Yesterday, with a single slam of a gavel, Elon Musk received nearly 14 % nearer to being a trillionaire.
He desires you to suppose you can’t damage him by calling him grasping when issues like this go his approach. In his public life, he has cocooned himself inside a heat little excuse for his outlandish, countless pursuit of a bigger fortune. He most not too long ago laid all of it out in a tweet on November 3, however he’s been fairly constant about this for years.
The excuse goes like this: human consciousness is nice, however would die out solely if all life on Earth had been snuffed out. Earth is a finite useful resource and can ultimately grow to be uninhabitable or be destroyed. There is no such thing as a strategy to keep away from this, so it’s crucial that humanity discover a strategy to persist with out Earth—first by colonizing Mars, after which through the use of that step as a strategy to broaden into different photo voltaic techniques. He wants as a lot cash as potential to get to Mars, subsequently, if you happen to squint, getting as wealthy as potential is definitely heroic and Elon Musk is our savior.
This isn’t all unsuitable. There are disasters threatening Earth, and even when we survive these, our planet will solely exist for a restricted period of time, after which it is going to be swallowed by the enlargement of our solar when it depletes the gasoline at its core and turns into a purple dwarf. There are two frequent methods of shrugging this info off: a) The Armageddon or an identical non secular or religious occasion could have ended our troubles by then, or b) Truly, human extinction is nice. In the event you don’t subscribe to one among these concepts, then Elon Musk may seem to be he has a superb level.
Elon Musk doesn’t have a superb level, nonetheless. And he stays, by any affordable commonplace, completely nothing aside from a grasping wealthy man.
The concept that the Earth is on track for imminent doom is misplaced. As has been defined endlessly elsewhere, local weather change isn’t going to make our species extinct. It’s simply going to make life right here tougher and worse. The arduous fact is that there’s no escape. We have now to endure the horrible disasters and check out, for generations, to restore the injury we’ve carried out.
However while you zoom out previous short-term blips that Elon Musk performatively pretends to care about, like declining fertility, you’ll really begin to really feel fairly hopeful. For many of our species’ existence on Earth, we competed with predators that had been making an attempt to eat us and steal our meals, and we pulled by. Yeah, we’re presently all hooked on scrolling on our telephones, however that doesn’t change the truth that we’re constructed for survival, and we’ll do it on a chilly Earth or a scorching earth, with or with out Teslas and satellite tv for pc web, till, say, the ambiance turns into unbreathable in roughly a billion years, and, hell, perhaps even longer than that.
All of which is to say that in the long run, the undertaking of sending combustion-powered gasoline tubes to the closest planet in our photo voltaic system is a fairly goofy plan for saving our species. There’s no hurry to get off Earth, and anyway, we don’t presently know what to do about the truth that Mars colonists could be irradiated, and unable to develop meals within the native soil. You and I’ve the identical Google as Elon Musk, so it’s not like he doesn’t learn about these issues.
However he nearly actually is aware of his fantasies are more and more out of attain inside his lifetime. He’ll be pushing 60 earlier than the purpose at which he himself says he’ll lastly launch a crewed mission in his a few of his more moderen predictions. He’ll be someplace within the vary of 73 to 83 by the point he now claims there can be a self-sustaining metropolis on Mars. And in latest months the fantasy has gotten weirder nonetheless. He now desires to etch his personal AI-written encyclopedia in stone and distribute it on Mars and elsewhere in house.
I can solely guess that Musk is flailing. The truth that he’ll by no means see the creation of a Mars colony is coming into view for him. Perhaps if he actually hurries, he can strand a number of corpses on the lifeless, purple rock that’s Mars—one thing he has acknowledged is a part of his plan—earlier than he himself slumps over lifeless atop his large money pile.
Humanity will keep it up with out him. His time will come to an finish, and the species he goals of saving gained’t have wanted him. The present interval of cartoonish inequality between the wealthy and poor will finish. Our species will endure the slings and arrows of life on our imperfect planet, and if we’re fortunate, maybe a day will come sooner or later after we can pilot some unknown sort of craft comfortably to a different star and arrange a colony there. Perhaps folks in that colony will learn a e book that mentions Elon Musk after Croesus and Mansa Musa on an inventory of wealthy guys, again when there have been wealthy guys.
Anyway, Musk has been preventing a years-long authorized battle to save lots of the $56 billion Tesla pay package deal that pushed him to the standing of super-billionaire within the first place. Final 12 months, a courtroom agreed with sure shareholders who felt that Musk’s management of Tesla known as the equity of the pay package deal into query, and that package deal was tossed out. Nicely, he simply gained his attraction, and for the reason that package deal has gone up in worth through the years, he simply received $139 billion richer. Good for him.
