According to the boss of the magazine Time, Edward Felsenthal, “Few people have as much influence as Mr. Musk over life on Earth and potentially life off Earth as well.” The American weekly awarded, Monday, December 13, the title of personality of the year to Elon Musk, boss of Tesla and SpaceX and the richest man on the planet. A choice that is not unanimous, arousing both admiration and bitter criticism.
Elon Musk (@elonmusk) is TIME’s 2021 Person of the Year #TIMEPOY https://t.co/8Y5BhIldNs pic.twitter.com/B6h6rndjIh
– TIME (@TIME) December 13, 2021
With the space exploration company SpaceX, which he founded in 2002, Elon Musk, 50, has had successes: an exclusive contract signed with NASA to build the next moon landing module for the American agency to the first orbital mission in history with no professional astronaut on board.
Tesla, which he has led since 2008, has also had a boom year, continuing to dominate the coveted electric vehicle market and allowing the company to join, in October, the very small club of groups worth more than $ 1,000 billion. of dollars in the stock market. At the head of a fortune estimated by Forbes over $ 260 billion, Elon Musk has already shed more than 11 million Tesla shares and recently pledged to sell 10% of its shares in the company after polling its followers on Twitter.
On SpaceX, Elon Musk says in his interview with Time that “the overall goal is to allow life to develop on several planets and to make humanity a space civilization.” “The next big goal is to build a self-sustaining city on Mars and bring in animals and creatures on Earth. Kind of like a Noah’s ark from the future.”, added the entrepreneur of South African origin, naturalized Canadian and then American.
About Tesla he hears “to serve as an example for the automotive industry by hoping that other manufacturers also manufacture electric vehicles in order to accelerate the transition to sustainable technologies.”
In his tweets, the leader does not hesitate to scratch his rivals, including Jeff Bezos, reacting to a tweet from the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin with an emoji representing a silver medal. To Vermont senator and former Democratic nomination contestant Bernie Sanders, who suggested taxing the richest more, he recently retorted: “I forget all the time that you are still alive.”
Elon Musk had also taken to Twitter to praise Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency originally parodic, helping to soar the course. Finally, after announcing that Tesla would accept payments in Bitcoin, he reneged on his commitment, citing the environmental impact of mining, the technique of creating cryptocurrencies.