Elon Musk: TIME’s Worst Person of the Year

Elon Musk has just been named as TIME magazine’s Person of the Year - by which we assume they meant “worst person of the year”. And while many have been quick to criticize TIME’s choice, we actually think it’s perfect. 2021 has been the best representation we’ve ever had of how thoroughly and cravenly America’s most powerful not only don’t care about the middle and working class, but are doing everything in their power, financially, politically, socially, and psychologically to exploit and crush the wellbeing of 99% of the country. 

This year, Elon Musk is arguably the most brazen cultural figure to represent the billionaire class going mask-off, and launching an all-out offensive against the working class, who on their end, are fighting back by abandoning their jobs, striking for higher pay, organizing unions, and calling out the absurd new economy that is actively working to syphon every penny of wealth out of the middle class into the pockets of the ultra-wealthy.

This has been the year of the COVID-19 economic recovery, and when we say recovery, we mean that the top 1% saw their wealth skyrocket, the top 0.1% saw their wealth go supersonic, and Elon Musk added $119 billion dollars to his net worth in less than one year. This man made more money in 2021 than the annual GDP of more than half the countries on Earth. Meanwhile, most people in America saw their net worths collapse and not recover.

During the pandemic, workers LOST $1.3 trillion dollars in income, while billionaires ADDED $1.3 trillion dollars to their piggy banks. The math adds up perfectly, and while Elon Musk isn’t singlehanded responsible for the shape of the new economy that has abandoned the working class, he is exactly the poster child for how ideologically committed America’s power brokers are to obliterating workers rights.

For example, Musk has been openly anti-union at his companies, he was even found guilty of violating national labor laws for threatening to take away stock options from workers who unionized. He also fired a worker for engaging in union activity, which is protected on the federal level by the National Labor Relations Act, and he was forced to reinstate that worker and pay him for the time he was illegally fired. 

But it’s no wonder that Tesla employees want a union, there is an almost nonstop flood of complaints and reports about mandatory overtime, high rates of injury, extremely low wages, and overall nightmarish working conditions for those lucky enough to work for the richest man in the world.

Elon Musk represents the American Dream of the new millennium, and it’s not pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, working hard, climbing the corporate ladder, and achieving lifelong security for you and your family - that’s not really the way things work anymore.

The new American Dream starts with being born rich, preferably off the proceeds of your family’s apartheid-era share in an emerald mine, then investing in an already successful car company and pretending you founded it, and through bombastic showmanship, illegal market manipulation, and an army of obsessed followers, skyrocket the valuation of your company so far beyond it’s actual worth that you become the richest man alive while your company generates a revenue that’s barely 1/10 of your personal net worth.

Musk made enough money in one day this year to be able to end an emergency world hunger catastrophe, six times over, and when he was asked for help, he publicly taunted the World Food Program on Twitter, and said he would gladly give them the money if they gave him a comprehensive plan on how they would spend it.

So in response, the WFP delivered a specific plan on how to deploy $6.6 billion dollars worth of meals to feed more than 40 million people across 43 countries. And not only did Elon Musk completely and totally ignore them, he and his followers declared an ideological victory by pretending that the WFP never responded to him, didn’t present a plan, and claimed that one of the highest rated charities in the world - was actually thoroughly corrupt with zero evidence.

The sheer audacity. His cult-like followers are quick to say that he’s a visionary of the future and a tireless salesman of his brand and ideas - And the problem isn’t that they’re totally wrong, there is some truth to Musk’s luck and ability in spotting emerging tech trends and dumping money and time into them. But the part they ignore, and the part that truly makes him the Person of the Year, is his even greater ability to exploit.

His workers, his customers, his fans, the crypto market, the stock market, the legal system, the tax system, the media, government subsidies, Twitter, the list just goes on and on - all of these people and structures uniquely benefit him, and only him. That’s truly what he’s good at, not building cars or rockets - most of the time, he kind of sucks at it.

Elon Musk represents 2021 as the year of pure and unadulterated exploitation, it’s right in our faces, and we’re struggling to fight back while companies call us lazy for not working at starvation wages, and the government refuses to give us healthcare during a pandemic, or cancel student loans like they explicitly promised, or prosecute blatant criminality on the corporate and political level. The nightmare we’re all living in, is the new American Dream.

TIME magazine is exactly right: Elon Musk is this year’s biggest winner - and the rest of us, are it’s biggest losers.