Taylor Swift vaulted into rarified air this week when she was named TIME magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year. So of course now that she’s joined a list that includes Gandhi, Jimmy Carter, late pope John Paul II, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Barack Obama, teen climate activist Greta Thunberg and 2022 honoree Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, 2021 POTR Elon Musk had something troll-y to say about it.
The embattled, blustering Tesla/Space X/X boss posted a congratulations to Swift under the singer’s tweet thanking the magazine for the honor on Thursday (Dec. 7). But, Musk being Musk, he also added a jokey warning to the global pop superstar about the risk/reward factor of the TIME title.
“Some risk of popularity decline after this award, I speak from experience lol,” Musk tweeted.
To be fair, Swift is coming off the first run of her record-shattering Eras Tour, followed by her box office record-breaking Eras Tour film and months of breathless press about her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.
Things were a bit different when richest man in the world Musk took home the TIME honor in 2021 for what the magazine said was his aptitude for “solving the globe’s most intractable challenges” and “driving society’s most daring and disruptive transformations” through his category-leading electric car company Tesla and rocket company Space X.
Unlike Swift, however, Musk has had a mostly annus horribilis so far in 2023, which included his co-sign of an antisemitic tweet on his X platform (which he later walked back and apologized for), his boosting of the bonkers, repeatedly discredited Pizzagate conspiracy and his recent profane suggestion to the flood of major companies pulling advertising off of the listing X platform to “go f–k yourself.”
At press time it did not appear that Swift had responded to Musk’s tweet.
See Musk’s tweet below.
