Tech billionaire Elon Musk continued a wild end-of-year ride by being named Time Magazine’s person of the year for 2021.
The news was greeted on Monday morning by a 5% decline in value in the company’s stock. Stock volatility is not news for Musk who has seen his pioneering EV company Tesla run wild on the stock markets going from a valuation of $86 in March 2020 to $960 on Monday.
“Markets move themselves all the time, based on nothing as far as I can tell,” Musk one told Time Magazine. “So the statements that I make, are they materially different from random movements of the stock that might happen anyway? I don’t think so.”
Major steps forward for Musk were winning a bid from NASA in April to build a lunar lander for the Artemis program and EV deliveries up 87% year-over-year, a market which Tesla already dominates with about two-thirds of all the world’s EV coming from Musk’s assembly lines.
Time magazine’s cover first ushered in the information age when it highlighted the computer in 1982 as the Machine of the Year. Since then the digital era has been represented on the person-of-the-year cover by semi-conductor pioneer Andrew Grove in 1997, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 1999 and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in 2010. Microsoft’s Bill Gates was featured for philanthropy in 2005.
