Maybe this is why Time moved its POTY presentation from network TV to YouTube. Normally, one wouldn’t expect the increasingly woke magazine to honor someone who spends his days ridiculing Bernie Sanders on Twitter, especially a “zillionaire” who refuses to apologize for his wealth. And yet …

Elon Musk (@elonmusk) is TIME's 2021 Person of the Year #TIMEPOY https://t.co/8Y5BhIldNs pic.twitter.com/B6h6rndjIh

— TIME (@TIME) December 13, 2021

The magazine and media brand selected Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and CEO of electric car marker Tesla and rocket company SpaceX as its Person of the Year.

In his editor’s letter explaining the decision, Time editor-in-chief and CEOEdward Felsenthal writes, “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.”

2021 also marks an expansion of the Person of the Year brand for Time. In addition to its main honoree, Time also announced an Entertainer of the Year, and Athlete of the Year, and Heroes of the Year. The Entertainer of the Year was singer-songwriter Olivia Rodrigo, the Athlete of the Year was gymnast Simone Biles, and the Heroes of the Year were “Vaccine scientists and the miracle of mRNA.”

Musk’s achievements certainly merit consideration for Time’s award, although Jeff Bezos has kept pace with Musk’s work in space this year. Both men (and Richard Branson of Virgin) have recast aerospace as a private-sector venture, a transition sorely needed from decades of public-sector stagnation and neglect. We’re not getting Americans in space thanks to NASA these days, which seems much more focused on wokery than spacery.

The presence of these alternatives to highlight the revolution in access to space makes Time’s choice of Musk even more intriguing. They do note that Musk is the least apologetic and politically correct multibillionaire this side of Donald Trump, albeit nearly at the end of their lengthy profile:

Musk has disavowed terrestrial political affiliations and maintained good relations with politicians of both parties, including Presidents Obama and Trump, though he quit the latter’s business council after only a few months over the decision to pull out of the Paris climate accords. Of President Joe Biden, he says, “I don’t think he’s doing an amazing job, but I don’t know—it’s hard to tell.” He has an ardent following in some of the nastier precincts of the far right, but Musk claims that when he tweeted “Take the red pill” last year, he had no idea that “red-pilling” was a right-wing dog whistle: “I was just referring to The Matrix,” the movie from which the meme derives.

Unlike some techno-libertarians, Musk doesn’t anticipate a grim future of competition for resources in which only the naturally gifted prevail. But he rejects the idea that the size of his fortune constitutes a policy problem in and of itself, or that he is morally obligated to pay some share of it in taxes. A recent ProPublica investigation found that Musk and many others in his tax bracket paid no individual federal taxes as recently as 2018 because they had no income, only assets. In October, Senate Democrats considered imposing a “billionaires’ tax” on wealth. When Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon tweeted in support of it, Musk responded with a vulgar insult of Wyden’s appearance in his profile photo.

When the topic of government comes up in TIME’s interview, Musk briefly amuses himself by humming rapper Warren G’s ’90s hip-hop hit “Regulate.” “They’re basically saying they want control of the assets,” he says. “This does not result in, actually, the good of the people. 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.”

Well. yeah. Furthermore, the ProPublica complaint essentially boiled down to a gripe that multibillionaires can afford tax attorneys. There wasn’t any legal wrongdoing uncovered in their “exposé,” except perhaps the leaking of tax returns to their reporters, which is a criminal act.

Given all of those leftist headwinds against Musk, Time actually took a risk this year. They could have named Anthony Fauci their POTY, Jazz quipped to me this morning, and basked in the adulation of progressives the rest of the day. However, Time really did miss the mark here, and it has nothing to do with politics or economics. They chose vaccine researchers as their “heroes of the year,” a new category that appears to be a consolation prize for POTY finalists. Given how many lives the COVID-19 vaccines will save — and have already saved this year — and how quickly those vaccines got developed, the impact of these scientists has already outstripped Musk’s, at least in 2021.