The 50-year-old business entrepreneur has been awarded the prestigious title by the publication due to his SpaceX programme, which he hopes will lead to off-planet human settlements, his philanthropy and efforts to tackle the climate crisis.
Musk has also been chosen because he is “the man who aspires to save our planet” with his visionary work.
Announcing Elon as the recipient of the title in the new issue of the magazine, Time editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal wrote: “Person of the Year is a marker of influence, and few individuals have had more influence than Musk on life on Earth, and potentially life off Earth too.
“In 2021, Musk emerged not just as the world’s richest person but also as perhaps the richest example of a massive shift in our society.
“This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P.T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars.”
As well as SpaceX, Musk’s Tesla electric car company Tesla was praised for changing the automobile industry.
Felsenthal added: “His startup rocket company, SpaceX, has leapfrogged Boeing and others to own America’s spacefaring future. His car company, Tesla, controls two-thirds of the multibillion-dollar electric-vehicle market it pioneered and is valued at a cool $1 trillion. That has made Musk, with a net worth of more than $250 billion, the richest private citizen in history, at least on paper. He’s a player in robots and solar, cryptocurrency and climate, brain-computer implants to stave off the menace of artificial intelligence and underground tunnels to move people and freight at super speeds.”
Tesla’s incredible growth is continuing and it continues to lead the way in electric motoring. In October, car-rental giant Hertz announced it planned to add 100,000 Teslas to its fleet.
In December, it was revealed that Tesla CEO Musk sold a total of $9.85 billion in Tesla stock last month, and he’s now decided to make even more of the company’s stock available to buy.
Musk sold another 934,091 Tesla shares for an estimated value of $963.2 million, according to financial filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission published on December 9.
Tesla is valued at $1 trillion, whilst Musk’s personal net worth of $250 billion, makes him the richest private citizen in history.
