PEOPLE
Billionaire businessman Elon Musk is Time magazine’s 2021 Person of the Year.
The rocket-building, “Saturday Night Live” hosting, hybrid car-making, stock market-bending 50-year-old South African-born eccentric was bestowed that distinction Monday.
“A few short years ago, Musk was roundly mocked as a crazy con artist on the verge of going broke,” Time wrote about Musk. “Now this shy South African with Asperger’s syndrome, who escaped a brutal childhood and overcame personal tragedy, bends governments and industry to the force of his ambition.”
Time first gave its annual recognition to aviator Charles Lindbergh in 1927. The publication says that its aim in choosing a Person of the Year is to recognize individuals who influenced the world for better or worse. Past recipients run the gamut, from Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler to Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.
Billionaire businessman and fellow space traveler Jeff Bezos — who Forbes ranks second only to Musk on its list of the world’s richest individuals — was given Time’s distinction in 1999. An online poll of Time magazine readers named Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro the 2021 Person of the Year.
———
Kim Kardashian West has passed California’s “baby bar” exam, and she is really proud of herself.
“For anyone who doesn’t know my law school journey, know this wasn’t easy or handed to me,” the beauty mogul and prison-reform activist wrote Monday on Instagram. “I failed this exam 3 times in 2 years, but I got back up each time and studied harder and tried again until I did it!!! (I did have COVID on the 3rd try w a 104 fever but I’m not making excuses.)”
The reality TV star and entrepreneur included photos of herself at home in a plunging royal blue bodysuit with a sweeping train over the pants and heels.
Kardashian West is studying law without one big traditional step: attending law school. That means that she, like others who study in programs and schools that aren’t accredited by the State Bar of California, has to take two exams to earn her credentials — the so-called baby bar, plus the bar exam that all aspirants must pass to become attorneys.
Kardashian West said she was told by “top lawyers” that her path was “a close to impossible journey,” but noted that it was her only option. She decided to pursue law in 2018 and revealed her decision in early 2019.
At the time, she was among those lobbying for the release of Alice Marie Johnson, who later became a model for her Skims shapewear line. In that process, she told Vogue, she realized she was in over her head with regard to the law.
Before the pandemic hit, Kardashian West had been hoping to take California’s official bar exam in 2022. No word on whether that plan has changed.
“I know my dad would be so proud and he would actually be so shocked to know that this is my path now but he would have been my best study partner,” Kardashian continued on Instagram, referring to her late father, Robert Kardashian, an attorney who represented O.J. Simpson.
Kardashian apparently filed Friday to separate her and Kanye West’s financial issues from their divorce, according to TMZ, and asked the court to declare her an unmarried woman before those issues are settled.
She also reportedly asked to drop the “West” from her name and return to her maiden name, Kim Kardashian.
By Tribune News Service
