Elon Musk is sweeping the Person of the Year awards: The Financial Times named Tesla’s Elon Musk its person of the year for 2021 today, just a few days after Time Magazine announced that Musk would be awarded the same accolade. While one person-of-the-year award could be a fluke, two suggests a pattern. Leading us to ponder: could it be that Musk really is as special as he thinks he is?

Musk has undoubtedly had a big year, becoming the world’s richest person as the US stock market boom saw Tesla’s valuation pass USD 1 tn. And while he reportedly works a 90-hr week between Tesla and his beyond-Earth endeavors at SpaceX, the b’naire still found time — primarily while perched on his “porcelain throne” — to play havoc with the crypto markets, pick fights with US regulators on taxes, and suggest that creating a big family (Musk has seven children) is a civic duty because “Mars has a great need for people, seeing as population is currently zero.”

Critics lashed out at the choice: Musk tends to inspire rage, mirth and adulation in equal measure—and the Time announcement was followed by a swift and inevitable backlash. Critics took to social media to highlight Musk’s many flaws, with some saying the magazine had made its “worst choice ever” given Musk’s sub-optimal attitude to tax, opposition to unions and minimization of the pandemic.

But Twitter shenanigans aside, just how revolutionary is Tesla? Musk is easy to mock. But the Time award aims to identify “the person who had the most influence on the events of the year, for good or for ill.” This was the year that saw Tesla vindicated in its dogged insistence that EVs are commercially viable, as every automaker and their mother piled into the market with announcements on their all-electric futures. Plenty of Musk-followers argue that no other b’naire can rival Musk for manufacturing intelligence — but more than that, Musk possesses a single-mindedness that has seen the car company build a serious, revenue-generating market for electric vehicles, surviving a decade of naysaying from traditional carmakers before they were forced to concede. Now the shift to EVs, spearheaded by Musk, is set to impact global transport and climate for generations to come — and that, the FT says, is what makes him 2021’s biggest fish.

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Climate tech investments are booming: Global investment in climate tech grew 210% y-o-y to USD 87.5 bn in the 12 months ending in June, according to PwC’s State of Climate Tech 2021 report. Innovative funding mechanisms including SPACs drew new inflows to climate tech, the report says, as investors looked to deploy dry powder stored up from the year before.

Around USD 0.14 of every USD 1 of VC funding went towards climate tech in 2H2020 and 1H2021, according to the report. Meanwhile, the average ticket price for each investment almost quadrupled on a yearly basis, hitting USD 96 mn in the first half of 2021. New investors also rushed into the field, rising to number 1.6k in 1H2021, compared with less than 900 in the first half of 2020. The report defines climate tech as anything that directly mitigates or removes emissions, helps people adapt to the impacts of climate change, or enhances our understanding of the climate, according to PwC.

There’s a big ‘but’: investments aren’t going to the places where they would have the most impact. Of the 15 types of climate tech covered by the report, the top five — solar power, wind power, food waste technology, green hydrogen production, and alternative foods — are the world’s biggest hope for reducing climate risk, representing over 80% of future emissions reduction potential, according to PwC. But those sectors only received only 25% of climate tech investments between 2013 and 2021. Meanwhile, the flashier and more lucrative mobility and transportation sector received the lion’s share of funding at USD 58 bn.

In other words: enough with the electric vehicles, flying taxis, and e-scooters. The report calls on VCs and policymakers to “better channel and incentivize investment in technology areas that have the greatest future emissions reduction potential,” giving us pause for yet another rethink on the whole just-how-great-is-Elon-Musk debate.