Taylor Swift as Time's Person of the Year? How about Bitcoin?
The great Time magazine editorial tradition has come and gone—and so has corporate and billionaire-owned 'media.'
Vanity doesn’t pay
A perfect symbol of the decline in Corporate Media just might be Time magazine’s cover naming newly minted billionaire pop star Taylor Swift as its annual ‘Person of the Year.’
Time was bought for $190 million in cash by Salesforce founder and Godfather of cloud computing apps, Marc Benioff, in 2018, whom we have known since he was slinging enterprise apps at Oracle. We like to tease Marc that he not only wants to keep up with the Joneses but likes to surpass them. Marc built his gigantic penis of a headquarters that awkwardly protrudes through the San Francisco downtown skyline (sorry, but that’s what it looks like) to outmatch his old boss Larry Ellison’s sleek and modern Oracle headquarter designs—including the company's impeccable new campus in Austin. Another one of the Joneses is Jeff Bezos, who bought the once-storied newspaper and now-dying Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million in 2013. So, of course, Marc had to follow and buy Time.
The billionaire boys both bought their respective media franchises when they were in free fall and were thinking at the time that they were getting such a deal! Only to find out the properties would keep falling and not end up being such a deal after all.
Several media giants, including The New Yorker, The Messenger, and Mr. Bezos’s Washington Post ( in the midst of an employee rebellion), are poised to lay off staffers in droves this holiday season. To say all the old media brands are a mere shadow of their glorious past would be an overstatement.
Now, back to Tay (pet name for Ms. Swift by her new beau, Kansas City tight end Travis ‘Trav’ Kelce). While we lean towards Rihanna in our musical tastes, we still love Tay. Any modern artist who writes and sings her own songs and plays the banjo, amongst many other instruments, is our kinda gal, too.
The entrepreneurial capitalist in us also admires the fact the 33-year-old has parlayed her talent into a blockbuster year with her Eras Tour selling a whopping $1.04 billion in tickets thus far (4.35 million of them!) across 60 dates while also raking in another $200 million in merch sales. To top it all off, her film adaptation of the tour, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, has earned $250 million in sales, making it the highest-grossing concert film of all time 🌟. Good on you, Tay—incredibly impressive and well deserved.
“Thanks to the record-breaking success of the Eras tour, Swift became a billionaire in October — making her the rare recording artist to achieve ten-figure status, joining the likes of Jay-Z (net worth: $2.5 billion) and Rihanna ($1.4 billion).’
—Forbes, October 2023
However, journalistically, 100 or 200 years from now, are historians really going to look back to Ms. Swift as someone who met the old Time magazine editorial standard of ‘the greatest influence for good or evil’ of the year?
We see it as all part of the celebrity-seeking Mr. Benioff stretching to be cool—a tough job for an enterprise app sales guy. Time’s last attempt at the same trick was profiling Harry and Meegan as part of the top 100 in their 2021 issue. Are the renegade royals truly ‘impact’ players spreading good or more akin to the caricatures portrayed in the epoch South Park episode last February?
Interestingly, Time’s 2021 cover boy, Tesla founder Elon Musk, Xed out a warning to Tay after her selection was announced. ‘Some risk of popularity decline after this award. I speak from experience, lol.’ There is truth in what Elon says, as schadenfreude is clearly one of America’s favorite hobbies. We love to build ‘em up and then tear ‘em down.
Time’s ‘Machine of the Year’—1982
Back when Time magazine was Time magazine, the editors made the bold but since proven brilliant choice of the PC as their ‘Machine of the Year.’
“Time's ‘Man of the Year’ for 1982—the greatest influence for good or evil—is not a man at all. It is a machine: the computer.’
—Time editors, in the 1982 cover story.
Time was so prestigious in those days that for most folks in the US, the 1982 cover marked the official beginning of the personal computer age. It also marked the first time that the editors selected a non-human recipient for the award since they started naming the top Lovers of Peace and War in 1927—with the planet Earth being the second time later in 1988.
A sub-drama caused by Time’s choice in 1982 was that it hurt the feelings of one of the machine’s inventors. Right up to publication, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs believed that he was being profiled to be the Man of the Year in 1982, only to find that Time instead ran a harsh portrait of the then 27-year-old and chose to honor the personal computer as ‘Machine of the Year.’
Jobs’ Story
‘Time decided they were going to make me Man of the Year, and I was 27, so I actually cared about stuff like that. I thought it was pretty cool. They sent out journalist Mike Moritz [now the second richest venture capitalist on the Forbes 400 with $6B] to write a story. We’re the same age, and I had been very successful. I could tell he was jealous, and there was an edge to him. He wrote this terrible hatchet job. So the editors in New York get this story and say, ‘We can’t make this guy Man of the Year.’ That really hurt. But it was a good lesson. It taught me to never get too excited about things like that since the media is a circus anyway. They FedExed me the magazine, and I remember opening the package, thoroughly expecting to see my mug on the cover, and it was this computer sculpture thing. I thought, ‘Huh?’ And then I read the article, and it was so awful that I actually cried.’
—Steve Jobs retelling his story to his biographer and former Time editor Walter Isaacson.
If the PC, why not Bitcoin?
Since 1982, billions of PCs have been sold all over the world, and you would have to add the billions in smartphone sales as part of the impact of the original machine. Last time we checked, The Beatles are still at the top of the list for best-selling artists worldwide, with 600 million claimed sales, with Tay huffing and puffing in pursuit of the Fab Four with 114 million sales.
Bitcoin is not quite The Beatles, but at 420 million current holders, it's still almost 4x Tay’s record sales. (Although it should be noted that the top 1% of Bitcoin addresses hold over 90% of the total Bitcoin supply). Its market cap today is $865 billion. Bitcoin has also been the best investment, bar none, over the last decade. A $1 investment in BTC since December 2013 would be worth $32.88 today, with a total return of 3187.99% (41.81% annualized).
With all these highly prosperous things being said, the biggest reason Bitcoin belongs on the cover of Time is it represents a highly disruptive challenge to the standing of the US dollar and potentially the World Order.
There is a growing contingency of sensible people all over the planet who believe that Bitcoin should replace the US Dollar as the global reserve currency because BTC is time and entropy-based, has a limited supply, operates on decentralized blockchain technology, and is, therefore, more secure and independent of governmental control.
Our view is we would like to see the USD compete with Bitcoin by offering a digital USD and return to the gold standard (even if just a sliver) to compete with the time-based created Bitcoin and put a USD in every crypto wallet on the planet before China does. There is a lot of dinero and currency value-building-power in banking the unbanked. Everyone can and will win.
The bottom line is the $300 trillion tower of global debt [$37,500 per person in the world—$33 trillion of it from the US] is beginning to teeter. The only savior in sight is the creativity in crypto that is preparing a new financial system for the moment the fiat currency pinata bursts at last. Bitcoin is the Godfather of this movement, serving just as much as a symbol of change as it is a new currency that could very well replace the USD as the global currency standard. This is why this year’s Time cover should have been ‘Bitcoin—Currency of the Year.’
Epilogue
Corporate and single-billionaire-owned media properties will all fade away no matter what because the old media model no longer works, and they have lost trust by not maintaining the independent journalistic standards we used to depend on to keep all powers in check. Instead, corporate media peddles gossip, chases celebrities, and acts like glorified activist organizations that blatantly censor content and cancel commentators so as to have their political way.
Maybe the fact that Time magazine didn’t choose a pop star for their annual cover in the previous 94 years was for a reason. Maybe Time’s old editorial principle of choosing ‘the greatest influence for good or evil’ was the proper ‘Person of the Year’ standard and offered the most valuable perspective for their readers. Maybe it doesn’t matter anyway because we no longer trust centrally controlled ‘media,’ and that is not going to change.
Ms. Taylor Swift
In her own right, Ms. Taylor Swift is a force of nature. Our intentions here are not to pull a Kanye West and storm the stage. We are happy to celebrate a small-town girl with oversized talent who is lighting up the world—and she still has another year of shows on her Eras Tour. We picked a video to honor Ms. Swift, where she tells her story of an aspiring songwriter and sings a song that will bring a tear to your eye in a way that Bitcoin never will. (Unless you bought it for $67K in November 2021 😭.)
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What’s even weirder is Vladimir Putin being on the shortlist for person of the year.