He Received 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 desires you to suppose that you may’t harm 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, 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 nice, however would die out completely if all life on Earth have been snuffed out. Earth is a finite useful resource and can ultimately change into uninhabitable or be destroyed. There isn’t 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 by utilizing that step as a option 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 improper. 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 gas at its core and turns into a purple dwarf. There are two widespread methods of shrugging this info off: a) The Armageddon or an identical non secular or non secular occasion may have ended our troubles by then, or b) Actually, human extinction is good. When you don’t subscribe to certainly one of these concepts, then Elon Musk may appear to be he has a great level. 

Elon Musk doesn’t have a great level, nonetheless. And he stays, by any cheap customary, completely nothing apart 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 more durable and worse. The arduous 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 accomplished.  

However if 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 have been attempting 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 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, perhaps even longer than that. 

All of which is to say that in the long run, the venture 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 presently 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 latest months the fantasy has gotten weirder nonetheless. He now desires 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 a number of corpses on the useless, purple rock that’s Mars—something he has acknowledged is part of his plan—earlier than he himself slumps over useless atop his big money pile.

Humanity will keep on 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 once we can pilot some unknown sort of craft comfortably to a different star and arrange a colony there. Possibly folks in that colony will learn a guide 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 bundle 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 bundle into query, and that bundle was tossed out. Effectively, he simply gained his enchantment, and because the bundle has gone up in worth over time, he simply obtained $139 billion richer. Good for him.