--- title: Why Elon Musk Will Go Down in History description: Elon Musk has already earned himself a spot in the pantheon of history’s great innovators, Walter Isaacson writes canonical: https://time.com/6127750/elon-musk-history-innovators/ author: Walter Isaacson article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2021-12-13T13:10:43.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-14T09:17:31.827Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Why Elon Musk Will Go Down in History og:description: Elon Musk has already earned himself a spot in the pantheon of history’s great innovators, Walter Isaacson writes og:url: https://time.com/6127750/elon-musk-history-innovators/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6ceade008aa7226e/698a20918fd2eee3493634d4/person-of-the-year-2021-walter-isaacson-essay.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: person-of-the-year-2021-walter-isaacson-essay og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Why Elon Musk Will Go Down in History twitter:description: Elon Musk has already earned himself a spot in the pantheon of history’s great innovators, Walter Isaacson writes twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6ceade008aa7226e/698a20918fd2eee3493634d4/person-of-the-year-2021-walter-isaacson-essay.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Why Elon Musk Will Go Down in History > Sponsored content. 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A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/newsletters?i=1693f12f-cd80-4182-8d20-4a7d520e4040&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1) ## Video: TIME Person of the Year 2021: Elon Musk [Watch (HLS stream): TIME Person of the Year 2021: Elon Musk](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/mYXITUNy.m3u8) (12:42)  _Published 2021-12-13. Person of the Year is a marker of influence, and few individuals have had more influence than Musk on life on Earth, and potentially life off Earth too. In 2021, Musk emerged not just as the world’s richest person but also as perhaps the richest example of a massive shift in our society._  by [Walter Isaacson](https://time.com/author/walter-isaacson/)  ## Walter Isaacson Dec 13, 2021 1:10 PM UTC Person of the Year is a marker of influence, and few individuals have had more influence than Musk on life on Earth, and potentially life off Earth too. In 2021, Musk emerged not just as the world’s richest person but also as perhaps the richest example of a massive shift in our society.  by [Walter Isaacson](https://time.com/author/walter-isaacson/)  ## Walter Isaacson Dec 13, 2021 1:10 PM UTC [Elon Musk](https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2021-elon-musk/) might be the [most interesting person on the planet](https://time.com/collection/100-most-influential-people-2021/6095970/elon-musk-innovators/). And given his passionate quest (so far surprisingly on track) to make humans into a multiplanetary species, he could someday become the most interesting person in the solar system. O.K., those statements may be hyperbole. But Musk’s ability to turn hyperbole into reality is one of his superpowers. Through his intense focus on driving every problem down to the level of basic physics, he has already earned himself a spot in the pantheon of history’s great innovators. His endeavors are not merely digital concoctions conjured up in a dorm room or garage. They involve devising and manufacturing physical products, such as cars and batteries and rocket ships, like America used to be able to do: Tesla (no, Mr. President, not General Motors) is the primary driving force transporting the world into the age of electric cars. And self-driving ones. Tesla Energy, with its solar roof tiles and battery walls, is heralding an era of decentralized, carbon-free electricity. [SpaceX](https://time.com/tag/spacex/) has enabled the U.S. to launch humans into orbit for the first time since NASA shut down the space shuttle program a decade ago. Starlink has deployed more than 1,800 satellites and is quietly rebuilding the Internet in space. Neuralink is making the next great leap in the storied history of human-machine interfaces by creating implants that can link to the neurons of a brain. The Boring Co. is building tunnels designed to conquer the scourge of traffic. And Starship, the biggest rocket ever built, will someday take us to Mars. Musk’s input-output mechanisms can be unnerving. He displays a [manic wackiness and semicalculated craziness](https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2021-firstname-lastname/) that occasionally skitters, like a too early beta version of Full Self-Driving, across the line between wiliness and weirdness. With ultracapacitor bursts of energy, he is addicted to sparking dramas that he can use for strategic purposes. Having endured psychological and physical violence as a kid in South Africa, he has a greater-than-normal mental ability to calculate risk and emotional ability to tolerate it. As a biographer who has covered the shapers of technological revolutions, I see in Musk many of the traits of earlier innovators. Like Thomas Edison, he knows that vision without execution is hallucination, a weakness that sometimes hobbled the original Tesla, as in Nikola. So he expends 90% of his time on the nuts and bolts (literally) of his products. Like Henry Ford, he understands the importance not only of the products he devises but also the factories that can churn them out. His gigafactories for cars and batteries—in the U.S., Germany and China—are showing that innovative methods for manufacturing a product are even more important than innovative products themselves. Like [Steve Jobs](https://time.com/3462259/steve-jobs-cover/), he is reinventing multiple industries with the strategic use of reality-distortion fields. He questions every assumption in order to drill down to the first principles of physics. Like Bill Gates and [Jeff Bezos](http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2023311%5F2023309%5F2023310,00.html), he has a hardcore intensity that can drive colleagues (and himself) to near madness but also drive them to do things they thought were impossible. And like Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo da Vinci, he has an obsessive but playful curiosity about all of the wonders of nature that helps him see patterns across disparate fields. But more than most other great innovators, Musk is driven by a larger sense of mission. He has a fierce urge to make life on this planet sustainable, turn humans into a spacefaring species, and assure that artificial intelligence will be beneficial rather than malign to us mortals. These goals are audacious, and he may fail. But at the moment, he has become the most important single individual in designing and deploying the innovations that will bring us a few steps closer to each of these aspirations. ## Transcript [00:00] Okay, all right, all good. [00:07] So, which living person do you most admire? [00:11] I admire anyone who is making a positive contribution [00:15] to humanity. [00:17] Whether that is an entertainment or technology or, you know, I think anyone who's sort of [00:24] doing things that are really useful to the rest of humanity is, I admire them greatly. [00:46] You know, it's really hard to escape Elon [00:49] Musk's dominance over so many things in American life, right now. [00:53] He's got this rocket company that is completely dominating the space launch [00:58] business. [00:59] He's got a car company that is completely dominating the electric vehicle market. [01:04] He's got 65 million Twitter followers, and he likes to make weird jokes and set people [01:08] off. [01:09] And sometimes with a single tweet, he can control the stock market or the value of various [01:14] different cryptocurrencies. [01:16] So this is a man who's just sort of become ever present across a lot of different sectors. [01:23] And this was really the year that he came into his own. [01:25] His goal is to make humanity a multi-planet [01:29] species. [01:30] And in a time in which NASA has abdicated its operations to put people in low Earth [01:37] orbit. [01:38] And for the time being, at least, put people on the other worlds, SpaceX has stepped in [01:44] like no other private company before it around the world. [01:47] So Elon Musk's wealth is largely tied up in [01:53] Tesla stock. [01:55] He is the not only the CEO, he is its largest shareholder. [02:02] And Tesla is one of the most valuable companies in the country, its market value is more than [02:09] $1 trillion dollars. [02:11] And his wealth is sort of tied up in that company. [02:15] Tesla has dragged the legacy automators into [02:19] the electric vehicle market. [02:21] Yeah. [02:22] Do companies like Ford, GM, Rivian, Lucid, pose a threat to Tesla's dominance? [02:27] Or do you think you guys have so grasp the market at this point that you are going to own it? [02:32] Well, if [02:33] somebody makes better cars than we do, then, [02:35] and they then sell more cars than we do, I think that's totally fine. [02:39] Our intent with Tesla was always that we would serve as an example, to the car industry and [02:44] that, and hope that they also make electric cars so that we can accelerate the transition [02:50] to sustainable energy. [02:52] I'm confident in the future in Tesla that will do well. [02:55] And I hope some of these other companies do well, too. [02:57] Earlier this year, this Tesla crashed into [03:00] a highway divider in California killing the driver, another slammed into a parked fire truck [03:05] in Utah, both had the autopilot feature on. [03:09] There is a federal investigation underway into the [03:12] autopilot software that Tesla has, which despite the name is not autopilot software, it does [03:18] not drive the car for you. [03:20] And people inside Tesla have expressed a lot of skepticism about whether the company's [03:25] technology is eventually going to be able to get there. [03:29] Are the cars safe? [03:31] I mean, should I feel comfortable getting behind the wheel of a Tesla and saying, drive [03:35] me where I need to go? [03:36] Well, the statistics that I think are at this [03:41] point unequivocal, that you know far more accidents off autopilot than on autopilot. [03:47] So this is not to say that autopilot is perfect. [03:49] Now to get to full self driving where you don't need to pay attention, we still obviously [03:54] have a lot of work to do. [03:55] So as we get to the point where interventions are extremely rare even in complex [03:59] traffic situations, and get to the point where the probability of injury with full self driving [04:05] is much lower than whether human driving. [04:07] Right. [04:08] Then obviously at that point, it would make sense to allow the car to drive itself and not have to pay attention. [04:13] So this year, Elon Musk became the world's richest man ever. [04:18] So we asked him about another pressing global problem, and that is income and wealth inequality. [04:25] When it's time to pay taxes, new reporting [04:28] from ProPublica says the nation's top 25 richest people pay little to nothing at all, [04:34] including Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. [04:37] One of the main criticisms of him is just [04:39] that he's so rich, should any human being be worth $300 billion dollars? [04:47] Yeah, a lot of the push for higher government [04:50] involvements, and expropriation of assets by the government is really pushed by a bunch [04:54] of politicians who are actually saying that resources shouldn't be in control [04:59] of people—of private individuals, they should be in control of the government. [05:05] They're basically saying they want control of the assets. [05:07] I mean, I think in terms of things that people should perhaps get upset about is like, I [05:11] think getting upset about excess consumption is a thing to get upset about. [05:16] But, you know, somebody is just wasting money on personal luxuries in a crazy way. [05:21] You know, I'm like, I'm not, I'm not Warren Buffett's biggest fan, frankly. [05:24] But, you know, he sits there. [05:25] And he reads all these annual reports, which are super boring. [05:28] Does anybody want that job? [05:29] I think most people do. [05:31] No, I don't want that job. [05:33] But like, he's not, he's not like, engaged in like, insane, conspicuous consumption. [05:38] So you have say, like, okay, sure he's got a high net worth, but doesn't— [05:42] he's doing a useful job for the economy, you know, and he's very skilled at it, and should [05:46] probably keep doing it. [05:47] Elon Musk definitely uses Twitter in a way [05:49] that no other business leader does. [05:53] And it's gotten him into a lot of trouble in recent years. [05:55] His twitter feed is juvenile, to say the least [05:58] he has insulted some important people in really immature ways. [06:04] But when a person with 65 million followers and $300 billion dollars, is just having fun, that [06:10] tends to create ripples in the larger pond. [06:13] You are [06:14] not to put too fine a point on it, the richest [06:15] man in the history of the world, and arguably the most influential. [06:21] And yet you tweet freely and playfully and [06:25] mischievously. [06:26] I guess that's—that's accurate. [06:30] So are feuds with policymakers? Or poking Jeff Bezos? [06:33] Is that good for the overall brand? [06:36] Yeah, I don't really think about brand optimization [06:38] to be frank, as lobbyists for my tweets, which are often self inflicted wounds, or humor [06:43] that I find funny, but not necessarily that other many other people find funny, right? [06:47] You know, [06:48] when you say take the red pill, do you worry [06:50] about sending none to— [06:53] I say take both pills. [06:56] But do you worry at all about activating motivating the, you know, political fringe? [07:04] Yeah, actually, when I said take the red pill, I didn't realize that was some like, politically charged phrase— [07:09] Right. [07:10] I'm just referring to "The Matrix". Yeah. [07:15] You know, yeah. [07:16] Like, you know, make sure you accept reality for what it is right? [07:18] And it turns out, it's like, also like some, like, accept right wing dogma thing, or something? [07:22] I don't, I didn't realize that at the time. [07:24] You do have the ability to move markets with [07:27] a tweet, should any one man have that power? [07:30] Well, um, you know, the markets move themselves [07:34] all the time. [07:35] And so, you know, especially Tesla stock has seen some very big changes in value from one [07:40] day to the next based on nothing, as far as I can tell. [07:43] So just statements that I make_ [07:45] are they materially different from random movements of the stock that might happen anyway? [07:51] I don't think so. [07:53] It's not like, you know, stock drops in half or something like that, you know, [07:56] Elon Musk is someone who pursues his goals [07:59] relentlessly. [08:00] And I think that does sometimes make him blind to the potential human toll, the potential [08:05] human cost that, that can create for some of the people who gets sort of ground up in the [08:10] gears of the things he's trying to do. [08:12] You've made statements, downplaying COVID-19, [08:17] you kept your factories open, running at the height of the pandemic. [08:20] Well, [08:21] actually, technically, I think there's a misunderstanding [08:22] there on the on the factories front, [08:24] Tell me about that. [08:25] So other car factories in the United States had started—had restarted. [08:30] Right. [08:31] And we were blocked, only because our car factories in the Bay Area in California. [08:37] So California had actually said, manufacturing can restart. And then Alameda County sided off their own accord that the Tesla could not restart. [08:47] Reopening the factory in Alameda was arguably a poor management choice. [08:52] I think he was aware of the risks that his employees were taking. [08:58] I don't think it was necessarily a fair choice to pressure or invite or ask or instruct employees [09:06] to come back to work. [09:08] Are you vaccinated? [09:09] If I may ask. [09:10] Yeah. I'm very pro-vaccination. [09:13] We've it's the science is unequivocal. [09:14] I treat it to that effect. [09:16] But by the same token, I am against forcing people to be vaccinated. [09:19] You know, I think this is just not something we should do in America. [09:22] I think we should encourage people to be vaccinated, strongly try to convince them to be vaccinated, [09:29] but not force them to be vaccinated or for example, force them to get vaccinated [09:35] or get fired. [09:36] Elon Musk is incredibly influential in the, [09:41] in the cryptocurrency world. [09:44] He's constantly tweeting about his opinions about certain cryptocurrencies versus others. [09:50] He is known as a big proponent of Dogecoin. [09:57] And someone who has in the past taken Tesla's assets and invested those into Bitcoin [10:05] and then sold that Bitcoin at a profit. [10:07] Well, I mean, I could really sort of wax on [10:10] about the nature of money for hours because I played a significant role in creating PayPal. [10:17] And so my understanding of the money system at a fundamental level of how it actually [10:21] works, the detailed mechanics of it is I think there's there very few people that understand it better than [10:26] me. Bitcoin is an interesting example obviously, the prime mover on this, but the transaction [10:32] volume of Bitcoin is low, and the cost per transaction is high, it is at least at [10:39] its base level, suitable for maybe an exchange a store of value, but fundamentally, Bitcoin is [10:46] not a good substitute for transactional currency. [10:53] And even though it was created as a silly joke, Dogecoin is better suited for transactions. [10:59] Why is that? [11:01] The total transaction flow that you can do with Dogecoin is substantially more than, [11:08] like transactions per day, is much higher than—has much higher potential than Bitcoin. [11:13] It is a slightly inflationary but that inflationary number is a fixed number as opposed to a percentage. [11:22] Right. [11:23] So that means over time, its percentage inflation actually decreases. [11:26] And that's actually good because it encourages people to spend and rather than sort of hoard [11:30] it as a store of value. [11:31] I'm going to switch to a personal question [11:36] a little bit if you're okay with that. [11:37] Yeah, sure. [11:38] So what happened with Grimes and do you have a new girlfriend? [11:41] Oh, man. [11:41] Are you seeing someone new? I know here we are with our somewhat different approach. [11:49] Grimes as I said, like 70 separated, you know, like, it's just that her work, [11:57] has her just being in different places a lot versus my work. [12:01] So we, you know, weren't seeing each other that much. [12:04] We're still—we're still good friends. [12:06] And I do not have a new girlfriend or anything. [12:10] Okay, yeah. [12:12] I mean, this place is basically like a technology monastery, you know. [12:17] Technology monastery? [12:19] Yeah. There's hardly any. [12:21] I mean, there's someone here, but not many. [12:23] And it's remote. [12:25] Yeah. [12:26] And we deal to do technology. [12:27] Yes. 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