Do you think Elon Musk should have been Time Magazine's Person of the Year and if not, who should and why?
Asked by
janbb (
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December 31st, 2021
I realize that who Time names is increasingly irrelevant but I thought this might be a fun question to bat around a bit. This was sparked by an article from the New Yorker profiling Congressman Jamie Raskin as Person of the Year. He lost his son to depression and went on to research and spearhead the first impeachment trial.
Putting it in General because I’d like answers to stay on topic. If you don’t care, no need to answer.
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53 Answers
I think the nurses and doctors deserved it much more.
I agree that, given the impact of COVID, I would have liked to have seen doctors & nurses collectively as “Person of the Year”. And before anyone says “a group of people can’t be a person”, remember that Time once named the Personal Computer as ‘Person’ of the Year (much to Steve Jobs’ chagrin).
That said, love him or hate him, strange as he may be, the dude has done more for electric vehicles and space travel (with one basically funding the other) than anyone else.
My vote would be for Greta Thunberg.
Obviously nurses and doctors are worthy, but I dislike the idea of “person of the year” going to a group of people, even if Time has set the precedent in the past. Also there are some nurses and doctors that suck. Some are grifters promoting junk science, or signing off on BS vaccine exemptions to make a buck.
I really have no problem with the guy. I know that’s not going to be a popular opinion, and yeah, he’s filthy rich. But at least he is giving trying to give NASA some competition in space. Baby steps maybe, but someone needs to do it. And as far as I know, it’s not coming out of the taxpayer’s pocket. Let the guy have his 15 minutes of fame.
What have they accomplished since the end of the Apollo Project? Nothing but excuses. We lost the technology, we need more money, blah blah. I want to see manned exploration, and if it can be done by a private individual, more power to him. And I believe that that is his ultimate goal. And not only that, but a private company won’t try to militarize space.
I think more worthy would be not only the doctors and nurses, but all essential workers who had no choice but to come to work during the shutdown ( sewage treatment plant operators, public transportation workers, etc.).
@jca2 I agree, but it is what it is. And at least Musk is providing a service to humanity. At least for those of us who are interested in progress in exploring outer space. Even he lines his own pockets doing it.
@Nomore_lockout: There’s no argument about it, as they’ve chosen him and it definitely is what it is, but I was asked for my opinion so I gave it.
I know, it’s all good. I was just commenting. And as said I agree with your sentiment. But go figure who or what Time likes or does. @jca2 Peace and Love!
Time’s Person Of The Year has never been about who is most deserving because of good deeds, but by this: ” The publication claims to pick it’s recipients by analyzing how much coverage they had in the media over a given year.”
From this https://www.history.co.uk/this-day-in-history/02-january/hitler-named-time-magazines-man-of-the-year
”Though giving Hitler the award had been seen as a controversial choice, Time has since given the recognition to other controversial figures such as Joseph Stalin, Osama Bin Laden, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Donald Trump.”
@canidmajor Interesting. I thought that Trump had coveted it but didn’t get it.
Researching it, I see he did get it in 2016.
I still don’t like Musk getting it. Or maybe I just don’t like Person of the Year awards!
I’d like to nominate Caravanfan for Fluther’s Person of the Year!
@janbb
No, that was the Nobel Peace Prize that he did not get.
Elon Musk isn’t a person he is more of a medium sized country.
@janbb I believe our nurses and health care workers shold definitely be Times’ People of the Year! They are the real, true heroes here.
Response moderated (Off-Topic)
I think Elon sounds like a jerk but he has made important and meaningful contributions to humanity. Nonetheless, I would have nominated the teams of scientists who brought us COVID19 mRNA vaccines—Katalin Kariko, Drew Weissman, Ozlem Tureci, Ugur Sahin, Kizzmekia Corbett, and others.
I don’t know why Elon gets so much hate other than he has said some off color things and is rich. You would think essentially forcing the whole auto industry to begin moving to electric would be worthy of praise. You would think proving beyond a doubt that space travel is not a far-reaching goal would be something worth celebrating. IMO it’s deserved.
More manned exploration of what, @Nomore_lockout? And what makes you think they lost technology?
The Apollo program succeeded in its goal, to make it to the moon. Should we just keep going back to the moon, over and over again?
They’ve been putting physical rovers on Mars for years.
They launched Hubble. And they had to go up there and physically fix it.
What technology have they “lost”?
Elon Musk can’t begin to compete with NASA
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@Dutchess_III Mars, and maybe back to the moon. And I will have to find the link, but an astronaut actually said, the “We lost the technology, and it is a painful process to get it back”. In reference to the Apollo tech. Give me a sec I will try to find it.
@Dutchess_III
“Should we just keep going back to the moon, over and over again”
Yes. Humanity should have a permanent presence there. It’s perfect for us to master adapting to living off planet.
Elon is overshadowing NASA because NASA is tangled in bureaucracy and can’t stay on task because of politics.
Most of the tech that took us to the moon was “lost” through attrition and neglect. It should have been built on and progressed but that did not happen. We can do it again but not exactly they way it was done before. We would be in a sense reinventing the wheel. We go to low earth orbit all the time but that’s different than a manned trip to the moon.
FYI: The Apollo program was scheduled up through no. 21. Multiple scientists were brought on board, trained, scheduled to fly with the astronauts — but funding was slashed and all flights cancelled.
https://youtu.be/wXIxfILaOsA @Dutchess_III Here it is, Astronaut Don Pettit says we lost or destroyed the technology. From a Flat Earth ass hole, ignore him. Just listen to Pettit. He also talks about returning to the moon, and then on to Mars and elsewhere. So stop picking on my boy Elon, ; )
The only “impressive” thing that Musk has done, is making a rocket stage that lands by itself, which is nothing more than a gimmicky parlor trick. Everything else are things that have been done hundreds of times.
He has yet to accomplish anything that comes even close to any of the Mars rovers, or the recent JWST mission.
And let us be honest: when I say that “Musk has done”, I mean “his engineers did”. I guarantee you, the man has done not a single minute of actual engineering work.
Closest he ever got to that, was to propose some stupid, ad-hoc submarine to rescue some trapped people underwater, and when that was naturally rejected as completely ridiculous, he called the people in charge of the rescue “paedophiles”.
Elon Musk is not a real world Tony Stark.
Elon Musk is a real world Justin Hammer.
That Don Petit must be a moron to say something like that. It’s a bizarre thing to claim @Nomore_lockout.
I admire Elon Musk’s accomplishments, but don’t see him as a particular standout in 2021. He continued doing what he does.
Prior to last year (Happy new year everyone!) he transformed the auto (first mass market electric car in a century) and space launch (has made delivery to orbit cheaper) industries.
The health care workers would have been a good choice for 2020. The obvious choice for 2021 is the vaccine scientists.
Why on earth would NASA need competition
NASA moves slowly and Congress jerks it around by the budget, making it change priorities often. Its Constellation program was planned to land people on the moon in 2020. Instead, it was cancelled, and its replacement, the Space Launch System, is years behind schedule.
Meanwhile, SpaceX can move forward on its agenda and has become a premier supplier of orbital payload capacity for NASA, the Pentagon, and commercial customers.
We already landed on the moon. We have no earthly (ha ha) reason to go back. There is nothing whatsoever to sustain life. No oxygen, no water. Just rocks and dust, which we already know the composition of.
Mars is the closest thing to an earth like environment in our solar system. We just need to find water and plant a bunch of trees to suck up all that carbon monoxide and wait a few billion years for the plants to leak out enough oxygen for us to live on.
It would have been nice to pick healthcare workers, or vaccine researchers, but I guess Musk has made an impact on our culture in multiple ways.
@Dutchess_III Why are you so focused on the moon? There is an entire universe out there. Multiple nations have people on the space station at any given time doing experiments. I haven’t followed Musk and his goals; is he just looking to do trips to the moon?
is he just looking to do trips to the moon?
I believe Elon Musk has said everything SpaceX does is a step towards landing people on Mars. He wants to spur a human move onto other worlds.
I had no idea there was so much to the moon.
I would have preferred Alex Trebek.
Or Ruth Bador Ginsburg.
Even the health care nurses and doctors who kept us safe from Covid.
As for Elon, I think the guy certainly has some faults that absolutely deserve criticism, but I also think today’s tribalistic politics of us vs. them has resulted in people feeling compelled to view him as a complete villain, instead of a more nuanced view. Musk’s detractors seem to pretend that he’s not as smart as everyone says he is, or that he’s made no contributions himself.
Let’s not mince words, without Elon Musk, all of legacy auto would be completely ignoring EVs. They’d be lobbying for extensions on legislation designed to push the industry away from fossil fuels, they’d be building “compliance cars”—designed to fail to “prove” the lack of demand for EVs so they could continue building profitable trucks and SUVs. He has catalyzed an entire industry that’s shifting to EVs kicking and screaming the whole way.
His energy storage tech may also play a major factor in reducing CO2 emissions. And if he ever manages to work through the issues with his solar roof, that could radically decentralize power production for the grid.
As for SpaceX, building a reusable rocket system is a game changer for human exploration of space and other bodies in our Solar System. One can acknowledge these things and also condemn other actions he’s taken and statements he’s made.
I really have no problem with him. He’s rich. People are jealous.
But I don’t think he deserved Time Magazine.
@Dutchess_III I agree but as I said above, it is what it is. And they have chosen much worse people in times past.
Here.
We didn’t “lose” the technology. The Saturn V rocket booster is no longer in production. It’s no longer in production because there is no demand for it @Nomore_lockout. If there is a demand for it in the future it will go back into production.
@Dutchess_III “If there is a demand for it in the future it will go back into production…”
In what facility? Which workers are going to make it? I’m pretty sure the people involved with manufacturing the Saturn V rockets are all very much retired, or dead at this point. The facilities where they were made are likely closed, the tooling is gone, the experience of how to make this stuff on that scale is gone. That’s what we mean by “lost technology.” Obviously we have the schematics, drawings and general understanding of how they were made, but it’s not like there’s a switch someone can flip to just start making them again.
We have the ability to start making them again if it’s called for.
The switch to turn it back on would be NASA contract.
There is no “sooper sauce” or player memory !
You follow the blueprints and operation sheets.
Precision machining some of the largest parts ever created in human history to insanely tight tolerances out of special alloys is not something that is easy to just start doing. It would be like starting from scratch.
So then Don Pettit was correct, even if he neglected the details. Anyway it was just some moron Flat Earth clown trying to make NASA look bad, who made that video. And took what Pettit said out of context.
He was incorrect in saying we’ve “lost” the technology, implying we could never find it again.
If we had to start over I can only imagine we’d make a new and improved version.
Which has little or nothing to do with @janbb’s Q as written.
Actually it does. Elon Musk has nothing on NASA.
@Tropical_Willie My grandpa was one of the guys who machined the Saturn V rockets. He used to tell me stories about how ridiculous the tolerances had to be and how challenging the whole process was. I understand that there are large CNC machines, but when you’re talking about parts of that scale, things like heat from the tooling can cause a massive part to get scrapped. When you’re machining to less than a thousandth of an inch on that scale there are tons of challenges. Everything is custom, including all of the framing used to hold it in place so it doesn’t shift during transport.
@Dutchess_III Elon has transformed the economic equation for launching rockets. That is a big deal, and something NASA hasn’t done (and probably couldn’t do). NASA has to “play it safe” and can’t blow up dozens of rockets trying crazy ideas like SpaceX can. NASA is crippled by being at the mercy of public funding and ultimately politics.
Do you know how much precision engineering is inside the JWST and the mars rovers?
Carnaghi machinery is capable of tolerances in the range of .00001 of an inch. There is a picture of two people standing on a VTL table, I think the machine is the one that machines the rings for the Saturn boosters.
Fuck no. It should be Fauci.
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