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 method. In his public life, he has cocooned himself inside a heat little excuse for his outlandish, countless 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 good, however would die out completely if all life on Earth have been snuffed out. Earth is a finite useful resource and can ultimately turn into uninhabitable or be destroyed. There is no 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 increase into different photo voltaic programs. He wants as a lot cash as doable to get to Mars, due to this fact, in case you squint, getting as wealthy as doable is really heroic and Elon Musk is our savior.
This isn’t all incorrect. 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 will likely be swallowed by the enlargement of our solar when it depletes the gasoline at its core and turns into a pink dwarf. There are two frequent methods of shrugging this information off: a) The Armageddon or the same non secular or non secular occasion can have ended our troubles by then, or b) Actually, human extinction is good. When you don’t subscribe to one in every of these concepts, then Elon Musk would possibly appear to be he has an excellent level.
Elon Musk doesn’t have an excellent level, nevertheless. And he stays, by any cheap customary, completely nothing aside from a grasping wealthy man.
The concept that the Earth is on course 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 onerous fact is that there’s no escape. Now we have to endure the horrible disasters and check out, for generations, to restore the harm we’ve carried out.
However if 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 have been making an attempt to eat us and steal our meals, and we pulled by. Yeah, we’re at present all addicted to scrolling on our telephones, however that doesn’t change the proven fact 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 venture of sending combustion-powered gasoline tubes to the nearest 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 at present know what to do about the proven fact 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 before the level at which he himself says he’ll finally launch a crewed mission in his a few of his more moderen predictions. He’ll be someplace in the vary of 73 to 83 by the time 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 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. Possibly if he actually hurries, he can strand just a few corpses on the lifeless, pink rock that is Mars—something he has acknowledged is part of his plan—before he himself slumps over lifeless atop his big money pile.
Humanity will carry on with out him. His time will come to an finish, and the species he desires of saving received’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 are available in the future once we can pilot some unknown type of craft comfortably to one other star and arrange a colony there. Possibly individuals in that colony will learn a ebook 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 the $56 billion Tesla pay bundle that pushed him to the standing of super-billionaire in 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. Effectively, he simply received his attraction, and since the bundle has gone up in worth over the years, he simply acquired $139 billion richer. Good for him.
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