The once-venerable Time Magazine has snacked for decades off its “Man of the Year” franchise, but this year it’s outdone itself in terms of controversy by naming loopy genius, Elon Musk, as its “Person of the Year”. Some suggested that a vaccine scientist or a philanthropist would have been more deserving, not the richest private individual in history, worth $251 billion or as much as is socked away in the California State Teachers Pension Fund. But Musk is a worthy recipient because he has overcome grave personal adversities, developed formidable intellectual gifts, and worked harder than most human beings.
Elon is not Rockefeller nor Wall Street manipulator rich. He’s Thomas Edison and Henry Ford embodied in one person and has packed more life, success, and controversy into his 50 years than has happened historically in most nation-states. To date, he has launched and runs four incredible companies that are engaged at the leading-edge of everything from Tesla’s electric cars and solar power systems, to SpaceX’s rocket ships, Neuralink’s biotech implants, and the Boring Company which can burrow tunnels in record time in order to replace traditional road and rail transit systems.
Tesla is a stock market darling, worth roughly $1 trillion, but he’s far from Central Casting’s version of the powerful Chief Executive Officer of a publicly-listed corporation. He’s crude and immature at times, overcame a hideous childhood of abuse and bullying, and infamously smoked dope and talked nonsense on a popular podcast. To wit, he’s sometimes deliciously irreverent.
Even so, Time explained why he was their choice: "For creating solutions to an existential [climate] 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."
Hard to dispute. This fellow’s not only staggeringly rich because he’s invented stuff that people buy, but his enterprises are thoroughly unique. Through Tesla, he was the first to create high-performance electrified vehicles that were essentially computers on wheels run by software that was continuously upgraded. The company is worth more than the top five automakers in the world combined and still leads the pack. Through SpaceX, he reinvented rocket engines then recycled the rockets after they were used to dramatically bring down costs. He’s now replaced NASA as the transporter of astronauts and leads the space race hands-down. He’s also behind zillions of other inventions such as batteries, solar panels, the hyperloop, flying vehicles, and humanoid robots, to name just a few.
He grew up in Pretoria South Africa, a shy boy with Asberger Syndrome who was bullied at school and raised by a single parent, his father, who was a brilliant engineer but abusive. They haven’t spoken in years. By 12, he began to “escape” and coded a video game then sold it to a computer magazine for $500. Other ventures followed. Then, as a teenager, he fled to Canada, where his mother’s family lived, to avoid military service in South Africa and picked up a Canadian passport, thanks to his mother’s citizenship. This enabled him to get into the United States easily where he attended the University of Pennsylvania, then Stanford, studying physics and economics.
He and his brother Kimbal headed to Stanford and Silicon Valley. Elon dropped out of grad school, and the brothers rented a tiny office in Palo Alto, slept on the floor, showered at the YMCA, pirated an Internet line from a neighbor, and lived on fast food. Kimbal drummed up business and money while Elon wrote code nonstop. The two scored in 1999 when they sold to Compaq their mapping start-up, called Zip2, for $22 million. Then, a handful of years later, Elon sold a company to PayPal for stock and netted $180 million when PayPal was bought later by eBay. This entire grubstake was invested in SpaceX and Tesla and ever since he has worked at least 100 hours per week, often sleeping in his factories.
Personally, Musk is a one-man innovation who moves on a dime. This summer, he suddenly asked his 67 million Twitter followers to vote on whether he should cash in 10 percent of his Tesla shares after Democrats proposed a tax on billionaires. They voted yes and he sold off the stock. He then announced he would move Tesla’s head office to Texas for tax purposes because California’s taxes were too high. He quickly sold seven California mansions he owned and moved into a 375-square foot portable, foldable Boxabl “casita” in Boca Chica, where Musk's SpaceX is headquartered. Months before, he had declared his life plan was to “own no house” and to “sell almost all [of his] physical possessions”. Then he did.
Elon also skirts authorities and orderly markets. He lost the Chairmanship of Tesla in August 2018 by Tweeting that he might take the company private, contrary to disclosure requirements. This year, his Tweets about GameStop singlehandedly created a rush into “meme” stocks, triggering a securities investigation. He then created a surge in the price of bitcoin by announcing Tesla would accept it as payment for cars. He was immediately called out as a hypocrite because of the negative environmental impact of bitcoin mining so Tesla stopped accepting bitcoin. But he personally owns a chunk of the cryptocurrency.
Musk’s companies have occasionally been criticized for poor working conditions and fined for regulatory violations. Of recent concern, however, is that Tesla’s Autopilot software is being investigated by officials since it has been involved in many crashes that have caused injuries or deaths. He’s also run afoul of some organizations for expanding in China due to its human rights violations. Concerning these and other criticisms, his brother Kimbal says only that “he is a savant when it comes to business, but his gift is not empathy with people.”
Elon hates taxes and government subsidies even though Tesla was propped up in 2010 with a $465 million federal loan, and its vehicles have been heavily subsidized for years with tax write-offs. Besides, SpaceX has obtained millions in research money from Washington and now enjoys major government contracts. Undaunted, Musk resents taxation and took on Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposed “billionaire’s tax” which resulted in an entertaining Tweet spat. Her Tweet:
His Tweet in response:
Besides a sense of humor, Musk’s can-do attitude and work ethic are his most admirable traits. He’s already immersed in the next big things: space colonization and humanoid robots. “The goal overall has been to make life multi-planetary and enable humanity to become a spacefaring civilization. And the next really big thing is to build a self-sustaining city on Mars and bring the animals and creatures of Earth there. Sort of like a futuristic Noah’s ark. We’ll bring more than two, though—it’s a little weird if there’s only two.”
Meanwhile on Earth, he’s creating a five-foot, eight-inch robot that will replicate human workers and their labor. “Tesla is arguably the world’s biggest robotics company because cars are semi-sentient robots on wheels,” said Musk. “It kind of makes sense to put that into a humanoid form.” He wants his robots to “be friendly” and capable of performing regular tasks such as fastening bolts on a vehicle with a wrench or picking up groceries from markets and believes this will improve life because it will give real humans the option of doing physical work or not.
At only 50, Musk is just beginning an Edison-like journey of innovation. He’s already bashed and crashed his way to substantial achievement, ruffling feathers along the way. But on balance, Elon Musk has contributed more to society than just creating jobs, inventing technologies, and generating GDP. He’s changing human existence for the better. When asked by Time who he admired the most, he said simply: “anyone who makes a contribution to humanity.”
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King Elon
Elizabeth Warren, a fake Cherokee squaw, has never once contributed to the US economy. She is a taker not a giver much like Bernie. Even took the tax credit for a solar system possibly made by Elon's company Tesla Energy !.
Every generation has wakcy billionaires. Back then Getty(he needed help for his sex addiction) and Howard Hughes(he was brilliant too but crazy got in the way).