He Bought a Bunch of Cash Once more

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

He needs you to suppose which you can’t harm him by calling him grasping when issues like this go his method. In his public life, he has cocooned himself inside a heat little excuse for his outlandish, limitless pursuit of a bigger fortune. He most lately laid it all 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 totally if all life on Earth had been snuffed out. Earth is a finite useful resource and can finally change into uninhabitable or be destroyed. There isn’t any method to keep away from this, so it’s crucial that humanity discover a method to persist with out Earth—first by colonizing Mars, after which by utilizing that step as a method to develop into different photo voltaic programs. He wants as a lot cash as potential to get to Mars, subsequently, should you squint, getting as wealthy as potential is definitely heroic and Elon Musk is our savior. 

This isn’t all fallacious. 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 crimson dwarf. There are two frequent methods of shrugging this data off: a) The Armageddon or an analogous non secular or religious occasion can have ended our troubles by then, or b) Actually, human extinction is good. Should you don’t subscribe to considered one of these concepts, then Elon Musk would possibly appear to be he has a very good level. 

Elon Musk doesn’t have a very good level, nevertheless. And he stays, by any cheap commonplace, completely nothing aside from a grasping wealthy man. 

The concept the Earth is on the right 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 laborious fact is that there’s no escape. We have now to endure the horrible disasters and check out, for generations, to restore the harm we’ve carried out.  

However whenever you zoom out previous short-term blips that Elon Musk performatively pretends to care about, like declining fertility, you’ll truly 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 at the moment 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 atmosphere becomes unbreathable in roughly a billion years, and, hell, possibly 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 reasonably goofy plan for saving our species. There’s no hurry to get off Earth, and anyway, we don’t at the moment know what to do about the truth that Mars colonists would be irradiated, and unable to grow food in the local 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 virtually definitely is aware of his fantasies are more and more out of reach within his lifetime. He’ll be pushing 60 earlier than the purpose at which he himself says he’ll finally launch a crewed mission in his a few of his newer predictions. He’ll be someplace within the vary of 73 to 83 by the point he now claims there will be a self-sustaining city on Mars. And in latest months the fantasy has gotten weirder nonetheless. He now needs to etch his own AI-written encyclopedia in stone and distribute it on Mars and elsewhere in area.

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. Possibly if he actually hurries, he can strand just a few corpses on the lifeless, crimson rock that’s Mars—something he has acknowledged is part of his plan—earlier than he himself slumps over lifeless atop his big money pile.

Humanity will stick with it with out him. His time will come to an finish, and the species he desires 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 once we can pilot some unknown form of craft comfortably to a different star and arrange a colony there. Possibly 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 combating a years-long legal battle to save lots of the $56 billion Tesla pay bundle that pushed him to the standing of super-billionaire within the first place. Final yr, a courtroom agreed with sure shareholders who felt that Musk’s management of Tesla referred to as the equity of the pay bundle into query, and that bundle was tossed out. Properly, he simply gained his enchantment, and because the bundle has gone up in worth through the years, he simply bought $139 billion richer. Good for him.