Photo: SNL
The Financial Times, following TIME magazine, announced that it has named Tesla CEO Elon Musk its ‘Person of the Year,’ praising his work to transform the electric vehicle industry. The achievements of this amazing person speak for themselves, only emphasizing the uniqueness of Musk.
The Financial Times (FT) named Elon Musk its ‘Person of the Year.’ The authors and editors of the publication emphasize how difficult the path of the head of Tesla was in order to transform the global automotive industry. It has been 18 years since Tesla was founded and during that time, the company has proven that electric vehicles can compete with ICE cars. Over the years, Musk has not only had to create the electric car market almost alone, fighting bankruptcy, he has also been active in fighting short sellers on Wall Street and regulators that have tried to stifle the development of the industry.
2021 has shown that Musk's years of hard, dedicated work and sleepless nights have wildly paid off as various automakers around the world, including Ford, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, and now Toyota, committed themselves to the introduction of electric vehicles. Tesla's goal is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. This is what’s happening.
“For a long time, the rest of the auto industry was basically calling Tesla and me fools and frauds,” Musk says in an interview with the Financial Times. “They were saying electric cars wouldn’t work, you can’t achieve the range and performance. And even if you did that, nobody would buy them.”
Musk believes climate change activists have helped push automakers towards greener technologies. But he argues that there is one important reason why they are finally ready to switch to electricity: “Until we started taking market share from them in a meaningful way, they didn’t react.”
FT names Elon Musk Person of the Year because “he has triggered a historic shift in the world’s auto industry towards electric vehicles.” In an era often defined by new technology, Musk is staking a claim to be the most genuinely innovative entrepreneur of his generation, writes FT.
In addition to his achievements in the automotive industry, Musk excelled in other areas. His private space company—SpaceX—brought human space flight back to American soil for the first time last year. The Starlink network is approaching the launch of the world's first commercial satellite broadband internet, and a new giant rocket, Starship, which is supposed to take the first humans to Mars, is awaiting its first test launch.
“I'm just trying to get people to Mars, and enable freedom of information with Starlink, accelerate sustainable technology with Tesla, free people from the drudgery of driving,” he says. “It’s certainly possible that the road to hell to some degree is paved with good intentions—but the road to hell is mostly paved with bad intentions.”
© 2021, Eva Fox | Tesmanian. All rights reserved.
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Article edited by @SmokeyShorts, you can follow him on Twitter
About the Author
Eva Fox
Eva Fox joined Tesmanian in 2019 to cover breaking news as an automotive journalist. The main topics that she covers are clean energy and electric vehicles. As a journalist, Eva is specialized in Tesla and topics related to the work and development of the company.
