He Got a Bunch of Money Again

Yesterday, with one hammer blow, Elon Musk came about 14% closer to becoming a trillionaire.

He wants you to think you can’t hurt him by calling him greedy when things like this go his way. In his public life, he isolated himself inside a cozy little excuse for his strange, endless quest for greater wealth. He recently made all of this clear in a November 3 tweet, but he’s been pretty consistent about this for years.

The excuse is this: human consciousness is good, but it will become completely extinct if all life on Earth is wiped out. Earth is a finite resource and will eventually become uninhabitable or be destroyed. There is no way to avoid this, so it is imperative that humanity find a way to continue without Earth – first by colonizing Mars, and then using this move as a means of expanding 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 wrong. There are cataclysms threatening the Earth, and even if we survive them, our planet will only exist for a limited period of time, after which it will be swallowed by the expansion of our Sun when it exhausts the fuel in its core and becomes 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 problems by then, or b) In reality, Human extinction is a good thing. If you don’t subscribe to one of these ideas, it might seem like Elon Musk has a good point.

However, Elon Musk doesn’t have a good point. He remains, by any reasonable standard, absolutely nothing but a greedy rich man.

The idea that the Earth is on its way to imminent doom is misplaced. As has been repeatedly explained elsewhere, climate change will not lead to the extinction of our species. It will make life here harder and worse. The hard truth is that there is no escape. We have to endure terrible disasters and try, over generations, to repair the damage we have done.

But when you zoom out the short-term fluctuations that Elon Musk pretends to care about, like declining fertility, you start to feel hopeful. For as long as our species has been on Earth, we have competed with predators that tried to eat us and steal our food, and we succeeded. Yes, we’re all currently addicted to browsing our phones, but that doesn’t change the fact that we were created to survive, and we will do so on cold or hot Earth, with or without Tesla cars and satellite internet, until the atmosphere becomes, say, unbreathable in about a billion years, and perhaps longer than that.

All of this means that in the long run, the project of sending combustion-powered fuel tubes to the nearest planet in our solar system is a pretty idiotic plan to save our species. There’s no rush to get off Earth, and in any case, we currently don’t know what to do about the fact that Martian colonists are exposed to radiation and are unable to grow food in the local soil. You and I have the same Google that we have with Elon Musk, so it’s not like he doesn’t know anything about these issues.

But he almost certainly knows that his fantasies have become increasingly unattainable throughout his life. He will reach 60 points before the point at which he himself says he will finally launch a manned mission in some of his latest predictions. It will be somewhere in the range of 73 to 83 by the time he now claims there will be a self-sustaining city on Mars. In recent months, the fantasy has become even stranger. He now wants to engrave his encyclopedia written by artificial intelligence in 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 establishment of a colony on Mars dawns before him. Maybe if he really hurried, he could pin some bodies onto the dead red Martian rock – something he admitted was part of his plan – before he himself dropped dead on top of his giant pile of money.

Humanity will continue without him. His time will run out, and the species he dreams of saving will no longer need him. The current period of cartoonish 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, perhaps a day will come in the future when we can comfortably pilot an unknown type of vehicle to another star and establish a colony there. Maybe people in that colony will read a book that mentions Elon Musk after Croesus and Mansa Musa on the rich list, when there were rich people.

In any case, Musk has waged a years-long legal battle to save Tesla’s $56 billion pay package that propelled him to super-billionaire status in the first place. Last year, the court agreed with some shareholders who felt that Musk’s control of Tesla called the fairness of the pay package into question, and the package was struck down. Well, he just won his appeal, and as the value of the package has risen over the years, he’s become $139 billion richer. Good for him.