What Elon Musk's TIME Person of the Year Prize Says About Our Era

Rabat – TIME Magazine’s selection of Elon Musk as “Person of the Year” is an apt symbol of our current era of profit-driven pandemic responses and record profits amid untold suffering.

While TIME emphasized it is recognizing the eccentric billionaire for his influence “for good or for ill,” the laudatory articles accompanying the award reveal a shocking level of disregard for human lives in the face of the glitter and glamour of the ultra-rich.

Many have critiqued Musk’s award for his resistance to paying taxes despite being the richest man on Earth. Others have highlighted his horrible treatment of his staff, or his downplaying of the COVID-19 crisis even as it was killing millions around the world.

While these critiques are valid, exploitation and tax-theft are commonplace among the world’s richest. Musk’s greatest sin in 2021 is his conscious choice to not help 42 million people who he could have saved from famine or undernourishment by sacrificing a miniscule fraction of his total wealth.

“Anyone who is doing things that is really useful to humanity, I admire them greatly,” Musk said in his interview for the TIME award.

The Nobel-Prize winning World Food Programme (WFP), arguably the greatest life-saving organization in the world, made another desperate plea for funding this year. Despite growing famine worldwide, the organization was still in dire need of funds to provide the most basic requirements for human life to an estimated 42 million people.

WFP Director David Beasley made a desperate call on the world’s two richest people, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, to donate just 0.36% of their wealth to save 42 million people from starvation. Citing a “perfect storm of conflict, climate change and COVID-19,” Beasley implored the two men to “just help me with them, one time.”

Such a decision would be a no-brainer for even the poorest person with a genuine interest in a goal that most celebrities and billionaires are often eager to proclaim or identify with: changing the world for the better. Sadly, however, Musk and Bezos did not see this moment as an opportunity to do some actual good for the world.

While Bezos languished in shameful silence following Beasley’s request, Musk challenged the WFP chief to provide him with details. “If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.”

The disingenuous nature of his response was instantly evident as he added several preconditions to his potential donation. Despite Beasley’s insistence that “People that are literally going to die,” Musk demanded that the WFP explained their plan in his personal twitter feed, and used an inaccurate headline to shift the target from saving 42 million lives to “ending world hunger.”

In his response, Musk indirectly accused the Nobel Prize winners of fraudulent accounting by demanding “open source accounting.”

The UN agency called his bluff, providing a detailed plan outlining how every penny of his donation would help save lives, and how WFP’s transparent accounting worked. Ever since, Musk has been obfuscating, pointing to unrelated UN scandals and shifting the goalpost with new demands.

Beasley asked Musk to simply “talk.” “I can be on the next flight to you, throw me out if you don’t like what you hear,” the WFP chief told Musk.

Ever since Musk has used his Twitter account to rail against US government’s social spending, commenting on his pet projects, ridiculing public officials and “asking” his Twitter audience whether he should sell stock to pay taxes.

Musk’s commitment to sell stock to save lives appears to have disappeared from his thoughts completely, even as every day those 42 million people get closer to starvation.

TIME highlighted a 2001 moment when Musk contracted Malaria, a confrontation with his mortality that is cited as a source of his remarkable drive, one of the key reasons cited for his Person of the Year award. While Musk’s own sense of mortality appears to fuel his personal mission, it appears the mortality of others is no concern.

Like many of the ultra-rich, Musk appears to see himself as a John Galt-type from Ayn Rand’s individualistic fan-fiction, a man that stands high above mere humans.

“You want those who are managing capital to be good stewards of capital. And I think the government is inherently not a good steward of capital,” Musk infamously stated despite his success having depended on giant government subsidies, scholarships, and other state support. Musk wants to build electric cars, he just does not want to pay his fair share of the cost of the roads they drive on.

Musk’s behavior is a key example of how entitlement blinds a person to the amount of help he or she receives along the way. A 2013 experiment by social-psychologist Paul Piff tested this premise through a simple game of monopoly, where some players would receive twice the money and less restrictions during the game.

Despite the players having been aware of their advantage at first, within fifteen minutes the privileged players started attributing their success to their own skills, became louder, ruder, and would even eat more of the communal bowl of pretzels.

Piff’s experiment appears to show some explanation of Musk’s ability to ignore the plight of millions of people. He has forgotten that where he was born was not in his control, nor were the schools he attended, the scholarships and subsidies he received, as well as the doors of investors that were open to him but not to others.

In the end, perhaps Elon Musk does deserve to be “Person of the Year.”

He deserves it not for any contributions he has made to humanity, he deserves it as it serves as an apt example of our current world.

Indeed, Musks’ brazen adulation and celebration perfectly captures a culture where pandemic responses are limited by profit-making, where business booms amid economic crisis, where vaccines are available only in certain countries, and where life-saving institutions such as the WFP have to beg for money.

Elon Musk is a prime example of much of what is wrong with the world today — a world of unapologetic individualism, where we idolize those who hoard billions of our resources while millions are left to starve.