Yesterday, with one slam of the gavel, Elon Musk is about 14 percent closer to becoming a trillionaire.
He wants you to think that you won’t hurt him by calling him greedy if things like this go his way. In his public life, he has confined himself within the warm pretext of his pursuit of greater wealth in an extraordinary, unrelenting manner. He just laid it all out in a tweet on November 3rd, but he’s been adamant about this for years.
The excuse goes like this: human consciousness is good, but it would die completely if all living things on Earth were wiped out. Earth is a limited resource and will eventually be uninhabitable or destroyed. There is no way to avoid this, so it is imperative that humanity finds a way to persist outside of Earth—first by colonizing Mars, and then using that step as a way to expand into other solar systems. He needs as much money as possible to get to Mars, so, if you squint, getting as rich as possible is actually heroic and Elon Musk is our savior.
This is not all bad. There are disasters threatening the Earth, and even if we survive them, our planet will only exist for a limited time, after which it will be swallowed by the expansion of our sun as it runs out of fuel in its core and turns red. There are two common ways to remove this information: a) Armageddon or a similar religious or spiritual event will have ended our problems by then, or b) Actually, extinction is good. If you don’t subscribe to one of these ideas, then Elon Musk may seem like he has a good point.
Elon Musk doesn’t have a good point, though. And he remains, by any reasonable standard, nothing but a greedy rich boy.
The idea that the Earth is about to be destroyed is lost. As has been pointed out endlessly elsewhere, climate change will not wipe out our species. It will make life here very difficult. The hard truth is that there is no escape. We must endure terrible tragedies and try, from generation to generation, to repair the damage we have done.
But if you put aside the short-term blips that Elon Musk pretends to care about, like declining fertility, you’ll actually start to feel more optimistic. With our multi-species life on Earth, we competed with predators that tried to eat us and steal our food, and we pulled away. Yes, at the moment we are all addicted to scrolling on our phones, but that does not change the fact that we are built to survive, and we will do it on a cold Earth or a hot Earth, or without Teslas and satellite internet, until, say, the universe does not breathe in about a billion years, and, hell, maybe longer than that.
All of which means that in the long run, a project to send fuel tubes with burning energy to our nearest planet in our solar system is a great plan to save our species. There is no hurry to get down to Earth, and anyway, we don’t know yet what to do about the fact that the Mars colonies will be irradiated, and they can 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 probably knows that his dreams are getting more and more out of reach in his lifetime. He will be pushing 60 before the point where he himself has said he will eventually introduce a labor force in some of his latest predictions. He will be somewhere in the range of 73 to 83 by the time he says there will be a self-sustaining city on Mars. And in recent months the fantasy has gotten weirder still. Now he wants to put his AI-written encyclopedia in stone and spread it to Mars and other places in space.
I can only guess that Musk is fired up. The fact that he will never see the creation of a Mars colony dawns on him. Maybe if he’s really quick, he can tie a few bodies to the dead, red rock that is Mars—something he admits is part of his plan—before he himself drops dead on top of his pile of money.
Humanity will continue without him. His time will come to an end, and the species he dreams of saving will not need him. The current era of cartoon inequality between rich and poor will end. Our species will endure the slings and arrows of life on our imperfect planet, and if we’re lucky, maybe the day will come in the future when we can comfortably fly some alien craft to another star and set up a colony there. Maybe people in that colony will read a book about Elon Musk after Croesus and Mansa Musa in the list of rich boys, back when there were rich people.
Still, Musk has been fighting a legal battle for years to save the $56 billion Tesla package that propelled him to billionaire status in the first place. Last year, the court agreed with some shareholders who felt that Musk’s management of Tesla questioned the fairness of the pay package, and that package was thrown out. Well, he just won his bid, and as the package has increased in value over the years, he just became $139 billion richer. Good for him.
