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 assume you can’t damage him by calling him grasping when issues like this go his manner. 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 sweet, however would die out solely if all life on Earth had been snuffed out. Earth is a finite useful resource and can ultimately develop into uninhabitable or be destroyed. There is no such thing as a option to keep away from this, so it’s crucial that humanity discover a option to persist with out Earth—first by colonizing Mars, after which through the use of that step as a option to broaden into different photo voltaic techniques. He wants as a lot cash as potential to get to Mars, due to this fact, in the event you 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 will probably be swallowed by the enlargement of our solar when it depletes the gas at its core and turns into a purple dwarf. There are two widespread methods of shrugging this info off: a) The Armageddon or the same spiritual or non secular occasion may have ended our troubles by then, or b) Actually, human extinction is good. In the event you don’t subscribe to one in all these concepts, then Elon Musk may seem to be he has a great level. 

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

The concept 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 more durable and worse. The onerous reality is that there’s no escape. We have now to endure the horrible disasters and take a look at, for generations, to restore the harm we’ve finished.  

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 means of. Yeah, we’re at present 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 sizzling 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 challenge of sending combustion-powered gas 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 present 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 find out 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 current 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. Perhaps if he actually hurries, he can strand just a few corpses on the lifeless, purple 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 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 legal battle to avoid wasting the $56 billion Tesla pay package deal 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 known as the equity of the pay package deal into query, and that package deal was tossed out. Properly, he simply gained his enchantment, and for the reason that package deal has gone up in worth over time, he simply acquired $139 billion richer. Good for him.