Musk was named Time's Person of the Year: Genius, Joker, and hope to bring humanity to Mars

Reporter | Jiang Jingling

On December 13, local time, the US "Time Magazine" announced that the 2021 person of the year was Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and CEO of Tesla.

Source: Time Magazine

Time Magazine's description of Musk is:

This is a man who wants to save our planet and bring us to new habitats;

He is a crazy mix of clowns, geniuses, leaders, visionaries, industrialists, performers, scoundrels; Edison (inventor), Barnum (the father of modern PR), Carnegie (entrepreneur), and Dr. Manhattan (a superhero, scientist in DC Comics).

His start-up rocket company, SpaceX, has surpassed Boeing and others to hold the future of the U.S. space industry. His car company, Tesla, pioneered the electric car market and has a trillion-dollar market capitalization.

He is a participant in robotics, solar, cryptocurrency, climate, human brain interface, underground tunnel speeding transport.

He has a large following that dominates Wall Street, and "the value of stocks is not based on cash flow, but on how close they are to Musk." ”

Time magazine wrote that 2021 is elon Musk's year:

In April, SpaceX won NASA's first exclusive contract since 1972 to send American astronauts to the moon, which will build a lunar landing system that can send astronauts to the moon by 2024;

In May, Musk hosted the nation's top veteran talk show, Saturday Night Live;

In September, Musk's SpaceX made history by successfully sending four private passengers into orbit, completing the first ever space mission by a national crew;

In October, car rental giant Hertz placed an order for 100,000 vehicles with a total value of $4.4 billion, making Musk the world's richest man;

On November 14, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket performed the launch of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, completing the first planetary defense test in human history.

What shaped Musk? Compared with ordinary people, Musk is good at making big decisions under great pressure and generating the motivation to change the human process. All of Musk's entry into is outside the scope of his academic research. Electric vehicles and space exploration used to be "graveyards of investment."

Although in the early days, Tesla has been in a crisis of tight cash flow, technical chaos and delayed schedules. But the smooth landing of Tesla Motors and Musk's viral influence on social media have allowed the company to start the electric car market and occupy two-thirds of it, gaining a trillion-dollar market value in the capital market.

SpaceX, on the other hand, creatively used a collection engine to develop a recyclable rocket that greatly reduced the cost of rocket operation, and it was seen as a hope for the United States to restart the space dream.

Compared with money and influence, whether it is Musk himself or the company's external expression, these are seen as means. And his real original motivation fell on the mission for humanity as a whole — to alleviate the energy crisis with electric vehicles, reduce carbon emissions to help solve climate problems, and to use SpaceX as the first step in the "Colonization of Mars Project" to help humans find and build new habitats in the universe.

Compared to the two, although Tesla is Musk's biggest source of wealth and influence at present, space is his most extreme ambition. "The ultimate goal [of mine] is for life to operate on multiple planets and for humanity to have a space civilization."

This carries Musk's ultimate personal need for self-actualization — "Money is not an end to him, but a means." He wanted eternal glory for great deeds, which he defined as things that were good for humanity. ”

Time magazine mentioned that in the next two months, SpaceX plans to put a starship into orbit for the first time, and the behemoth is powered by 33 engines at a huge bottom of 230 feet and requires more than 7.5 million pounds of liquid fuel. Musk plans to make a one-way orbit of the moon by 2023 and land on the lunar surface within three years.

Musk isn't sure if the plan will succeed, though, and he recently said Space X is facing bankruptcy. "This is the largest rocket project in human history and has far-reaching implications for entering Earth's orbit. Because there has never been a fully reusable Earth orbit launch vehicle before. "It's revolutionary for human space technology, and a lot of very smart people have given up after trying it, and I'm still not sure if that's really possible." ”

Edward Fersenthal, editor-in-chief of Time magazine, said of him, "Almost no one can match his impact on life on Earth, or even on extraterrestrial life." He created solutions to existential crises, he embodied the possibilities and dangers of the age of technology, and he drove bold and subversive change in society. ”

In the famous science fiction film The Matrix, the blue pill and the red pill are the major choices faced by the protagonist Neo on the edge of the virtual and real worlds. Blue represents the established smooth, orderly virtual world life; red represents the heroic mission of saving the entire human world ruled by robots.

In May 2020, Musk tweeted, "Take the red pill." This is the choice made by this person who "has all the outlier qualities" and is "reckless and arrogant.".