Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, named Time magazine’s Person of the Year

Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2021.  The Tesla CEO saw his company’s market value soar to more than $1 trillion this year.

Elon Musk is also the founder and CEO of SpaceX and leads the brain-chip startup Neuralink and infrastructure firm The Boring Company.

“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.”

In his writeup introducing Musk as Person of the Year, Felsenthal called attention to his “persona,” describing it as a “blunt instrument that often seems to revel in division and aggressive mockery,” which the public sees through his frequent use of Twitter.

Time magazine said their Person of the Year is someone “who affected the news or our lives the most, for better, or worse.”

The magazine named teenage pop star Olivia Rodrigo its Entertainer of the Year, American gymnast Simone Biles Athlete of the Year and vaccine scientists were named as the magazine’s Heroes of the Year.