Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, has been named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2021, a year in which his electric vehicle firm became the most valuable automaker in the world and his rocket company ascended to the edge of space with an all-civilian crew.

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Musk is also the founder and CEO of SpaceX, as well as the creator and CEO of the brain-chip business Neuralink and the infrastructure firm The Boring Company. This year, Tesla’s market worth surpassed $1 trillion, making it more valuable than Ford Motor and General Motors combined.

Tesla manufactures hundreds of thousands of cars each year and has handled supply chain challenges better than many of its competitors while encouraging many young consumers to switch to electric vehicles and traditional manufacturers to move their emphasis to EV vehicles.

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“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 airplane flight over the Atlantic.”

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From hosting Saturday Night Live to tweeting about cryptocurrencies and meme stocks, which caused large price swings, Musk has dominated the news and gained over 66 million Twitter followers. In the past, several of his tweets have drawn regulatory scrutiny.

According to the magazine, “The Person of the Year” signifies somebody “who affected the news or our lives the most, for better, or worse.”

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Time magazine named the teenage pop singer Olivia Rodrigo as its “Entertainer of the Year”, American gymnast Simone Biles “Athlete of the Year” and vaccine scientists were named “Heroes of the Year”.

The “Person of the Year” award was shared by US President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris last year. 

This trend was started by Time in 1927. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, have both been given the title in the past.