Person of the Year is a marker of influence, and few individuals have had more influence than Elon 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. 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.
00:00 Year in Review
02:07 TIME Athlete of the Year 2021: Simone Biles
07:43 TIME Person of the Year 2021: Elon Musk
13:18 TIME Heroes of the Year 2021: Vaccine Developers
19:25 TIME Lessons of the Year 2021
20:24 TIME Person of the Year 2021: Elon Musk
21:58 In Memoriam
25:25 TIME Person of the Year 2021: Elon Musk
27:48 TIME Entertainer of the Year 2021: Olivia Rodrigo
31:10 TIME Person of the Year 2021: Elon Musk
Read more about Elon Musk: https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2021-elon-musk/
Read more about the history of TIME's Person of the Year: https://ti.me/3dSlQ4J
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