The South African, chosen “person of the year” by ‘Time’, is the richest man in the world.
Anyone who has read about the world of technology has known its name for more than two decades. However, there is no denying that everything he has done since then has brought him to a pedestal in the industry as he reaps the results of his investments. That’s Elon Musk, whom this week’s magazine Time has named the “person of the year.”
“Personality of the Year is someone influential, and few individuals are more influential than @elonmusk in life on Earth, and potentially beyond Earth as well,” noted the editor-in-chief of Time, Edward Felsenthal, announcing the winner on his Twitter account.
For Franklin Velasco, research professor in the marketing area at the San Francisco de Quito University, if one looks at the type of innovation and entrepreneurship that Musk carries out, there is a transversal line, which is the welfare of consumers, but with a more global perspective.
“I also believe that his personal brand plays an important role, how he handles himself within the media, because these types of awards have that type of influence,” says Velasco, who adds that this character seeks a way to solve real problems. For example, for traffic and mobilization problems, he proposes different types of tunnels through his company The Boring Company.
“He develops new technology, breaks paradigms to make it more efficient and give it more value, more money. Tesla is another example, but it had bad seasons and is only now seeing it consolidated. It has achieved that credibility that it did not have before, ”says Velasco.
Tesla is already the most valuable automotive company in the world, according to the Kantar BrandZ ranking, due to its large stock market appreciation in the last year.
Musk has also entered the world of technology applied to health with projects to create chips that connect to the brain, and most importantly, what has generated the greatest growth of his fortune, the advances for space travel using the same rocket to go and return without major waste. This, through his company SpaceX, which already takes astronauts to the International Space Station, plans to consolidate space tourism and is even technically preparing to try to reach Mars in the near future.
This 50-year-old man born in South Africa – he also has American citizenship – and possessed of great ambition, this year surpassed his rival in the space race Jeff Bezos, the founder tycoon of the online sales giant Amazon, to become the richest person in the world with more than $ 250 billion – according to this week’s estimates of Forbes-, more than 100,000 million more than in the previous year.
He has made that amount of money by the number of investors who have looked to the technology and its different innovative applications, many of which have been closer to the pandemic now than before. This added to the personal brand that has continued to accumulate credibility and maintains a public relations that always puts him in the news, even when he causes controversy for creating a flamethrower or threatening that Tesla will leave the stock market, something that has even cost him sanctions .
According to the multinational finance company Morgan Stanley, he is the one most likely to become the world’s first billionaire (trillionaire, in English), that is, to exceed 1’000,000,000,000.
Everything has worked for him, from the show business (appearing in movies or series) to the tangible results of his innovations, so that the stakeholders pay attention and money to your businesses.
One of the people who thinks this is Danny Barbery, dean of Communication at the Espiritu Santo University of Specialties, who thinks that Musk is very media, since he was one of the creators of PayPal. But what launches him to stardom is the unveiling of Tesla’s electric car models and their spatial interest.
Barbery recalls that when he started investing in rocket launches he had many failures and NASA, of whom he was seeking to be a supplier, pushed him aside. But he kept researching and testing until he was successful and now has large contracts with NASA.
Besides that Musk is a person who has a very broad vision of the future. “The idea he has is that humanity not only stay on Earth but go to other planets,” says Barbery, for whom Musk along with Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg (for their initiative in the world of virtual reality) are the three people who for now are shaping the future and their visions have accelerated in recent years with the arrival of investors who have seen that this future can be reached in a faster way.
Sometimes the question has arisen as to whether Musk is the new Steve Jobs (co-founder of Apple and recognized for his vision of innovation by introducing products to the market that are now part of the lives of millions of people around the world), who died in 2011. Although other technology leaders like Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and who has a strained relationship with Musk, have responded that “Elon is more of a hands-on engineer. Steve was a genius in design, recruiting and marketing. “
However, shortly before the proclamation, Musk was involved in a controversy for having taken to Twitter to unleash a litany of personal attacks against US Senator Elizabeth Warren after she suggested that he was “taking advantage” and not paying his fair share. tax, collect CNN.
Another that Musk often faces is Senator Bernie Sanders, who accuses him of cementing the investments of his companies in large tax deductions, something that for Musk and other entrepreneurs is something usual and important for business development and what it implies .
Only time will tell if Musk becomes as or bigger as Jobs in the world of technology and in popular culture, but for now he is not going astray. (I)
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
