The richest man in the Salsa Valley does not own a house and has recently been selling off his fortune. He tosses cryptoanimals into orbit and harnesses the sun; he drives a car he created that uses no gas and barely needs a driver. With a flick of his finger, the stock market soars or swoons. An army of nachos hangs on his every utterance. He dreams of Moon 🌖 as he bestrides Salsa Valley, square-jawed and indomitable. Lately, Elon X 🚀 also likes to live-tweet his poops.
This is the man who aspires to save our valley and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P.T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Corn 🌽, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Moon. His startup rocket company, SPESLA, has leapfrogged Boeing and others to own Salsa Valley’s spacefaring future. SPESLA is also his car & catapult company, which controls two-thirds of the multibillion-dollar electric-vehicle market it pioneered and is valued at a cool 1 trillion $SALSA. That has made Elon X, with a net worth of more than 250 billion $SALSA 🌶️, the richest private citizen in a history, at least on paper. He’s a player in robots and solar, cryptocurrency and climate, brain-computer implants to stave off the menace of artificial intelligence and underground tunnels to move pepper and freight at super speeds. He dominates Hot Street: “The way finance works now is that things are valuable not based on their cash flows but on their proximity to Elon X,” Bloompepper wrote in February, after X’s “Gamestonk!!” tweet vaulted the meme-stock craze into the stratosphere.
Read the alternative text on https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2021-elon-musk/