Elon Musk is named Time's Person of the Year for 2021!
New York, New York – On Monday, Time Magazine named Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, as its Person of the Year.
After a groundbreaking 2021, the wealthiest man in the world has landed Time Magazine's most prestigious honor.
The announcement came days after Time announced both its Athlete of the Year in Simone Biles and Entertainer of the Year in Grammy-nominated music artist Olivia Rodrigo.
Time's Editor-in-Chief Edward Felsenthal provided some insight into what led the publication to grant Musk the title in his profile on the 50-year-old entrepreneur and business magnate.
"Person of the Year is a marker of influence, and few individuals have had more influence than Musk on life on Earth, and potentially life off Earth too," Felsenthal said.
Regardless of how people feel about the tech mogul, it's hard to deny what he's accomplished this year alone.
A year in the life of Elon Musk
In April, Musk's rocket start-up company SpaceX won an exclusive $2.9 billion contract with NASA to put astronauts on the moon for the first time since 1972.
In May, the South African native hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time, and subsequently became the first person with Asperger's syndrome to ever do so.
On September 15, SpaceX successfully launched its first all-civilian human spaceflight, dubbed Inspiration4, into a three-day orbit.
And on Friday, NASA announced it would be purchasing three additional flights for its astronauts on SpaceX's Crew Dragon.
But that's not the only thing SpaceX and Musk have on the calendar for 2022.
According to Space.com, the innovator announced that SpaceX hopes to attempt its first launch of a Starship flight into orbit in early 2022.
"I would not say that it is likely to be successful, but I think we'll make a lot of progress," he said.
If there's one thing the SpaceX CEO has learned, it's that great successes sometimes take failures to attain. He believes that without failure, there cannot be growth. And for Musk, being stagnant or complacent doesn't seem to be an option – and that's exactly where his innovation begins.
While some might not find Musk to be the best recipient of this monumental honor, Felsenthal defended the magazine's pick.
"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," he wrote.
Time Magazine has been naming a Person of the Year since 1927, with Charles Lindbergh being its first recipient.
Cover photo: Collage: Imago/UPI Photo & ZUMA Wire