Time Magazine awards the Person of the Year award to the person who “for better or worse, has most influenced events in the preceding year”. It’s not an award but a title, a remark. Note that both Hitler and Einstein are on this list.

In 2001, Time Magazine named New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani as Person of the Year for his response to the World Trade Center attacks in New York City. But many were expecting Osama bin Laden to get the title instead. From Time’s managing editor Jim Kelly:

“[Osama bin Laden] is not a larger-than-life figure with broad historical sweep … he is smaller than life, a garden-variety terrorist whose evil plan succeeded beyond his highest hopes.”

Today Time Magazine selected Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to be 2010 Person of the Year. Replace “terrorist” with “programmer” and remove “evil” and the same quote basically applies to Zuckerberg.

Time needs to decide whether luck discredits achievement.