Elon Musk, an eccentric genius and visionary

The news is out –and TIME’s 2021 Person of the Year is Elon Musk. He is by far the most talked about man in industry circles and elsewhere. He is also the richest person on Earth, and the CEO of the aerospace company SpaceX and the electronic car company Tesla.

This award is given to that person who has had the most influence during the past year. TIME has described the title as going to “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse.”

He was born and raised in South Africa, and he spent time in Canada before finally moving to the US. After he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in Physics, Musk launched himself on the journey as a serial tech entrepreneur with early successes like Zip2 and X.com. He is famous for creating the company that became PayPal.

The critics were the first to react to TIME magazine’s decision by commenting adversely to his attitude to tax, opposition to trade unions and how he had downplayed the dangers of Covid.

TIME was not deterred. It described him as a “clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman”, and listed his achievements such as the founding of SpaceX in 2002, the creation of the alternative energy company SolarCity in addition to Tesla, the most valuable car company in the world. The magazine hastened to clarify that its annual acknowledgement was not an award, but rather, “recognition of the person who had the most influence on the events of the year, for good or for ill”.

With a Twitter following of nearly 60 million people, Musk has been indulging in some bold and irreverent tweets, some allegedly admitted by him to have been made during his “porcelain throne” poop moments. TIME flushed aside these …tweets before asserting that: “This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit.”

This tradition of selecting a person of the year began in 1927. The annual choice is not necessarily considered an honour, since in the past some have been chosen who have wielded negative influence, Adolf Hitler being a case in point [ He was named Man of the Year in 1938] . A significant name missing in the Man/Person of the Year has been Mahatma Gandhi.

In 2019, TIME has added some additional categories such as Artist of the Year and Athlete of the Year. The title of Heroes of the Year, previously known as “Guardians,” went to the scientists behind the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine specifically Katalin Kariko, Barney Graham, Kizzmekia Corbett and Drew Weissman.

It is space that really captivates him, and he has led by example. He expressed his passion about being out there quite eloquently: “There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What’s the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.”

Edward Felsenthal, TIME’s Editor-in-Chief, described Musk as “a person with extraordinary influence on life on Earth, and potentially life off earth too.” This extraterrestrial influence was accorded to him, when his firm, SpaceX, won a $2.9 billion contract with Nasa to build a moon lander for astronauts, beating out Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, and in September 2020, SpaceX launched the first all-civilian crew to orbit earth. Even the Financial Times newspaper has named Musk “Person of the Year.” The FT said it picked Musk for triggering a historic shift in the world’s auto industry towards electric vehicles.

Clearly, here is a person whose time has come !