Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s mission to Mars is incredible. By itself, it’s just cool as shit.

But, he said something during his presentation that stood out to me in a way few claims in a grand announcement ever do. 

He made a point of saying that any asset acquisition he makes now is solely in the interest of funding this endeavor.

That’s truly astonishing. 

Many people want to create a better world. Few people with his unique ability to deploy resources actually try.

He is currently on a mission to save humanity. 

Tesla, as much as it is a car company, is also a deeply subversive attempt to unseat petroleum (and its knock-on environmental effects) as the engine of civilization. It’s literally a gambit to save the earth.

By itself, that’s a huge undertaking. And, he’s already doing a fantastic job at it.
But, ever the engineer, he’s also looking to mitigate the risk to civilization of a single point of failure (Earth) by moving forward with a plan to make us a multi-planet species.

The yawning world wealth gap shows that nearly every person of means is content to take as much wealth as they can from the benefits of civilization. Stealing all the underpants and then sitting on a pile of underpants is essentially the strategy of those who benefit from capitalism.

Musk, on the other hand, is stealing all the underpants to make sure that there are still people to wear underpants a hundred or a thousand years from now.

The goal of capitalism — indeed, the goal of civilization — should be to ensure, first, the survival of civilization and, second, to ensure that civilization lifts the human condition as much as possible out of misery.

If the wealthy concentrated on at least the latter, civilization would be worthwhile. 

Unfortunately, they don’t. The wealthy in the past two generations at least have proven themselves no better than simple apes, indulging in acquisition for its own sake, capturing as much productivity as possible for the deplorable purpose of self-aggrandizement.

Elon Musk, I salute you. You may be one of the few people alive with power who understands what being alive is for.

P.S., I rilly, rilly want to know what you’re thinking vis-a-vis making Mars habitable.