He wants you to think that you can’t hurt him by calling him greedy when things like this suit him. In his public life, he has hidden himself inside a warm little façade for his extravagant, endless pursuit of big fortune. He revealed all this as recently as November 3 in a tweet, but he’s been pretty consistent about it over the years.
The excuse is as follows: Human consciousness is good, but it will disappear completely if all life on Earth ceases to exist. The Earth is a finite resource and will eventually become uninhabitable or be destroyed. There’s no way to avoid it, so it’s imperative that humanity finds a way to survive without Earth – first by colonizing Mars, and then using that move as a way to expand into other solar systems. He needs as much money as possible to get to Mars, so, if you’re flabbergasted, becoming as rich as possible is actually heroic and Elon Musk is our savior.
All this is not wrong. Earth is in danger of disasters, and even if we survive them, our planet will only exist for a limited time, after which it will be swallowed by our Sun’s expansion when it runs out of fuel at its core and will become a red dwarf. There are two common ways to ignore this information: a) Armageddon or some similar religious or spiritual event will have ended our troubles by then, or b) In fact, human extinction is goodIf you don’t agree with either of these ideas, Elon Musk may think he has a good point,
However, Elon Musk doesn’t have any good stuff. And he is, by any reasonable standard, nothing more than a greedy rich man.
The idea that the Earth is headed towards imminent destruction is wrong. As has been endlessly explained elsewhere, climate change will not make our species extinct. It’s going to make life harder and worse here. The harsh truth is that there is no escape. We will have to endure terrible disasters and spend generations trying to repair the damage we have done.
But when you zoom out past short-term blips that Elon Musk pretends to care about, like declining fertility, you’ll actually start to feel quite hopeful. For most of our species’ existence on Earth, we competed with predators who were trying to eat us and steal our food, and we succeeded. Yes, we’re all currently addicted to scrolling on our phones, but that doesn’t change the fact that we are made to survive, and we’ll do it on cold Earth or hot Earth, with or without Teslas and satellite internet, until, say, the atmosphere becomes breathable in about a billion years, and, hell, maybe even longer than that.
All this means that in the long term, the project of sending combustion-powered fuel tubes to the nearest planet to our solar system is a very foolish plan for saving our species. There’s no rush to get off Earth, and anyway, we don’t currently know what to do about the fact that Mars colonists will be irradiated, and unable to grow food in the local soil. You and I have the same Google as Elon Musk, so it’s not like he doesn’t know about these problems.
But he almost certainly knows that his fantasies are becoming out of reach within his lifetime. He will advance 60 years before the point at which he himself says he will eventually launch a crewed mission in some of his recent predictions. By the time he claims there will be a self-sustaining city on Mars, he will be between 73 and 83. And in recent months the fantasy has gotten even weirder. Now he wants to carve his own AI-written encyclopedia into stone and distribute it to Mars and elsewhere in space.
I can only guess that Musk is faltering. The fact that he will never see the construction of a Mars colony dawns on him. Maybe if he really hurry, he can throw some corpses on the dead, red rock of Mars – which he admits is part of his plan – before he himself drops dead on top of his huge cash pile.
Humanity will continue without him. His time will be over, and the species he dreams of saving will no longer need him. The current era of cartoonish inequality between rich and poor will end. Our species will endure the storms and arrows of life on our imperfect planet, and if we’re lucky, perhaps there will come a day in the future when we can comfortably take a craft of some unknown type to another star and establish a colony there. Perhaps the people of that colony will read a book in which Elon Musk is mentioned after Croesus and Mansa Musa in the list of rich people, when there used to be rich people.
Anyway, Musk has been fighting a legal battle for years to save the $56 billion Tesla pay package that propelled him to super-billionaire status in the first place. Last year, a court agreed with some shareholders who felt that Musk’s control over Tesla raised questions about the fairness of the pay package, and that package was rejected. Well, he just won his appeal, and since the value of the package has increased over the years, he’s left with another $139 billion worth of wealth. good for him.
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