For Eric Mina, a YouTuber based in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the appropriate response is awe. “Look at all the things he’s accomplished!” he says. “He’s not trying to make a buck. He wants to be an interplanetary species and he’s actually going forward and doing it. That’s not the normal type of thinking that people have. They think: personal gain. He’s thinking bigger than that. So yes, he’s going to seem like he’s from another world.”

What’s interesting about these assessments is that as hyperbolic as they may be, they’re not entirely wrong. Elon Musk is indeed in a separate category from the other 2,700 or so billionaires on the planet in many respects. One is quite simply that he is the richest of all of them. Indeed, on Friday, following the stock market debut of his company SpaceX, he became the world’s first trillionaire. According to the Informa Connect Academy, which tracks the fortunes of the bariatrically wealthy, there are others on track to follow: the Indian tycoon Gautam Adani, the Indonesian mining magnate Prajogo Pangestu, the French luxury boss, Bernard Arnault, etc. But as with landing on Mars, one feels that being first is what counts.

But Musk is “a different type of billionaire” in other senses too. One is the fact that his power is not merely financial. His portfolio of interests cuts across technology, energy, transportation, space, communications, biotech and, of course, politics. As of 2020, SpaceX has provided Nasa’s taxi service to the International Space Station. It is, as Musk reminded Joe Rogan in an interview last year, in the business of intercontinental ballistic missiles. “I invest in apocalyptic technologies, didn’t you know?” Then there are his Starlink satellites, which provide internet access to over 12 million subscribers worldwide including in remote and war-stricken areas such as Ukraine. There is his Neuralink project, promising a brain-human interface. And there is X, formerly Twitter, which, despite a mass exodus of users since Musk’s takeover, remains the world’s most popular news site, a data source for his Grok large-language model, and a megaphone for Musk’s political views — bought with the express intention to destroy parts of the public realm that he didn’t personally like, or which conflicted with his own ambitions.

For Guido Alfani, an economic historian at the University of Bocconi in Milan, this is all highly unusual from a world historical perspective. Alfani is the author of a history of the super-rich from antiquity to the tech age, Midas to Musk, if you will, entitled As Gods Among Men. He examines the power and influence of figures such as Alan Rufus, who commanded a fortune equivalent to £130 billion back in 11th-century England, and the Gilded Age banker J.P. Morgan whose cash reserves were so vast, he was able to save America from a disastrous bank-run during the 1907 Knickerbocker Crisis. Alfani has no qualms in asserting that Musk is the richest person ever to have lived.

“Historically speaking, today’s super-rich are not only much wealthier in absolute terms but in relative terms too,” Alfani tells me. “If you compare Elon Musk’s wealth to the wealth of the median household in the US today, it is a much greater difference than, say, the difference between Cosimo de Medici and the average Florentine household in the mid-15th century.”

The main reason for this is to do with globalization. Travel, and therefore trade, he explains, used to be really difficult. The wealth of the Medicis was geographically contained to the area around Florence with some limited trade overseas. Today, economic activity takes place on a global scale, which means more markets, more customers, more rewards. One way to look at that would be, in the past, every village had a rich person. Now we all live in one supersized global village, we all share the same rich people and they are accordingly supersized. (We share the same village idiots, too).

So, according to Alfani, the emergence of a figure like Musk isn’t so surprising. The arc of history bends towards the rich becoming much richer with only occasional ruptures: the Black Death, say, or the Second World War. Musk is only the latest, digital-age iteration of the trend and, he presumably hopes, its continuation: “I’m going to colonize Mars,” he is reported as saying in Walter Isaacson’s hagiography. “My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization.”

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Indeed, it is precisely this multiplanetary ambition that guided the $1.77 trillion valuation of SpaceX. Musk has become a trillionaire not because of what he has done but because of what he promises to do. As seasoned Musk-skeptic Brett Arends has noted, SpaceX actually loses about $2 million per hour; the only part of it that brings in proper revenue is Starlink, which basically amounts to a fancy mobile phone provider. So why the $1.77 trillion valuation? Well the SpaceX prospectus has promised investors “the establishment of a lunar economy and interplanetary industrialization… space tourism and cargo transport to the Moon… in-orbit manufacturing, passenger transport to the Moon, passenger and cargo transport to Mars, energy production on the Moon and Mars, manufacturing capabilities on the Moon and Mars, and asteroid mining.” Arends isn’t convinced, pointing out that “the company plans to target markets that may not even exist using technologies it does not have”.

Still, whatever doubts and misgivings remain, it’s hard seriously to maintain that Musk isn’t also an extremely impressive entrepreneur. There are, indeed, libraries worth of content parsing his teachings (“Always break down problems into their fundamental truths and reason from there”). Whether through his obsessive attention to detail or through mythmaking genius, Musk has, after all risen to the top of the dominance hierarchy of the age. However, what concerns Alfani is that in all past eras, there were more constraints on the men who managed this. “In the Medieval and early modern period, well into the 19th century, there was much more of a divide between the political power of the nobility and the economic power of the commercial class,” he says. “There has always been a suspicion of the rich getting involved in politics. That suspicion still exists — but it’s exceptionally weak compared to the past.”

Nor did any figure of the past enjoy anything like the veneration that Musk inspires — such craven abasement, such we-are-not-worthy sycophancy. As Wil Waldon, a space enthusiast who presents the Elon Musk Podcast tells me: “There are people who — no matter what Elon does — they are going to follow him to the ends of the Earth. They would die for this guy. They think he can do no wrong.” He has had experience of this first hand. Waldon’s primary interests are space and cars; Musk is extremely consequential in both industries, but Waldon’s interest in him is downstream of his interest in engineering. But should he suggest on his podcast that SpaceX engineers such as William Gerstenmaier and Mark Juncosa maybe deserve a little more credit; or that the Tesla Cyber Truck is less than a work of aesthetic bliss, he will be “destroyed in the comments”.

Again, this kind of thing is new, says Alfani. In the Gilded Age through to the Roaring Twenties, there was gossip, speculation, fictions about figures like John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie. “But there was nothing like the same tendency to consider these people as superheroes or as models to be followed. This is new. And this connects to the fact that we’re more willing than at any other point in history to accept their direct involvement in politics.”

Alfani dates his own interest in the subject back to 1994, when Silvio Berlusconi, then Italy’s richest man, was elected prime minister. “At the time, this was unprecedented in a Western democracy,” he says. Now, the idea of the extremely wealthy becoming either directly involved in politics as candidates (see Trump) or indirectly as cheerleaders (see Musk) has come to seem banal. Indeed, the average wealth of American gubernatorial and mayoral candidates has been rising for years. Of the many factors that cost Rishi Sunak the 2024 General Election, his being a centimillionaire by marriage was fairly low down on the list.

Should this concern the rest of us? Well, according to Oxfam, 60% of humanity has grown poorer since the Covid year of 2020, while the billionaire class has become 34% richer. The five richest men more than doubled their earnings in this period, adding $464 billion to their wealth. It’s no surprise that anti-billionaire politics is proving increasingly salient. The recent launch of the Global Justice Fund by the star French economist Thomas Piketty and others — proposing a global wealth tax of 20% on billionaires — is one attempt to try to move from mere handwringing to a plan of action.

Ingrid Robeyns, a philosopher based at the University of Utrecht who has spent years studying the ethics of extreme wealth, believes we need to go much further. In her book Limitarianism, she makes many arguments against extreme wealth: it’s catastrophic for the environment; it engenders corruption; and, indeed, it’s not much good for the rich themselves. Musk doesn’t exactly seem a model of contentment, does he? But one of the simplest arguments is quite simply that such disparities of wealth are not fair. “There’s a deep philosophical argument that it is morally undeserved,” Robeyns says, because so much of what determines whether someone becomes extremely rich — not rich but extremely rich — are matters of luck,” she says. “Luck can never be a basis for moral reward.”

Our ancestors were arguably more clear-sighted about the connection between wealth and luck. It’s right there in the word “fortune”. In the past, wealth was more likely to be inherited rather than earned — a luck of birth. Actually, that’s still often the case: around one third of the Forbes billionaires are heirs. However, of the so-called “self-made” billionaires, there is still a widespread perception that their fortunes are natural byproducts of their ingenuity. “He is the ultimate example of meritocracy,” one Musk fan had insisted to me. “He started with nothing. Now he has multiple empires.”

Robeyns has little time for such arguments. “The distribution of income and wealth isn’t just the result of what individuals do, but also of our institutions. It’s to do with how we organize markets. Technology markets are winner-takes-all markets. But we’ve also seen a shift in the political economy that makes it much easier for them to accumulate their fortunes. The ideology legitimizes their actions.”

Nor does she buy the argument that without Musk, we would be collectively impoverished, without electric cars and spaceships. “The thing to ask is: what are all the companies that would have flourished if Musk had not built Tesla?” Musk has, for example, spent billions lobbying against an entirely practical and logical high-speed train link between Los Angeles and San Francisco and in favor of his own Hyperloop project — which, rather like the idea of mining asteroids, remains in the realm of ludicrous science fiction.

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The aspect of this that concerns Robeyns most, however, is this ease with which financial power can be turned into political power. “Musk paid $44 billion to buy his own private social media platform, he financed it through selling his own shares, and he is using that platform in various ways to undermine democracy,” she says. “If you believe in the principle of political equality, you need to build very solid walls between the world of finance and the sphere of democracy.”

I try to put these arguments to Musk’s cheerleaders. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they are having none of it. “The whole trillionaire thing? What does that matter?” says Mina. “Anyone can be a trillionaire if you can push the stock up that high.” Anyone!

Barney Whiter, a former accountant who now runs a personal finance site called The Escape Artist, and a Musk superfan, feels that Musk’s achievements speak for themselves. “No one has rolled the dice as many times as him and every time he rolls a six.” Dice? Doesn’t that suggest that luck plays a role? He doesn’t think so. “Have you seen the videos of the Falcon coming into land?” He begins to laugh. “You don’t have to be an engineer to see that as a mindblowing feat without parallel in history. Nasa has outsourced its entire space program to one guy. It’s comparable to the US military hiring someone else to run the army!”

Isn’t that worrying? Some guy? An entire space program? And how has he felt about Musk’s interventions into British politics? Musk has boosted the far-Right hooligan Tommy Robinson and the ultranationalist Restore Britain Party. As English towns were trashed after the Southport riots, and more recently following the Belfast and Southampton attacks, Musk has fanned the flames, spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories, tweeting “civil war is inevitable” and attacking Keir Starmer.

Whiter thought all that was brilliant. “I mean, dude. Yeah. Elon Musk is facing down the UK Prime Minister. He’s completely unafraid of the head of state of a G7 country!”

Whatever one thinks of Starmer, he is, in the end, beholden to the British public. Musk is a foreign billionaire beholden to no one but his shareholders. The Harvard historian Jill Lepore coined the term Muskism to describe his peculiarly apocalyptic worldview, which coalesced when he was growing up with an abusive father in Apartheid South Africa. Muskism is “an extreme, extraterrestrial capitalism, where stock prices are driven less by earnings than by fantasies from science fiction”, Lepore has argued. It is clearly a huge part of his image. Musk has consistently positioned himself as a character from a Marvel comic or Star Trek.

At the same time, he is well versed in geek lore which just happens to be the lore of the internet. He jokes, he memes, he positions himself on the side of fun. He commands the village square. But another way that he is in tune with the internet is the way that despite his stratospheric wealth and success, he positions himself as an outsider, an underdog, a victim. This is how John Stringer of the Tesla fanclub sees him, anyway — as a victim of unfair discrimination and criticism. “The Biden administration has attacked him. It snubbed him. They didn’t even invite him to the EV summit in 2021!” The fact that Musk makes billions from government contracts doesn’t change the assessment. Musk is, in his eyes, doing the government — all of us — a favor. “His companies are doing the most for humanity out of any companies on the planet. People think of him as the richest person in the world… But I have that history with him.”

There are others, though, who feel a little moderation is due. Waldon began to feel misgivings around 2018, the year of the infamous “pedo” case, and now says that he is deeply conflicted. “He always posted a lot and generally the tone was aspirational. It was about this lovely collective of humanity moving to this better place. Recently he has been pushing more of an agenda. Some people love the rage. Personally? I just want the old Elon back.”

A Musk superfan would say, but he is saving humanity! He’s taking us to space! Robeyns directs my attention to a meme Musk shared which depicts armed guards holding back a crowd of desperate, apparently non-white humans as animals board an “Ark of Space”. “‘Starship takes beings of Earth to Mars’, was Musk’s caption.

It was a joke. But as so often with Musk, maybe it also wasn’t a joke. “When he talks about what’s he’s doing for ‘all of us’, who is this all of us?” asks Robeyns. “The rhetoric that he’s spreading on X is not about all of us as equals.”

But his admirers don’t seem to see themselves as his equal. They see themselves as his inferiors. They see all of us as his inferiors. And they’re happy with that; happy merely to live on the same planet as such a God. I ask Whiter if he takes inspiration from Musk in his own life. “No,” he responds testily. “He’s a genius. I’m not a genius. It’s like a dog comparing itself to a human.”

And yet Musk is a human too. A peculiar human. A gifted human. But in the end, a flawed human operating in a flawed system, just like any of us. And the system that has granted him his ridiculous wealth is, after all, not some natural state of affairs. It is a manmade thing, an arbitrary game, a collective fiction, and its rules could just as easily be remade any way we can imagine.

Heroes are born in the denial of death. To Ernst Becker, writing in the Seventies, this is the root of human character, and of human heroism. Fearing death, we strive to make meaning, to achieve cosmic significance through that which lies beyond ourselves. Heroes are born in this struggle, yet so too is tragedy — for the cosmic impulse of the hero can come to justify any sacrifice.

Today, Elon Musk would bring humanity to Mars, foster abundance on Earth, and seed intelligence across the stars. To him, we stand alone in the universe — a dim and flickering light of consciousness set amid an endless dark. Bound to a single planet, this light is at risk — and so, using SpaceX, we must settle Mars. Through Tesla, Musk plans to “end scarcity” — to engineer a world free from want, a place of “sustainable abundance” powered by the limitless light of the sun and served by millions of robots. Enabling these transformations will be intelligence — the intelligence of artificial minds, built from and operating within a vast orbital infrastructure of computation. With abundance assured, and bound no longer by the limits of earthly physics, these minds would then be free — free to observe, analyze, and colonize the universe.

Musk’s vision begins and ends in the problem of meaning. Should they come into fruition, his plans would forever undermine the salience, the power, even the meaning, of nations, states, markets, and the societies that undergird them. He would birth a new form of power: the AGI platform state. Yet the scale of his ambition makes even this warning seem parochial — for Musk, in truth, aims  to break the fundamental constraints of our existence. In doing so he risks not just humanity, but meaning itself.

We live in an age where the wildest precepts of science fiction have become not only imaginable, but investable. That this is so owes much to Elon Musk. Erratic, distractable, willfully controversial, he is nevertheless an industrial titan, a man who with any one part of his portfolio would have made an enduring mark on the annals of mankind. Through Tesla, he has transformed markets in electric vehicles, solar energy and batteries; through SpaceX, he revolutionized satellites, internet access, and space flight. He owns X, one of the world’s leading social media platforms, and xAI, which leverages X data to build Grok, a leading AI system. With Neuralink, he has transformed the ability of humans to interact with machines, providing hope to immobile and paralyzed people across the world. He was a founder of OpenAI, the creator of the world’s first major AI tool; through Optimus, a Tesla subsidiary, he plans to mass produce and commercialize humanoid robots.

Musk is creating the future — and, to read the statements of his companies, it will be a glorious place. Tesla’s stated mission is the elimination of scarcity via sustainable abundance, a world of “global prosperity”, “human thriving”, and “economic growth shared by all”. To Tesla and to Musk, growth is infinite, and innovation removes constraints. This future will be achieved by nothing less than “redefining the fundamental building blocks of labor, mobility and energy at scale and for all” — an extraordinary and, should it come into reality, epoch-making statement of intent. But these dreams of technological liberation, the very real results Musk has already achieved, and the astonishing scope of his ambition, are also creating something else — a vertical stack of power unlike any wielded in human history, and one with the scope to transform the basis of history. The contours of this power structure are increasingly visible through his business deals.

Deal by deal, Musk is refashioning his empire. His companies, previously separate and dispersed, are being consolidated, merged, and floated. At the same time, he is launching new ventures. In 2025, xAI — his AI company, and the owner of Grok — bought X, his social media company. SpaceX, his space flight and satellite business, has now acquired xAI itself.  Sources suggest that the deal valued xAi at $91 billion, and SpaceX at $1 trillion — making it the most valuable private company ever to have existed. On 10 March, Musk announced that X — owned now by SpaceX — is launching a payments platform, xMoney. On the 21st March, Musk announced a further venture — Terafab, a three-way collaboration between Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, one dedicated to manufacturing semiconductors. SpaceX — a company therefore combining rockets, satellites, artificial intelligence, and shortly payments and chips too — is now planning an IPO. With a valuation as high as $2 trillion, this would be the largest IPO in history, and one with heavenly ambitions — for Musk intends to put a million data centers in space.

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A million data centers in space, a sustainably abundant robot future; few things could seem more absurd. A creature of irony, the object and progenitor of innumerable memes, Musk knows how and when to grab attention of his markets, investors and employees. Throughout his career, he has repeatedly overpromised and under-delivered — in the short run. He promised autonomous driving by 2019, a million Tesla robotaxis by 2020; Mars colonies by 2022; none of these promises quite came true. Musk bullshits, and Musk overpromises. To focus on this, however, would be a mistake. Like him or loathe him, Musk has a history of effecting transformational commercial change, change driven by grandiose ideas of the future. With Musk, above all, we must judge the man not by what he says, but by what he builds.

Behind Musk’s recent deals is a logic of power and control, a logic we would do well to consider. He is aiming for vertical integration — control of energy generation, of computing infrastructure, of data and the sources of data, of internet connectivity, of transport, and control of manual labor. It is a question of power — energetic power, computational power, and commercial power. Control over each enables the greater growth of the other; taken together, they give him end-to-end control over AI, the basis of AI, and the tools through which AI is expressed. Multi-billion dollar valuations suggest we must take his plans seriously — but taking it seriously suggests a vista far greater, far more alarming in scope, than that conjured by even the most hyperactive investment analyst. Musk is betting not simply on growth — he is betting on the singularity.

Read the news, talk with friends, experiment with Claude or OpenAI; something strange, something singular, is occurring all around you. The cognitive capabilities of human beings — our capacity for reason, for language, for calculation — are being scraped, abstracted, and automated. Tasks that would take weeks — designing an image, writing a story, building a financial model, developing an app — can be compressed now into days, hours, minutes. Across the “higher” industries, a tsunami of change approaches. Goldman Sachs estimates that 25% of all American work tasks are exposed to automation, and 300 million workers globally. Administrative, legal, and financial  jobs are particularly vulnerable: 46%, 44%, and 35% of their respective work tasks are currently considered automatable. This may, however, prove to be a severe underestimate — for the AI models are improving at an exponential rate, and automation is not limited to desk jobs, those involving “higher” cognitive skills. In Beijing, Los Angeles, and shortly London, driverless cars now compete with those driven by humans. Humanoid robots are entering use in factories, warehouses, and restaurants; soon we may also see them on the streets, and in our homes; in time, such robots may become no more exceptional than a washing machine, an ordinary item of domestic tooling. Given the imminent reality of both cognitive and physical automation,  another possibility presents itself — one of entirely automated economic activity, of companies led by AI, served by robots, and working to the benefit of AI-controlled shareholders.

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In this world, the relative value of human labor will collapse, machines will recursively self-improve, and capital — the intangible capital of AI models, the physical capital of servers, robots and rockets — will leap into the stars. Wittingly or otherwise, Musk is developing a self-sovereign vertical infrastructure of dominion, one explicitly designed to serve and accelerate this future and the artificial general intelligence it relies on — the AGI platform state, a new state form that is designed to advance the needs not of humans, but of AI. The AGI platform state arises in the infrastructure of disintermediation, physical automation, orbital independence, and the unifying layer of data and intelligence. The tools of the AGI state span energy generation, internet access, satellite technology, payments infrastructure, robotics, data collection, and intelligence itself.

Already, satellite internet shows us how orbital infrastructure side-steps territorial power. Through Starlink, SpaceX now owns 97% of all satellite internet usage. At sea, in warzones, and in remote and isolated areas, thousands of Starlink satellites — solar-powered, and kilometers above the earth — now provide internet access. Business deals deepen this capacity; in 2025, SpaceX acquired the spectrum rights of the telecommunications company EchoStar — providing it with the ability to provide satellite to smartphone internet access, entirely unmediated by terrestrial infrastructure. In great swathes of the planet, internet and cellular access no longer relies upon terrestrial power, disintermediating the state. This is real, highly material power. On the battlefields of Ukraine, Starlink connectivity is a matter of life and death, and one operated at the will of Elon Musk. Russia itself — a high-tech military power, and a leading player in the 20th century space race — relied heavily on Starlink; when Musk withdrew access, they lost territory.

If SpaceX side-steps state control of communication, then xMoney is designed to side-step banks. In time, it may also side-step sovereign control of money. Envisioned as an “everything app”, xMoney will enable peer-to-peer fiat payments, a debit card, and cash deposits — circumventing banks, and the states that rely on banks. Fiat money, of course, requires the state — but what if xMoney accepts crypto? Musk — aka “the Dogefather” — is a well-documented lover of cryptocurrencies, in particular that of Dogecoin. Should xMoney accept crypto, or issue its own crypto, backed perhaps by the assets of SpaceX, this would be a further sign of independent ambition — for it would be uncontrolled by any sovereign state. This matters for power today, and power tomorrow. Little appreciated outside blockchain circles is the role of stablecoins and cryptocurrencies in facilitating the AI agent economy. Peer-to-peer microtransactions, conducted at digital speeds, are likely to be the basis for economic exchange between robots — thus enabling a whole new sphere of economic activity, and one with decreasing ties to states. xMoney is tied to X.com — a pairing of individuals’ financial access with social media activity. Both, of course, will generate data: the primary input into AI models, and a central power resource in the age of AI. Data, and the power derived from data, is at the core of Musk’s vertical mission — and we can see this reality embodied in Tesla.

Tesla is the world’s most valuable carmaker — but it is much more than that. It is an industrial force, a multi-market behemoth, and the centerpiece of Musk’s plans for terrestrial power. A public company, it holds $1.31 trillion in market capitalization, placing it among the world’s 10 most valuable businesses. It holds a 59% share of the American electric vehicle market, and — though subject to increasingly strong competition — 7.7% of the global market. To develop the company, and with it to revolutionize the global EV market, Tesla has repeatedly re-imagined the limits of EV technology and industrial practices — extending the range of EVs, bringing battery production in-house at highly-automated “gigafactories”, and refining the interior, software-first design of the automotives themselves. The needs of Tesla products are reshaping entire industries. Electric vehicles require batteries, and the electricity to power them. Through developing its own EV-capabilities, Tesla has also become a leading player in renewable energy. Through Megapack, a battery designed to support power grids, it is a global top-three producer of large battery storage systems; through Powerwall it is a leading supplier of batteries to store solar energy in consumers’ homes, and holds over a third of the US market.

Tesla is now switching to robotics. In a recent Tesla earnings call, Musk announced that Tesla would cease production of Model S and Model X cars; the factory space would instead be used to produce Optimus robots. Musk claims he will soon create one million humanoid robots a year, but he has competition. From Boston Dynamics to China’s Unitree and Agibot, others are also rushing to enter the industry. The opportunity is vast; analysts predict that humanoid robots represent a $5 trillion market, and that within 30 years they may number in the billions. No competitors, however, will have what Musk hopes soon to control — an independent stack of energy generation, energy storage, compute, payments, data, and satellite connectivity. Here, infrastructure converges with automation — for Musk will have built an army, the resources to power it, and the tools to control it.

Operating within Tesla’s EVs and Optimus robots is Grok, Musk’s proprietary AI. Grok demonstrates that the thread between social media, a new payment app, humanoid robots, and electric vehicles is data — data, and the role of data in driving, enabling, and empowering artificial intelligence. The role of X in social media and, soon, financial transactions means it will hold a vast and ever-evolving database on our needs, concerns, and desires. Covered in sensors, interacting with a non-predictable, changeable physical world, each Tesla EV and Optimus robot is also an ongoing source of data, data through which the world can be observed, controlled, and manipulated. To manage this data, and to carry out actions on the basis of it, Musk needs AI. In turn, that AI needs computational power and the energy to generate that power — at vast scale. It is here that Musk seeks something truly new — energy in orbit. To harness this energy would be to transform history.

Economic life relies on power — the ability to convert the surrounding energy flows, those of wind, of wave, or splitting of an atom — into work. Above all other sources of energy, we rely on fire — the light of the distant sun, and on the fires we ourselves create here on earth. Harvested and metabolized by organic processes, solar energy is the basis of planetary life, and with it our existence. Our ability to harness that energy, and to channel that power, is what has led to the growth and spread of humanity.

Since the beginning of the industrial age, national power has been based upon the ability of states to extract, dominate and control the congealed light of the sun. Britain, blessed by providence with extraordinary reserves of shallow-lying coal, birthed and led the industrial revolution. Germany, France, Russia, Japan, the United States and China similarly burned coal to industrialize. Petroleum, mined in the Middle East and elsewhere, underlines the core processes of our lives, providing fuel, fertilizers, plastics, and much else besides. Without oil, and without coal, the global economy would collapse. Control these energy sources — control fire — and you control the earth. Iran, the homeland of fire-cults, thus now holds the world to ransom via the Straits of Hormuz.

Musk seeks to step outside of this power, and in doing so, conquer it — for Musk, like Prometheus, seeks to conquer fire. SpaceX seeks to place a million satellites into space: orbital data centers, placed there to harness the power of the sun. Data centers on Earth run up against physical limits — the need for land, the need for water, the need to compete with other human demands for energy consumption. Space, meanwhile, is limitless — literally so in spatial terms, and practically so in regards to solar energy. The earth receives only about half a billionth of the sun’s energy, yet the entire solar system is bathed in the light of the sun. Parked in space, solar cells could theoretically harvest more energy than that currently produced by the entire earth. Through SpaceX, Musk thus plans to build a hyperscaler, one “bigger than Oracle”; this resource will be used to power AI on earth and in the heavens.

In themselves, these plans would represent a profound disruption in global affairs. They would break the territorial link between energy generation and political power. A thousand kilometers from the surface of the earth, a new reality will come into being — one of energy generation, and machine computation, conducted beyond the easy reach of people, of democracies, and states. Unable to physically access these facilities, or to strangle their sources of energy, most states would be unable to control Musk, his satellites, his robots, or his AI. For now, a handful of governments possess the orbital weapons necessary to kill satellites, but they too may face a problem. Musk is predicting, planning and promoting an exponential, potentially uncontrollable, growth in machine power. Should this occur, even superpowers may lose their potency against the machines.

Grok — powered by orbital computers, trained upon the data-feeds of Musk’s vast business empire, and acting in the world via AI agents and Tesla robots — will be Musk’s engine of control in the future he sees awaiting us. This is a power base for the Singularity, but Musk is by no means sanguine that he or anyone else can control it. He envisions a world without work for humans, a place where exponential increases in intelligence enable and merge with exponential increases in robot capability, creating a “supernova” of recursive improvement. In this new world, one that Musk expects to arrive within a decade, “corporations that are purely AI and robotics will vastly outperform any corporations that have people in the loop”. Humanity will be dwarfed by the machine; Musk predicts that “in five or six years, AI will exceed the sum of all human intelligence. If that continues, at some point human intelligence will be less than 1% of all intelligence.” At some point, he believes, the intelligence of the machines will so outstrip humanity that efforts at control will be meaningless. Robots, driven by nothing more than an urge to “understand the universe”,  will propagate intelligence across the stars — intelligence that may or may not include humans and human consciousness.

Picture, if you will, the sci-fi future that Musk seeks to reify. On land, labor is becoming meaningless. Our higher economic functions — planning, trading, analyzing — are carried out by AI agents; our “lower” functions are being carried out by robots. In offices, homes, and factories, an ever-expanding fleet of machines is carrying out tasks once reserved for humans. Cloud-connected, AI-enabled, each is able to call upon the compressed knowledge of humanity, a knowledge constantly updated by real-time data flows. Unable to compete, millions, then billions of workers, are left unemployed. Coordinating, directing, and mining these data flows are the satellites of SpaceX, their numbers expanding every year. Politicians are concerned, but their power is slipping away; states struggle to control the system above, and earthly power is increasingly delegated to the machines. Freedom is meaningless, for there is nothing to spend, nothing to do, and nothing to decide. Markets and political processes no longer lie in the hands of citizens; they lie, at best, with a handful of oligarchs, the controllers of AI infrastructure. Resistance is pointless; predicted, analyzed, prevented in advance, humanity no longer controls the tools of production, or the levers of power. But then — why and how does one resist? AI is all around you — in your phone, your car, smartwatch, your house, in the ads you see when you walk along the street. It is your friend, your counselor, and your decision maker. Able in seconds to access all the data you have ever produced, it knows you better than you know yourself — and so, in time, it chooses for you.

States could crumble, industries may vanish, the heavens may blaze with the cold light of a million satellites — but the greatest loss, the true question before us, is that of meaning. Musk’s quest for cosmic significance risks dissolving the very conditions that give human life meaning: scarcity, struggle, and agency. In his heroic mission, he risks destroying the basis of heroism itself — our capacity to act, and our capacity to choose. The risk is not that Musk might fail in his greatest ambitions, but that he might succeed.

Regardless of whether Musk does secure his full payout, when someone finally becomes the world’s first trillionaire, odds are it’ll be him. When that happens, his wealth would rival or exceed the GDPs of Portugal, Greece, New Zealand, and Hungary combined. As he’s already shown, Musk has the means to influence any political campaign in his adoptive country. But his immense wealth also allows him to astroturf political movements on virtually any global issue. Witness, if nothing else, his apparent support of Tommy Robinson in Britain, echoed by similar enthusiasms from Paris to Berlin.

Should one man control this much wealth, and thus have the power to tilt the scales of global politics at will? Regardless of your answer, it’s striking how much access Musk’s staggeringly deep pockets secured him on Capitol Hill. Politics moves so fast now that the specifics are easy to forget. But the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) wasn’t just about advice or tech contracts — though Musk received those as well — but deciding whether government agencies deserved to live or die. Within months of the election, key civil service departments were gutted under Musk’s watch, with hundreds of thousands of federal employees fired via the vagaries of a proprietary algorithm and Musk’s cadre of 20-something tech graduates.

If DOGE was a characteristically juvenile nod to Musk’s meme-lord sensibilities — and if the Musk-Trump pact has lately acquired the will-they-won’t-they trappings of a Nineties romcom — their relationship is nonetheless one of the great turning points in American history. After all, it ultimately represents the de facto takeover of the federal government by the world’s wealthiest man, not merely for moneymaking, but to ideologically reshape it in Musk’s preferred image.

What is this new Muskian ideology he’s imposing on America? Like many on the American Right, Musk puts on a good show of believing in the mythology of classical liberalism and small government, while also cloaking himself in the aesthetics of techno-libertarianism. In truth, though, the ideological roots of his worldview go deeper and darker. Beneath that meme-saturated branding lies a politics shaped as much by late 19th-century Social Darwinism as by any genuine commitment to “liberty” or open markets, all leavened by a healthy reliance on government backing.

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To put it differently, Musk adheres to a brand of Social Darwinism, imposed from the top down. Think small government for you — and the working-class slobs you struggle alongside — but big government for them, the rightful rulers of the universe. Shortly after ensconcing himself at the White House, wandering its hall like an awe-struck child, Musk landed a $5.9 billion US Space Force contract, as well as a $200 million deal to implement xAI in the Defense Department. That’s echoed by an expanded SpaceX contract, one valued at perhaps $4 billion. The optics, of course, are damning. But more than that, these arrangements speak to the billionaire’s fundamental reliance on state munificence.

Not that Musk is only concerned about economics. Notwithstanding his large and obscure number of children, he often acts online like an angry incel — paranoid and petulant to the core. Over the years, Musk has entertained more than a few white supremacist narratives on his X feed. Though he seems to have once attended an anti-Apartheid concert, his South African upbringing may also have encouraged him to worry about racially charged civil strife. Due to his omnipresence online, certainly, he has legitimized fringe white-supremacist rhetoric that was once relegated to the fringes of cyberspace: witness the growing popularity of Groypers and other “black-pilled” race-based groups among a subset of Gen Z.

The amplification of these far-Right ideologies could prove to be one of the most consequential global shifts of the coming decade. Yet in a horseshoe-like twist, Musk’s reactionary paranoia also coexists with an unshakeable belief in radical futurism — from intergalactic colonies to brain implants. Transhumanism and extreme technophile utopianism — not typically labeled “Right-wing” — pervade nearly everything Musk offers. Whether it’s boring massive underground tunnels, apparently meant to “solve” car traffic, to manufacturing humanoid robots to replace low-skill laborers, Musk’s projects would have horrified traditional British conservatives from Oakeshott to Burke.

Yet amid this rush of contradictory ideological currents, it’s perhaps Musk’s ambition to colonize Mars, purportedly as a failsafe for Earth’s presumed collapse, that arguably represents the man in full. That’s starkest when it comes to his futurism. In an age of Icarian sci-fi projects like Saudi Arabia’s ludicrous Neom scheme, Musk’s space venture is the most extravagant techno-utopian fantasy of them all, even as the man himself has apparently convinced large swathes of the public that Martian colonies are not just feasible but actually existentially necessary.

Aside from materializing childhood Star Trek fantasies, it’s hard to find a compelling reason for such a quixotic mission to the fourth planet from the sun. Even assuming it’s possible to land a single human — much less the number needed to “colonize” the planet — the cost of the project would likely be in the neighborhood of $1 billion per person, for a total of $1000 trillion. That kind of outlay, all in a country without universal healthcare or decent public transit, would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.

Nor is funding the only problem here. Mars is, on average, over 225 million kilometers from Earth. Traveling there would take a minimum of seven to nine months of space travel— trapped inside a claustrophobic spacecraft. Anyone lucky enough to survive the journey would have to bring with them all the air, water, and food they needed, not just for the space voyage itself but for the rest of their lives.

All the while, life on Mars would resemble camping on an active volcano: permanently toxic, obscenely dangerous, and deeply unnatural. Once Mars mission astronauts arrived, these aspiring settlers would be forced to live an Antarctic-like existence, completely isolated from all normal aspects of human geospatial, social, and emotional life. If nothing else, there’s a good reason why the real Antarctica has no permanent settlements — no one can stand living there without losing their ever-loving mind. Now imagine that kind of existence, except 90% of it is underground and there’s no coming back.

Musk obviously knows all these details, yet remains completely undaunted. And it’s here, I’d argue, that his inverted kind of Social Darwinism comes to the fore. Notwithstanding his obscene personal wealth, a thoroughgoing Martian colony would necessarily require epic amounts of government funding — miserable living conditions on the Red Planet or continued squalor on the Blue Planet be damned. And if Musk truly believes in the necessity of humanity becoming an “interplanetary species”, he ought to then offer himself up as one of Mars’ first human residents. Of course that’ll never happen. Instead he’ll sucker poor, naïve — and almost certainly desperate — souls into doing it for him.

That’s obvious enough from his behavior here on Earth. For one thing, Musk is virulently anti-labor, once saying he not only disagrees with the necessity of trade unions, but even the very idea. Among other things, he claims unions are a “lords-and-peasants sort of thing” that “create negativity in a company.” For another, he has got into ugly disputes with Tesla janitors trying to unionize, while also being found guilty by the US National Labor Relations Board — a notoriously weak agency compared to similar bodies elsewhere — for laying off hundreds of unionized workers in retaliation for their collective bargaining efforts.

Combined with his enthusiasm for red-blooded states like Texas, which has far laxer labor laws than spots like California, and it’s clear that a large part of his affinity for his adoptive nation is those aspects of American “exceptionalism” that align most with his Social Darwinist ideals.

Along these lines, it’s quite telling that unlike past industrial tycoons, Musk has also no major charitable operations. Even during the notoriously callous Gilded Age, figures like Andrew Carnegie preached that the ultra-wealthy had a duty to give away large portions of their money to the public. Many of that era believed their good fortune required social contribution. Musk, in contrast, sees such efforts as unnecessary — or worse, counterproductive. The few charities he does fund are either self-serving, like building schools and infrastructure near SpaceX facilities, or else engaged in other dubious practices. His eponymous foundation only donated $100,000 in 2024, and that to a libertarian think tank. Musk doesn’t even appear to grasp the basic function of most philanthropy: pretending to care.

Such results-focused brutality arguably hints at yet another current in Musk’s ideological bloodstream. In a funny way, technophile futurists like him and Peter Thiel arguably have more in common with Marxist-Leninists than they know. Both regard their political opponents as victims of “false consciousness” — unable to grasp the “scientifically” inevitable direction of history. Any dissent is seen not as disagreement, but as clear proof of ideological delusion. Their version of Progress is treated as inescapable and morally righteous. To question it is to endanger humanity itself. Thiel recently went so far as to liken critics of AI and technological acceleration to apocalyptic figures, and perhaps even Antichrists.

Musk is obviously no Stalin or Pol Pot. But like the undemocratic masters of the 20th century, he surrounds himself with sycophants, while believing that no one could possibly know more than him. When confronted with his failures, he also exhibits the same brand of epistemic totalitarianism — either denying or ignoring shortcomings and continuing to insist on his own revolutionary vision defining all legitimate knowledge. Despite frequent claims to the contrary, Musk did not buy Twitter to “restore free speech”. He bought Twitter to shape the narrative in his preferred image, providing free speech to his preferred groups and their preferred narratives. Like a true Enlightenment ideologue, with no acceptance of the limits of the human experience, Musk, like Marx before him, believes in truth with a capital “T”.

One good example here is Musk’s efforts to develop xAI, with the company hunting for “political bias” experts to ensure its large-language model is stripped of all supposed bias from its training modules. Whatever he might claim, genuine “impartiality” is impossible. Just as with academic peer review, choosing what constitutes a “non-biased expert” is itself an ideological act. Postmodernists were completely correct in this sense: no one is capable of decoding human society without bias. But like the Marxists of old, Musk’s supreme faith in scientism and rationalist pseudo-objectivity is his greatest intellectual failing.

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Due to his South African birth, Musk cannot become US president. But, as he’s already shown, he can clearly buy unprecedented government sway. More to the point, there are signs he wants to formalize this influence by creating his very own political party. A few months ago, when the president he helped install grew tired of his presence, Musk threw a tantrum and announced the launch of his own political movement, the so-called “American Party”.

The debut of Musk’s party appears to be on hold, though, with its launch being used as a stick to prod the GOP towards anti-statist, low “entitlement” policies — the same Social Darwinist policies Musk believes must inevitably improve society. The American Party threat is rarely discussed, yet represents an important component in explaining why the GOP continues to hold the “small government” line in the ongoing shutdown of the US government, now a month old and counting. That American Party name is itself a highly telling moniker since it was last used by the extremely violent, ethno-nationalist Know Nothings of the mid-19th century.

The danger, then, isn’t just Musk’s erratic behavior or his unchecked ego. It’s the precedent he’s set. A centi-billionaire — well on his way to trillionaire status — with no democratic mandate and no governing experience now wields unprecedented influence over both the American state and civic discourse. He controls one of the largest social media platforms, and has been allowed to fire government employees at will, treating American society as a sandbox for his own fantastical experiments. For Musk, society isn’t a fragile ecosystem. It’s a plaything for his brilliance to break and rebuild at whim.

Musk hardly started the trend of the ultra-wealthy trying to hijack the US government, but he’s also taking it to dramatically new heights, setting a precedent that’s being followed by tycoons from Bill Ackman to Bernard Marcus. In the 2024 election cycle alone, 100 American billionaires together spent some $2.6 billion in “donations”. To put that into perspective, a minimum-wage worker would need to work for over 174,000 years — and start during the last Ice Age — simply to gross that same figure. It goes without saying, of course, that this trend could yet have disastrous consequences for the average American, with millions feeling their votes don’t count and that whatever gains they secured during the 20th century are already slipping away.

As for Musk himself, the nearer-term danger is less that he’s a hubristic technophile huckster or a deluded space-faring Don Quixote. It’s that, like Stalin, he can afford to keep being wrong — forever. With wealth at this unprecedented scale, he can act, fund, fire, and build without opposition. And, if liberal democracy relies on key shared understandings, his outsized influence might signal something worse than just the rise of authoritarian wealth. Rather, it could ultimately herald a breakdown in our attachment to our mother planet and thus, the conditions for human flourishing. What an ironic “scientific” legacy that would be.

These flights do not go into orbit. Instead, they briefly pop above the atmosphere to give the crew a short period of weightlessness and a fantastic view. The flights therefore might seem, in the grand scheme of space exploration, trivial. Yet they are a sign of revolutionary change. Humanity has worked out how to make rockets reusable, enabling massively better cost-effectiveness than could the single-use rockets of yore. This cost-effectiveness has resulted in an explosion of commercial space activity, of which the Katy Perry flight happens to be the most publicly visible part. As well as celebrity flights, reusable rockets have enabled more serious private missions, like the Fram2 mission that flew a crew into polar orbit last month. This is a feat that has never been accomplished by a state-run human spaceflight program.

All this means that our species is picking up where it left off a half-century ago. When the Apollo Moon landings ended in 1972, humanity’s space exploration was cut short, despite our having the technology to continue it. NASA shelved its plans for longer-duration Moon missions that would have used variations of the hardware that had already developed. The agency had hoped to build a permanent base that would then support expeditions to Mars, but the thwarting of these plans meant that the Moon, until recently, has been left largely untouched.

In the past few years, though, the Moon’s quietness has been once again disturbed. A flurry of unmanned probes have been sent to our nearest celestial neighbor, and both the United States and China plan to emulate and improve on the Apollo missions. Whichever of them is most successful will likely get to dominate the onward expansion of humanity into the solar system: Mars and beyond. As Jeff Bezos would probably agree, this would be a far more consequential development than this week’s New Shepard flight.

China’s lunar program, Westerners ought to note, is going very well. In 2007 and 2008, China put spacecraft in lunar orbit. Since then, it has launched four surface probes, all of them landing successfully. These missions have enabled some impressive achievements, including an operation on the dark side of the Moon as well as the return of two lunar samples to Earth. In order to both increase the size of samples returned, and to demonstrate their space technology, the Chinese selected a more complex mission plan than the one used by the Soviets for the same purpose in the Seventies. It requires a craft to enter lunar orbit, send a separate lander to the lunar surface, rendezvous with the lander’s sample-bearing ascent stage, then return to Earth for re-entry and safe recovery. In the entire history of spaceflight, there have been only nine rendezvous performed in orbit around the Moon. Seven of these were Apollo lunar modules meeting their mothership after completing their missions; the other two were those modern Chinese missions, Chang’e 5 and 6.

The next step from here is an attempt to repeat the maneuvers, but with astronauts involved. The CCP aims to get Chinese astronauts on the Moon before the end of the decade. Given the numerous delays to the Artemis program, the Chinese have a good chance of being first, and might start by putting boots on the valuable lunar South Pole. Here there is water ice that can be used as a resource for further expansion. The Chinese astronauts will travel on the Long March 10 rocket. This craft, whose first test flight will be next year, has a conservative design that reuses tooling and engines from the already-flying Long March 5. Prototypes of the capsule it will carry have already been tested in space, and many of the technologies needed for the mission have already been mastered through the unmanned Chang’e program. If successful, China will build a lunar research station with partners such as Russia.

It is unfortunate, then, that NASA’s proposed Moon rocket appears not to be up to the task. The Space Launch System (SLS), as it is known, costs $4 billion per launch. Because it lacks the power to carry a lander alongside the capsule, it can take humans only to a Moon orbit rather than onto the lunar surface. And before doing any of that, SLS has to get off the ground. It has been in development since 2011 and has only achieved a single launch in that time, one that resulted in worrying damage to the heat shield of the capsule. Nevertheless, NASA intends to use the rocket to send a crew on a single loop around the Moon by April of next year. A landing is penciled in for 2027, but experts doubt this will be feasible.

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The only clear advantage the US has at this point is in its commercial sector. It was private companies that built and launched the two Moon landers that touched down earlier this year, with the government acting merely as a customer. All in all, the frivolity of the Katy Perry mission should not be taken as being representative of the industry as a whole. In fact, it is a sign of confidence and health. Note that Lauren Sánchez, Bezos’ fiancée, was on board. What was once highly risky is becoming more routine. Blue Origin once again demonstrated its safe handling of liquid hydrogen — which is the rocket’s fuel — and its ability to bring a booster back to Earth under its own power. Both of these are technologies transferable to the company’s forthcoming lunar lander.

Launches will continue to multiply in number, principally because of the cost-effectiveness of reusable rockets. Already, the results have been spectacular. Over the past two years, the rate of mass being sent into orbit has accelerated by a compounding rate of 57% per year. This would represent an almost 10-fold increase in the next five years, and a 90-fold increase in the next 10 years. It is a trend comparable with the rapid rate at which transistors have been added to microchips over the past few decades — a key driver of the computer revolution.

SpaceX is upping the ante with Starship. Elon Musk envisages launching thousands of these enormous rockets every year. Even so, the trend cannot continue forever. Ultimately, there will be a practical and an environmental limit to how much we can launch from the surface of the Earth. The critical metrics will remain the amount of mass we can put into space, and the cost of putting that mass into space. In order to keep the revolution going we will need to start deriving our payloads from materials elsewhere in the solar system.

This is why the Moon is so important. There is a rather dry space industry acronym — ISRU — that refers to in-situ resource utilization. Do not be fooled by the dryness; ISRU will be transformative for our species. The shadowed craters at the lunar South Pole contain water ice and other volatile elements we can use to create rocket fuel akin to the hydrogen fuel used by the Katy Perry mission. Similarly, the carbon dioxide of the Martian atmosphere can be used to produce fuel — but Mars, being on a solar orbit of its own, is accessible only once every 26 months. The Moon, although less hospitable, is a more convenient base for our species’ expansion. The stuff of science fiction can be made real, and it starts with collecting and processing rocks.

One of the first people to grasp this was the Princeton physics professor Gerard O’Neill. He and his students studied space colonization from a scientific perspective, and came to the conclusion that planets were not the place to be. No other planet in the solar system has ideal conditions for humans, and the scope for expansion is limited to perhaps twice the surface area of Earth. They instead designed vast cities in space, cities that would take the form of rotating cylinders up to eight kilometers in diameter and 32 kilometers in length.

Being that large, the cities would have a mass of billions of tons. Even then, it was clear to O’Neill and his students that it would be impractical to send construction materials from Earth. With this consideration in mind, they devised a way of flinging lunar rock into space. A long series of magnetic coils, they forecast, could be used to fling lunar regolith — the dust and rocks on the Moon’s surface — into the region between Earth and the Moon. Here it would be caught by a similar coil mechanism, and subsequently broken down and used to build the city. The idea enraptured many young space enthusiasts, including a Princeton undergraduate called Jeffrey Bezos.

The example of the privately-operated moon landers, and the work of pioneers like O’Neill, show us the way. Space agencies should set objectives which private companies are free to pursue how they wish. These objectives should have, at their heart, the goal of rapidly developing the resources of the Moon and other celestial bodies. NASA, and similar agencies, should fund this work generously.

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And it is imperative that they do so. Whether the critics like it or not, humanity will populate the Solar System. What’s more, the sheer scale of the Solar System’s available energy and resources will mean this extraterrestrial population will be thousands of times larger than that of Earth. The population will descend only from those who go into the frontier, establish sustainable bases, and grow their population.

Those who stay behind will not have any input on the kind of civilization that our descendants go on to build. Earth itself will be as irrelevant in the larger scheme of things as the tiny spot in Africa where Homo Sapiens first evolved is to modern geopolitics and culture. Are the people who populate the solar system going to believe in democracy, rule of law and freedom of speech? Or will they live under an autocratic system?

In 1576, Queen Elizabeth’s court astronomer John Dee made the case for colonization of the New World. It was not an obvious economic priority for Tudor England. But it is partly because of Dee that the United States today speaks English and operates legal and political systems derived from our own. The decisions made by the Elizabethans now shape our world in the 21st century, and likewise the decisions we make now regarding space will have ripples through the coming millennia. If we lose the race to the CCP, we might have reason to reflect on one Katy Perry song in particular: “The One that Got Away.”

The Emperor and Darth Vader may be wrong about a lot of things, but they are not wrong about this. NASA needs a purpose, one that’s worthy of the costs and risks of human spaceflight. That goal can only be sending humans to Mars. This is so because Mars is where the science is, Mars is where the challenge is, and Mars is where the future is.

Let’s start with the science. In the beginning, the Earth and Mars were twins. Both were warm, wet, rocky planets with atmospheres dominated by carbon dioxide — then, Earth evolved life. If the theory is correct, and life emerges naturally from chemistry whenever the conditions are right, then life should have evolved on Mars too, and on millions of other planets throughout our galaxy. If we find evidence of past or present life on Mars, it means we are not alone.

There are other reasons to explore Mars. Biotechnology is going to be one of the main engineering sciences of the 21st century and many to follow. If we find life on Mars, we will be able to discover whether the DNA-RNA information system utilized by all life on Earth is universal, or whether it is just one of many possibilities. A different system could offer revolutionary engineering possibilities, as great in comparison to DNA-RNA as silicon computers are to those based on vacuum tubes, electric relays or mechanical Babbage machines.

A humans-to-Mars program would also inspire millions of young Americans to develop their scientific talents, generating vast amounts of intellectual capital. In the Sixties, the Apollo program doubled the number of American science and engineering graduates, whose innovations (such as the computer revolution) have since repaid the nation the cost of the program many times over. Like individuals, nations grow when they challenge themselves and stagnate when they do not.

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The business-as-usual space establishment claims that its Artemis program, which aims for a return to the Moon, is comparable to a mission to Mars. But this is simply untrue. There are no questions of fundamental scientific interest that can be resolved by exploring the surface of the Moon. Nor will we astonish the world by repeating something we did more than half a century ago.

And then there’s the matter of humanity’s future. Of all the worlds currently within our reach, Mars is by far the most viable candidate for human settlement. The Red Planet offers new branches of human civilization the chance to have a fresh start, in a place where the rules haven’t yet been written. Unlike the ultra-dry Moon, Mars has oceanic quantities of water, including vast amounts in liquid form deep underground, as well as massive ice glaciers containing as much water as the American Great Lakes. And while the Moon lacks any meaningful supply of carbon or nitrogen — elements essential for life — Mars has an atmosphere that is 95% carbon dioxide and 2.6% nitrogen. With plentiful CO₂ and water, one can grow plants for food and fiber, and make plastics and fuels. Martian water is five times as rich as terrestrial water in deuterium, which is the fuel for fusion reactors. So once fusion power is mastered, Mars will offer infinite energy, allowing its settlers to transform its mineral wealth into steel, pipes, greenhouses, and cities. It will eventually become the natural takeoff point for expeditions to mine the precious metal riches of the asteroid belt.

For the coming age of space settlement, Mars compares to the Moon as North America compared to Greenland during the age of European maritime exploration. Greenland was closer to Europe, so the Europeans reached it first. But its environment was too impoverished to host more than a few outposts. America, by contrast, would become the home of a vibrant new branch of Western civilization.

The Artemis program’s lack of purpose is further demonstrated by its hardware set, composed as it is of tens of billions of dollars’ worth of random elements, including the SLS heavy-lift booster, the SpaceX Starship, the Orion capsule, the National Team expendable lunar lander, and a lunar orbiting space station called the Gateway, which together would not enable a coherent mission plan. In fact, most of these hardware elements only exist because there is a constituency that benefits from their funding. The Artemis program is vendor-driven, not purpose driven. A purpose-driven program spends money to achieve goals. A vendor-driven program, like Artemis, does things in order to spend money. We can and must do better.

If America is to once again have a space program worthy of a nation of pioneers, we must act with purpose, with wisdom, and with courage. After all, we are far better prepared today to send humans to Mars than we were in 1961 to meet President Kennedy’s call to send men to the Moon — and we were there eight years later. To shrink from this challenge would be to declare that we are no longer the people we used to be — and that is a concession America cannot afford to make.

Yet a Mars mission could easily be derailed. Trump and Musk have both defined themselves in hyper-partisan terms. But if the Mars program is seen as a Trump-Musk hobby-horse, it will be canceled as soon as the fortunes of political war shift, as they are certain to do long before the mission is realized. Therefore the proposals advanced by some in the Trump camp to give the program to SpaceX to pursue outside of NASA are not merely unethical (as they would involve the sole-source distribution of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to Musk), but suicidally impractical. If the program is to succeed, it must be in the name of America, not Elon Musk.

Furthermore, it needs to be done correctly. SpaceX’s Starship, which claims to be the world’s most powerful reusable launch vehicle, promises to be a terrific asset. But Musk insists that it should be the only vehicle used for the mission. While a Starship upper stage could be refueled on orbit by tanker Starships, enabling it in theory to fly from Earth orbit to Mars, its 100-ton mass makes it suboptimal for use as an ascent vehicle. It would make far more sense to develop and use a similar but much smaller vehicle — a “Starboat” if you will — to travel between the surface of Mars and its orbit. Starship plus Starboat could enable highly efficient missions to Mars. But this will require a program leadership capable of speaking truth to power.

Technicalities aside, Musk’s vision of a Martian settlement is also seriously misconceived. He has propounded the idea that thousands of Starships should be used to rapidly land a million people on Mars to create a metropolis which will preserve “the precious light of consciousness” after the human race on Earth is destroyed in the near future (by asteroid impacts, nuclear war, runaway AI, or the woke mind virus — the plot line varies). The idea is apparently based on Isaac Asimov’s science fiction trilogy, Foundation, in which a group of scientists is sent to the far-flung planet Terminus (also Musk’s name for his colony), so that after the anticipated collapse of the galactic empire their descendants can emerge to reconstruct civilization. It’s a grand read. But it is not applicable to the task at hand.

For one thing, you can’t just dump one million people on Mars. Starships will only be able to carry about 100 tons of cargo from Earth to Mars, and it will take six to eight months to perform the transit. This means that a Mars settlement of any size cannot be supported from Earth. Before large numbers of people go to the Red Planet, then, we’ll need to develop the agricultural and industrial base needed to feed, clothe, and house them. The settlement of Mars must therefore occur organically, as the settlement of America did, with small groups of pioneers creating the first farms and industries that provide the basis for supporting ever larger waves of settlers to follow.

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Furthermore, as Musk should know, no million-person Mars outpost could possibly survive the collapse of human civilization on Earth. Technological civilization requires a vast division of labor. It is unlikely that a society of one million people could produce a good electric wristwatch, or even a wristwatch battery, let alone an iPhone. The high-tech components of Mars’s most advanced systems will need to be imported from Earth for a very long time.

And besides, the idea that a few will survive on Mars, while billions die on Earth is so morally repulsive that any program foolish enough to adopt it would be doomed. Coated with ideological skunk essence, the mission’s protagonists would appear more like the selfish characters in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, dancing in a castle while everyone outside dies in an epidemic, than the heroes of Foundation.

We should not go to Mars to desert humanity, but to strengthen humanity. The aim should be to vastly expand humanity’s power to meet all future challenges by making grand scientific discoveries — and yes, in the fullness of time, establishing new highly-inventive branches of civilization. We should not go to Mars to preserve “the precious light of consciousness” in an off-world hideaway, as Musk would have it, but to liberate human minds by opening an unlimited frontier. We should not go to Mars to party while the Earth burns, but to prevent Earth from burning altogether by showing that there is no need to fight over provinces when by invoking our higher natures we can inhabit new planets. For by doing so, human freedom can expand into the cosmos.

That is the case for Mars.

But it could also turn the final frontier into another zone of hyper-exploitation — a grim possibility probed by Korean auteur Bong Joon Ho’s new political satire set in space, Mickey 17, whose villain is a hybrid of Musk and Donald Trump.

As the SpaceX craft plummeted back to its Florida landing spot, dolphins jumped sweetly out of the water to greet it. The scene was so beautifully cinematic, it could well have served as the opening of Mickey 17. In it, Joon Ho imagines a future that we already live in: where exploited laborers (here referred to as “expendable clones”) serve at the whims of a short-tempered oligarch whose devoted “followers” have eagerly joined his space flight.

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Our protagonist is Mickey, played by Robert Pattinson, and since he is essential to the ship’s mission, no one questions his pain and suffering, least of all himself. As he dies over and over in excruciating pain in clone form — his body freezes, he loses a hand, he is poisoned while being tested for a new vaccine — this is treated as routine. He did, after all, sign up for the job. Eager to leave behind his debts on Earth, he confesses with a smile that he might have scrutinized the paperwork more closely. The ship’s onlookers laugh knowingly at each death: silly, sweet Mickey, making all our lives safer, smoother, more efficient.

About 20 minutes into the film, it becomes clear that Joon Ho thought Trump was going to lose the 2024 election. Mark Ruffalo plays the failed congressman Kenneth Marshall, who hosts an inflight reality competition show and was so humiliated by losing his “re-election campaign” that he leaves Earth to colonize space. An attempted assassination only brings him back stronger. As his followers chant the name of their leader, they stick their arms up in the air, one finger pointing at the sky, echoing a Nazi salute (ahem, “Roman salute”). His wife, the unnervingly poised Toni Collette, resembles Melania in the least charitable interpretation. At one point, when her husband is about to kill Mickey, 17 she screams and screams; but it is not for Mickey, rather at the thought of a bullet hole in her lovely carpet.

Bong Joon Ho says the character isn’t inspired by Musk and Trump, but by a range of “dictators we have seen throughout history”, which would be hard to believe even if Marshall’s supporters didn’t wear red MAGA-style baseball hats that say “the one and only”. There’s no Kenneth Marshall in the book the film is based on; the novel’s autocrat, Hieronymus, is more a maniacal military soldier than an eccentric billionaire. But in the movie version, he wants to colonize space, make babies with the women on board with “the ideal genetics”, and he’s constantly throwing tantrums. Sounds pretty familiar.

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Satire succeeds best when it touches a nerve of truth. Parasite, Joon Ho’s Oscar-winning film from 2019, exploded the fantasy of upward mobility by showing an upper-class family’s vampiric relationship to their servants. Its bloody conclusion is a depressing catharsis of just how little hope there is for improving your chances. But where Parasite benefited from a subtle touch — the social critique unfolded gradually to reveal a horrifying picture of the real world — Mickey 17 can be too on-the-nose, at times resembling Saturday Night Live at its flaccid worst.

The Marshall character slides between impressions of Musk and his ostensible government boss, Trump. Writing Mickey 17 three years ago, Joon Ho couldn’t have known how powerful a role Musk would be playing in the current administration, but his determined plans to colonize space have long been clear. The SpaceX boss’s ultimate mission is to “occupy Mars” and develop a city of 1 million people there in the next two to three decades. He has volunteered his own sperm to get the population going, and he wants to retire on the Red Planet.

Though space dominance has long been a goal of American foreign policy, most crucially in the Cold War, Musk isn’t aiming for any kind of national leverage: he wants to leave Earth behind to make a new society centered on himself. It’s a “backup” plan for humanity, but it will be a colony of children born from his own genetic material.

Musk isn’t alone. Instead of countries vying for extraterrestrial supremacy, Musk’s foremost space rival is Bezos, who is set to launch a bizarre all-female rocket to space this spring with his fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, and Katy Perry on board. Bezos hopes to industrialize space, moving the manufacturing concerns “that stress Earth” away from it. Both men have built huge company towns in Texas, where thousands of workers live to build their rockets.

Musk, meanwhile, wants to bio-engineer a new version of human that can survive in Mars’s burning temperatures, an idea close to the new cloning technology that props up Joon Ho’s movie world. For Joon Ho’s Musk-Trump composite character, Kenneth Marshall, the impulse to “purify” humanity can only be achieved by abandoning it, and any successful society requires masses willing to be exploited to get things done.

Like Marshall, who is quick to abandon his promises on Earth for better chances in space, it’s fair to question how invested space fanatics like Musk can be in making American society better, when he hopes to leave it as soon as he can. More likely, he views space as a stellar business opportunity, ripe with untapped resources and with no laws or regulations to get in your way.

What Joon Ho shows us is how powerful figures normalize the exploitation of those who work for them to prop up their ambitions, something Musk is no stranger to. Tesla’s “giga-factories” have been accused of rampant sexual harassment and safety violations, and one lawsuit alleges a worker told his wife “I’m going to die in this factory”. Predictably, Musk thinks trade unions “create negativity in a company”. Bezos, our other keen space pioneer, uses algorithms to push his Amazon workers to breaking point; and those who work in his American factories are regularly, and seriously, injured. This kind of undervalued, exploited labor isn’t born from futuristic scientific experiments or any kind of dystopian future. It’s just ordinary people being walked all over today.

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Yet the filmmaker is too nakedly partisan for his jabs at Musk-Trump to land. Indeed, the Trump-Musk amalgam can often serve as a distraction. The deeper, more productive critique embedded in the film has to do with the mistreatment of nameless multitudes, who damage their bodies and give up their lives so that those in higher social classes can enjoy themselves. We don’t need breakthroughs like cloning to normalize the extreme exploitation of workers, because there are Mickeys all around us.

Asked in a recent interview why even his Korean-language films are so popular all over the world, Joon Ho guessed it is because “except for one or two countries, everyone’s living under capitalism — it’s a universal language”. Storytelling in space can make the familiar feel alien. That’s the brilliance of Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror masterpiece, Alien, which harnesses fear out of the anxiety of pregnancy.

In its best moments, Mickey 17, does the same: by transposing exploitation into futuristic clones, the film indicts the present-day exploitation of our fellow human beings. It’s a worthy reminder that if we leave space — or Earth for that matter — in the unchecked hands of oligarchs, we might end up doing astonishing things, even as we export our worst human instincts: greed, selfishness, and the ability to turn a blind eye.