

In the past, some of his tweets have drawn regulatory scrutiny. According to the magazine, “The Person of the Year” is someone who “has had the greatest impact on the news or our lives, for better or worse.” Time magazine named Olivia Rodrigo, a teenage pop singer, “Entertainer of the Year,” American gymnast Simone Biles “Athlete of the Year,” and vaccine scientists “Heroes of the Year.” Last year, US President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris shared the title of “Person of the Year.” This tradition was started by Time in 1927. In the past, the title has been bestowed upon Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.