On Monday, TIME magazine offered up a preview of its upcoming “Person of the Year” issue. Since the Meredith Corporation took control of the magazine, the cover has been graced by capital-J Journalists—including the assassinated Jamal Khashoggi—environmental activist Greta Thunberg, and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris honored with this distinction. 

This year, Elon Musk, a man reportedly worth more than $300 billion dollars—almost all of which was gained during the pandemic—is the magazine’s “Person of the Year.” 

For at least the last six years, as Musk was briskly rising into the top-two richest people slots alongside Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, he has paid somewhere around 3.27% in true taxes. That’s about .00327 cents on every one of his billions of dollars. Since 2018, as his wealth has skyrocketed Musk has probably not paid anything in income tax. In October, Musk’s Tesla was ordered to pay out nearly $137 million to a Black employee who sued the company for cartoonishly racial discrimination. Musk’s proclivity to reveal how utterly pedestrian a mind he has by tweeting out his unremarkable and predictable thoughts from time to time has led to embarrassing public relations issues—like Tesla being found guilty of union-busting by the National Labor Relations Board. 

And while most people with sociopathic levels of wealth and power will at least donate some of their money—even organized crime bosses hand out turkeys at Thanksgiving, after all—Elon Musk is somehow estimated to have given less of his yearly wealth away than my mother, on a fixed income, gives to the New York Public Library. 

Out-of-touch billionaires are nothing new, although there are now more of them than ever. As most Americans continue to feel the squeeze and financial devastation of our broken economic system under the duress of a global pandemic, Elon Musk’s callous disregard for the struggles of people everywhere is only remarkable because TIME Magazine’s chose to put him on their cover.

According to the Boston Globe, the TIME article defends its choice of Musk, writing: “Few individuals have had more influence than Musk on life on Earth, and potentially life off Earth, too. He sees his mission as solving the globe’s most intractable challenges, along the way disrupting multiple industries.” At this point, anyone writing about how a billionaire “disrupted” anything has arguably the most shallow take on everything.

Musk made money from a software company he created, and then got into early digital money transferring, which made him super-wealthy, at which point he invested in Tesla, Inc. Musk did not come up with the idea; he simply showed up with lots of money. The “disruption” was having the capital and willingness to invest in a cleaner kind of car. 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren responded to the announcement by writing, “Let’s change the rigged tax code so The Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else.”

Campaign Action

Just days before this announcement by TIME, Musk spoke to The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Summit to tell them he wanted to burn the electric vehicle subsidies that created his astronomical wealth in the first place. This is the man whose outrageous wealth was funded, in no small part by literal billions of dollars in government subsidies. He said this because, like any true “libertarian,” Musk is a self-absorbed hypocrite who only believes in a government that works for Elon Musk, and Elon Musk alone.

The high level of hypocrisy of a registered GOP official engaged in a dick-measuring space race launches Musk into comic-book villain territory. He, like all billionaires, is proof of how much of a failure our current economic and government system is for the overwhelming majority of human beings.

Responses to TIME Magazine’s announcement centered what Elon Musk and his wealth really represent to most Americans.

But TIME is owned by fellow “disruptor,” Marc Benioff, and highlighting people like himself is definitely more important than reminding people that they create all the wealth Benioff and Musk hoard.

But Musk sees the future—and not simply a future biased toward his self-interest.