Not everyone is thrilled by Time’s choice for “Person of the Year,” but it’s hard to deny that 2021 has really been Elon Musk’s year.

Let’s run through the highlights trib.al/g4CfsgL
.@elonmusk is now, on paper at least, the richest person in the world, gaining more wealth in 2021 than Berkshire Hathaway made in revenue trib.al/ju1uIo0 bar chart of net worth of richest people in the world
@elonmusk In fact, although Berkshire Hathaway delivers America’s best profits, Tesla’s market cap is way bigger than Berkshire’s. Make sense?

Maybe not in a traditional sense, but this is Elon Musk’s financial market now trib.al/ju1uIo0
@elonmusk To be fair to Tesla, it’s having a good year:

🚗It’s become consistently profitable
🔋Delivered decent gross margins
🔌Its Q3 earnings were described as “normcore” trib.al/ju1uIo0
@elonmusk Tesla has even coped mostly pretty well with the supply-chain issues that have tripped up other manufacturers.

It’s only now that the company is having issues getting hold of raw materials to manufacture EV batteries in the U.S. trib.al/ju1uIo0
@elonmusk Meanwhile, SpaceX has dominated commercial space launches this year. The cost per seat is an absolute bargain:

🚀Apollo program: $390 million (when adjusted for inflation)
🚀Space Shuttle: $170 million
🚀SpaceX Crew Dragon: $55 million trib.al/ju1uIo0
@elonmusk If there’s one thing that Musk is destined to be known for, it’s his tweets – he’s sent about 3,000 this year.

🚽He says half are written on the toilet. It sort of checks out: All but 15 were sent from an iPhone, and when else would a busy CEO get time? trib.al/ju1uIo0
@elonmusk Many of Musk’s tweets are random musings, memes or updates on his companies. But sometimes they control the market.

For example, he only had to tweet about getting Floki, a Shiba Inu puppy, for $SHIB to soar in value trib.al/ju1uIo0
@elonmusk He even used Twitter this year to make a financial decision, asking whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock.

It was weird, but he did tell everyone what he’d do in advance even though he didn’t have to. Maybe other CEOs should follow his lead trib.al/ju1uIo0
@elonmusk There are some things happening at Tesla that might need some attention:

Six women are suing over sexual harassment at a Tesla’s Fremont factory and an employee has been arrested for the murder of another employee in the parking lot of that same factory trib.al/ju1uIo0
@elonmusk As Musk closes out the year, it’s nice to look back on what could have been, and how sad he’d be if he’d taken Tesla private in 2018.

Public markets have been extremely generous to Tesla and without them, he wouldn’t be the richest man in the world trib.al/ju1uIo0
@elonmusk We spent a lot of time this year pondering the existence of Elon Musk, his Twitter account and his influence over markets.

@TimOBrien chats about the Tesla CEO’s crazy year with @anjani_trivedi and @liamdenning on @TwitterSpaces. Listen in: twitter.com/i/spaces/1yNGa…

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More from @bopinion

19 Dec
🏠 The housing market is surging again.

But why is it upshifting during what should be the slowest time of the year? One answer is rising prices in the rental market trib.al/EJ4bwO9
Leases that are coming up for renewal now were signed at the end of 2020, before rents exploded higher.

That's renewing interest in home buying, which is essentially pulling the 2022 spring home buying season forward by several months trib.al/svEWcoh A picture of many houses lined up
If there's a silver lining for renters, it's that the cycle might relieve some of the upward pressure on rents that we've seen for most of 2021 trib.al/svEWcoh
Read 9 tweets
18 Dec
The enduring debate in the crypto community is whether Bitcoin will outperform “altcoins,” which are generally defined as digital currencies other than Bitcoin, such as:

🪙Ethereum
🪙Solana
🪙Cardano
🪙Polkadot
trib.al/Lm8n25y
It’s true that Bitcoin is perfectly decentralized and the number of coins that can be in existence is limited.

But the real question is whether crypto investors necessarily need a true store of value, or whether there is space for multiple blockchains trib.al/Lm8n25y Image
Consider that 2,000 years ago the financial system consisted mainly of gold.

🚫There were no stocks
🚫Bonds didn’t exist
🚫Loans were informal trib.al/Lm8n25y Image
Read 14 tweets
16 Dec
The change of expert opinion was sudden.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School now say the omicron variant, not delta, is likely fueling the current surge in Covid-19 cases in the northeastern U.S. trib.al/O49sJhb
That’s cause for alarm, because researchers still don’t know much about the variant, and it’s unclear how well vaccines will protect people.

Harvard’s labs are optimized for speed but omicron is spreading faster than they can track it trib.al/O49sJhb Man walks in holiday market with mask on.
“I think we are in the omicron surge,” Bronwyn MacInnis, director of pathogen genomic surveillance at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard said.

“There’s no system on the planet that could keep up with the pace of this doubling time” trib.al/O49sJhb Tracking Covid-19: 736,191 new cases reported worldwide as o
Read 14 tweets
15 Dec
Mark Zuckerberg has bet the future of his company on the “metaverse” becoming the place where we’ll connect with family and friends.

But what’s it actually like socializing in virtual reality? @parmy found out trib.al/ioKkM1R
@parmy Over two weeks, @parmy mingled with people at an array of virtual locations including a:

🎶Concert
⛪️Church service
🎙Conference
⏲Speed-dating event

Connecting with people in VR is fun and exciting, but it’s also intense, tiring and often awkward
trib.al/hyto7jH selfie of parmy's female avatar in horizon venues at a conce
@parmy Meta's VR platform Horizon Worlds just opened to adults in the U.S. & Canada. But its precursor, Horizon Venues, was full of kids.

Zuckerberg could face the same social media challenges, like barring kids and policing harassment, in the metaverse, too trib.al/hyto7jH
Read 14 tweets
14 Dec
The outmoded licensing regime in India needs to be brought up to date with digitization trends in the broader economy, writes @andymukherjee70 trib.al/BchfEYF
No deposit-taking institution in the world is trusted more by savers and enjoys a bigger cachet with investors than HDFC Bank.

This has made India’s most valuable lender so lethargic that it had to be banned from issuing new credit cards for eight months trib.al/PNtzgBM A picture of an HDFC Bank b...
Bank licenses are permits to make money out of thin air.

The prospect of sharing the privilege with a new breed of digital rivals will be more effective at keeping HDFC Bank and other traditional financiers on their toes trib.al/PNtzgBM
Read 9 tweets
13 Dec
If you’re a smoker who wants to indulge your habit while gazing over the mountains of the South Pacific, you’d do well to move fast.

New Zealand announced plans to become the first nation in the world to ban tobacco trib.al/SI0pMMR
Prohibition won’t happen overnight. New Zealand will raise the legal smoking age each year, so that people born after 2008 will never be allowed to puff.

That will eventually mean that tobacco smoking may start disappearing from one corner of the planet trib.al/eeRy24P A picture of a hand holding...
The tobacco ban in New Zealand may be a taste of things to come.

🇳🇱 The Netherlands will ban supermarket sales of tobacco starting in 2024
🇺🇸 One in four Americans supported a total smoking ban in a 2018 survey trib.al/eeRy24P
Read 10 tweets

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