On Monday, Time Magazine announced that their Person of the Year for 2021 is none other than Elon Musk. Or as we at the Not the Bee affectionately call him, "Papa Elon".
The first paragraph from the Time feature on the Man of the Year really does a nice job describing the enigmatic multi-billionaire and his eccentricities which perfectly match with this weird internet age.
The richest man in the world does not own a house and has recently been selling off his fortune. He tosses satellites into orbit and harnesses the sun; he drives a car he created that uses no gas and barely needs a driver. With a flick of his finger, the stock market soars or swoons. An army of devotees hangs on his every utterance. He dreams of Mars as he bestrides Earth, square-jawed and indomitable. Lately, Elon Musk also likes to live-tweet his poops.
I mean, if that doesn't explain the Elon Musk phenomenon I don't know what could.
More from Time:
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. He dominates Wall Street: "The way finance works now is that things are valuable not based on their cash flows but on their proximity to Elon Musk," Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine wrote in February, after Musk's "Gamestonk!!" tweet vaulted the meme-stock craze into the stratosphere.
Love him or hate him, Elon has tremendous influence and it's no doubt fair to name him Man of the Year in 2021. The successes of Tesla and SpaceX alone are more than enough reason to bestow the honor on the richest man alive.
Honestly, we at Not the Bee would probably give him that honor simply for this tweet alone:
