Elon Musk is very predictable
He just did a thing that I have previously pointed out he does at times such as this.
(Hello. In addition to this newsletter post about Elon Musk, you might also be interested in this Daily Beast story I just wrote about monkeypox, the new scary virus you can get.)
As you’re probably aware, there’s a Business Insider story going around today about how in 2016 Elon Musk was accused of making his employee look at his erect penis while she was on the clock, and trying to get her to give him a happy ending massage by offering to buy her a horse.
As I have previously pointed out, when criticized or in any way cornered, Elon Musk does this thing where he laments that if he’s not allowed to do whatever he wants, humanity ostensibly won’t get to go to Mars. It’s like he’s some deadbeat dad, and we’re his kids, and we’re supposed to stop yelling at him for his drunk driving, and show some gratitude for a vacation he claims he’s eventually going to take us on. I called it “playing the Mars card.” And I wrote a long essay about how it isn’t a plausible excuse even if one cares about space travel, and how it reveals some not-very-deep thinking on his part.
Earlier today, after finding out that the erection-massage-horse story was coming out, he played the Mars Card:
So now that I have a lot more readers than I did when I wrote it, here’s that same essay again for you to read and enjoy:
One day in the distant future, when human civilization spans many planets, perhaps our descendants will look back on the era of early space exploration and be puzzled by a stretch of time in the late 20th century when many Earth governments seemed to lose interest in space travel. Perhaps they’ll note that only the effort of an eccentric South African-born American risk-taker, working in the private sector, could inspire humanity to get back on the horse and regain its sense of adventure.
The South African guy I’m talking about is, of course, Mike Melvill, the pilot of the first private sector suborbital space flight in 2004. But naturally, a lot of the credit will also go to the tech billionaire who funded that flight. Obviously I mean the late Paul Allen. But perhaps future humans will also include a footnote about another South African guy named Elon Musk, founder of a rocket company funded largely by delivering weapons for the United States military, who once stranded a bunch of colonists on a dead rock called Mars.
I found Liftoff, a new book about SpaceX by Eric Berger, a reporter I admire a lot, to be a more substantive piece of Elon Musk merchandise than the biography/hagiography Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance. It’s about the early days of SpaceX, and it goes into great detail about the many non-Musk individuals who helped create Elon Musk’s rockets. But both books stop short of disrupting Musk’s primary narrative about himself: basically that Elon Musk is just a plucky nerd who nerded his way into a hundred billion nerd bucks on his way to becoming the savior of humanity, LOL!
In Liftoff, Berger uncritically repeats one of Musk’s signature phrases again and again: that Musk’s primary goal in life is to make humans a “multiplanetary species.” Musk, Berger writes toward the end of the book, “remains the same passionate, nerdy, driven person who founded SpaceX to make humans a multiplanetary species.” It’s a phrase Elon Musk seems to have started using during the inception of SpaceX, sometime around 2001 according to the Vance book, to curry favor among his fellow influential space nerds like engineer Jim Cantrell, whose credibility Musk needed to borrow in order to get SpaceX going. Musk even wrote a long piece of commentary for the publication New Space in 2017 called "Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species” (more on which later). He whipped out the phrase most recently on Thursday of last week in a conversation with entrepreneur Peter Diamandis.
Thanks to Musk, the phrase “multiplanetary species” has undergone an unseemly evolution over the last couple decades. It could once be used to evoke a Star Trek-like vision of humanity as a cooperative species, as opposed to a collection of factions in competition with one another. For instance, in 2005, when an international relations professor named Jonathan Fuller Galloway decried “win-lose and lose-lose” dynamics in a report for The International Academy of Astronautics and The European Space Agency, he speculated that “non-zero-sumness will arrive when humanity becomes a multiplanetary species and when we recognize ourselves as one people rather than conflictual subsets of our species.” Instead, the perceived imperative to colonize another planet is now little more than an excuse Elon Musk uses when someone criticizes him. He apparently sees himself as the protagonist of humanity’s Martian mission, so everyone, he seems to think, should get the fuck out of his way.
He’s playing the Mars Card, if you will.
(That’s all I’m going to copy-paste, but you can read the rest here)
I guess Musk didn't read your essay, but I do hope a lot of people do. You've uncovered one of his tricks.
Watching Musk from a safe distance is like watching a play and not knowing when it will turn tragic, the hero crashing down.
He seems to stacking up problems that would land most of us in poverty or jail and maneuvering himself in the political world to ensure that when his Waterloo comes, he will be banished to his own fortified, self sufficient pleasure island.