Yesterday, Musk was named the 2021 Person of the Year by Time magazine (the video was placed on Che Wulin's WeChat Weibo and B station). This is the magazine's award to the most influential individual or group in the last 12 months , for better or worse — an action that has been going on for nearly a century. Musk has relied on his influence, from saving billions of dollars for American taxpayers through SpaceX to successfully shifting the auto industry to electric vehicles, and most people still have a relatively positive overall evaluation of him.
But Musk may also be a controversial figure — and his personality in real life and online contributed to it all. According to TIME, 2021 is the year of "Elon Unbound". From SpaceX winning an exclusive CONTRACT with NASA, to sending American astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972, to the record delivery of a large number of pure electric vehicles even during the epidemic, and making Tesla reach a trillion-dollar market value, it can be said that he has been everywhere from space to land.
In addition, Musk can easily be portrayed as an arrogant supervillain, confused with tech brothers and ****, for whom money is a number and rockets are a big toy. But he's different: He's a manufacturing giant—a technology bastion for mobile, not just a few bytes. His rocket vision basically started from scratch, but in just a few decades he revived the American space dream (SpaceX was founded in February 2002, Falcon 1 launched in March 2006, Falcon Heavy launched in February 2018, Manned Dragon spacecraft launched in May 2020... He is also actively launching satellites to expand global Internet connectivity, and his Tesla has also come out of the difficult way to achieve today's achievements.
If you see his Twitter feed that immediately proves it (bold, arrogant, and optimistic), that's what most people think of him.
In an interview with Time, Musk noted that he actually welcomes competition and doesn't mind being beaten as long as competitors have better products. Of course, before that happens, Tesla, SpaceX, and his other companies will go all out: "If someone makes a better car than we do, and then they sell more cars than we do, I think it's completely fine." Our intentions for Tesla have always been that we will be a role model for the automotive industry and want them to produce excellent electric vehicles as well so that we can accelerate the transition to sustainable technologies."
It also suggests that Musk knows his efforts are still risky, though for innovators like Musk, those challenges only make things exciting.