Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, was chosen Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2021, the year his electric vehicle firm became the most valuable in the world and his rocket company sent an all-civilian crew to the edge of space.
Musk is also the creator and CEO of SpaceX, as well as the CEO of Neuralink, a brain-chip startup, and The Boring Company, an infrastructure company. This year, Tesla’s market worth surpassed $1 trillion, making it more valuable than Ford Motor (F.N) and General Motors (GM.N) put together.
Tesla manufactures hundreds of thousands of cars each year and has outperformed many of its competitors in terms of avoiding supply chain challenges, all while encouraging many young people to switch to electric cars and traditional manufacturers to move their attention to EV vehicles.
“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’s editor-in-chief, Edward Felsenthal, said.
“Even Elon Musk’s spacefaring adventures are a direct line from the very first Person of the Year, Charles Lindbergh, whom the editors selected in 1927 to commemorate his historic first solo transatlantic airplane flight over the Atlantic.”
From hosting Saturday Night Live to dropping tweets on cryptocurrencies and meme stocks that have triggered massive movements in their value, Musk has dominated the headlines and amassed over 66 million followers on Twitter.