He Got a Bunch of Money Again

Yesterday, with a single slam of a gavel, Elon Musk got almost 14 percent closer to being a trillionaire.

He wants you to think that you can’t hurt him by calling him greedy when things like this go his way. In his public life, he has cocooned himself inside a warm little excuse for his outlandish, endless pursuit of a larger fortune. He most recently laid it all out in a tweet on November 3, but he’s been pretty consistent about this for years.

The excuse goes like this: human consciousness is good, but would die out entirely if all life on Earth were snuffed out. Earth is a finite resource and will eventually become uninhabitable or be destroyed. There is no way to avoid this, so it’s imperative that humanity find a way to persist without Earth—first by colonizing Mars, and then by using that step as a way to expand into other solar systems. He needs as much money as possible to get to Mars, therefore, if you squint, getting as rich as possible is actually heroic and Elon Musk is our savior. 

This isn’t all wrong. There are disasters threatening Earth, and even if we survive those, our planet will only exist for a limited amount of time, after which it will be swallowed by the expansion of our sun when it depletes the fuel at its core and becomes a red dwarf. There are two common ways of shrugging this information off: a) The Armageddon or a similar religious or spiritual event will have ended our troubles by then, or b) Actually, human extinction is good. If you don’t subscribe to one of these ideas, then Elon Musk might seem like he has a good point. 

Elon Musk doesn’t have a good point, however. And he remains, by any reasonable standard, absolutely nothing other than a greedy rich guy. 

The idea that the Earth is on course for imminent doom is misplaced. As has been explained endlessly elsewhere, climate change isn’t going to make our species extinct. It’s just going to make life here harder and worse. The hard truth is that there’s no escape. We have to endure the horrible disasters and try, for generations, to repair the damage we’ve done.  

But when you zoom out past short-term blips that Elon Musk performatively pretends to care about, like declining fertility, you’ll actually start to feel pretty hopeful. For most of our species’ existence on Earth, we competed with predators that were trying to eat us and steal our food, and we pulled through. Yeah, we’re currently all addicted to scrolling on our phones, but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re built for survival, and we’ll do it on a cold Earth or a hot earth, with or without Teslas and satellite internet, until, say, the atmosphere becomes unbreathable in roughly a billion years, and, hell, maybe even longer than that. 

All of which is to say that in the long term, the project of sending combustion-powered fuel tubes to the nearest planet in our solar system is a pretty goofy plan for saving our species. There’s no hurry to get off Earth, and anyway, we don’t currently know what to do about the fact that Mars colonists would 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 his fantasies are increasingly out of reach within his lifetime. He’ll be pushing 60 before the point at which he himself says he’ll finally launch a crewed mission in his some of his more recent predictions. He’ll be somewhere in the range of 73 to 83 by the time he now claims there will be a self-sustaining city on Mars. And in recent months the fantasy has gotten weirder still. He now wants to etch his own AI-written encyclopedia in stone and distribute it on Mars and elsewhere in space.

I can only guess that Musk is flailing. The fact that he’ll never see the creation of a Mars colony is coming into view for him. Maybe if he really hurries, he can strand a few corpses on the dead, red rock that is Mars—something he has acknowledged is part of his plan—before he himself slumps over dead atop his giant cash pile.

Humanity will carry on without him. His time will come to an end, and the species he dreams of saving won’t have needed him. The current period of cartoonish inequality between the rich and poor will end. Our species will endure the slings and arrows of life on our imperfect planet, and if we’re lucky, perhaps a day will come in the future when we can pilot some unknown kind of craft comfortably to another star and set up a colony there. Maybe people in that colony will read a book that mentions Elon Musk after Croesus and Mansa Musa on a list of rich guys, back when there were rich guys. 

Anyway, Musk has been fighting a years-long legal battle to save the $56 billion Tesla pay package that pushed him to the status of super-billionaire in the first place. Last year, a court agreed with certain shareholders who felt that Musk’s control of Tesla called the fairness of the pay package into question, and that package was tossed out. Well, he just won his appeal, and since the package has gone up in value over the years, he just got $139 billion richer. Good for him.