Elon Musk’s big Mars lie
“I would like to die on Mars, just not on impact.” Thus spoke Elon Musk in a keynote session at the 2013 South by Southwest Conference. It’s a provocative statement, and not just because it conjures imagery of the world’s richest man being consumed in a fiery explosion in a place no-one would be able to hear him scream. It’s provocative because it is attached to what Musk says is the most important task facing humanity: to establish permanent human presence on a planet other than Earth.
This lofty goal is a cornerstone of the cult of personality Musk has built around himself, populated mostly by tech bros, MAGA sycophants, and those predisposed to falling victim to cryptocurrency scams. If you buy into the vision, Musk becomes a sort of messiah leading humanity to some kind of immortality.
This, of course, is fantasy. Musk is no messiah. The narrative he’s constructed around Mars, like everything else he does, serves one main purpose: making himself more wealthy and more powerful.
What Musk is proposing is not to go to Mars only for the sake of it, but to guard against the existential threat of the collapse of human society. As he put it in a post on X in 2018, “About half my money is intended to help problems on Earth & half to help establish a self-sustaining city on Mars to ensure continuation of life (of all species) in case Earth gets hit by a meteor like the dinosaurs or WW3 happens & we destroy ourselves”.
Let’s let it go that he seems to have forgotten the first bit about helping solve problems on Earth. The second part about building a city on Mars hasn’t slipped his mind at all. According to a piece in the New York Times based on private interviews and internal documents from insiders at SpaceX, in April 2024 Musk told SpaceX employees that he expects to have a million people living on Mars within two decades.
This is such a ludicrous idea it shouldn’t be worth wasting ink or pixels on. But, unfortunately, Musk is seen by many as an engineering genius, and too often his grand statements are insufficiently scrutinised. He also doubled down on it publicly on US Republican Senator Ted Cruz’s podcast in March of this year. So, let’s quickly think through what it would take to get a million people to Mars in 20 years.
SpaceX is working on Starship, a spaceship with a maximum capacity of 100 passengers, to take people to Mars on journeys that take a minimum of nine months. To get a million people there by 2045 they would need to build and launch a fully loaded Starship every day starting… in 2017. Better get a move on.
They might have a way to cut down on the number of people needing to be transported from Earth—Musk allegedly volunteered his own sperm to help boost the numbers in the new colony, according to the New York Times. Somehow finding takers on that offer seems even less likely than filling out 10,000 Starships.
It’s certainly possible that a crewed mission to Mars with a small number of people could happen within the next decade or so. But a functioning society on another planet is certainly not yet on the horizon.
If Musk actually believes it’s possible to have a million people living on Mars in less than two decades, he’s an idiot. More likely is that he knows it’s not. He’s a businessman who has a commercial interest in SpaceX appearing very important and very productive. So he’ll claim a Martian metropolis is within reach and that his company is going to be the one to make it happen to build that image.
In reality, the main purpose of SpaceX isn’t saving humanity from extinction; it’s making money. And on that metric, it’s been very successful. Through launching billionaires on space tourism flights, filling low Earth orbit with an ever-denser web of Starlink satellites and contracting out rockets to NASA and the US military to take their payloads into space, SpaceX has become the biggest company in the space industry.
SpaceX is not publicly traded and doesn’t publish its financial numbers. Bloomberg recently reported an insider deal putting its total value at US$350 billion. Profit margins are a well-guarded secret, but industry analyst estimates of its 2024 revenue are at about US$13 billion, up from US$8.7 billion in 2023. There is one well-known metric we can use to measure SpaceX’s dominance in the sector: last year, it launched more rockets into orbit than the rest of the world combined, including both private companies and state agencies.
Starlink is one of SpaceX’s most important projects. It’s an artificial satellite constellation made up of more than 8,000 satellites in orbit, with thousands more planned. For a premium price, it provides internet access practically anywhere on Earth, no matter how remote.
Reuters reported in February it also acts as communications infrastructure for a parallel constellation of US military surveillance satellites. The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the agency that runs the US’s secret spy satellite network, has launched more than 100 of them since last year on SpaceX’s rockets through the company’s Starshield unit.
The NRO’s satellites are not scientific instruments but intelligence-gathering devices that are an integral part of the US imperial machine. Far from preserving humanity, SpaceX is part of the US military industrial complex, the key aim of which is to kill and destroy more effectively. Being the biggest stakeholder in a private company so central to the world’s biggest military’s surveillance operations certainly puts Musk in a powerful position. It’s no wonder he has had (until recently) a VIP pass to the White House.
Musk is enjoying the spoils of SpaceX’s revenue streams and position of power, but it was not his own work that made him the richest person in human history. It’s the workers employed by his companies who are really to thank for that. Workers are the ones who design, build, test, develop and launch SpaceX’s rockets. They’re also a key audience for Musk’s Mars fairytale.
A 2023 investigation by Reuters revealed how the Mars fantasy is explicitly used within SpaceX to justify unsafe workplaces. More than 600 injuries of SpaceX workers since 2014 were documented, many of them swept under the rug, including amputations, eye and head injuries, and one death.
Tom Moline, a former SpaceX employee, told Reuters: “Elon’s concept that SpaceX is on this mission to go to Mars as fast as possible and save humanity permeates every part of the company. The company justifies casting aside anything that could stand in the way of accomplishing that goal, including worker safety”.
Moline was one of nine workers fired in 2022 after writing an open letter criticising a culture among SpaceX managers of dismissing employee concerns and unfairly enforcing discipline, and speaking up against Musk’s flippant public responses to sexual harassment allegations. He was told by SpaceX’s chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, that he was distracting from the goal: “Please focus on your job and the mission of SpaceX—to get humanity to Mars as quickly as possible.”
This is perhaps the most insidious effect of the “colonise Mars to save humanity” narrative. Entrenching such a cultish vision in the company acts as both a carrot and a stick for its workers: work hard and you can be part of something important; step out of line and you’re disrupting the mission. This doubtlessly puts pressure on workers to put up with unsafe workplaces, notoriously long hours, and intense deadlines.
The biggest winners from this are Musk and the other SpaceX executives. Less money and time spent on workplace safety means more productivity and more profit. That SpaceX now has its own company town, the newly established Starbase, Texas, signals a further tipping of the scales away from SpaceX workers towards their bosses.
It is undeniable that SpaceX’s workers have made impressive technical feats. That Starlink is capable of enabling global internet access is testament to that. That Musk gets to take the credit and the profit simply because he owns the company is one of the injustices of capitalism.
If SpaceX proves anything, it’s that workers are capable and willing to take on difficult problems and find solutions to them. But because of capitalism, currently their efforts go only towards enriching a select few at the top. Instead of it being free, publicly owned infrastructure, Starlink’s main functions are to generate more wealth for Musk and facilitate US imperial domination.
It is understandable that SpaceX workers would want to make a contribution to landing humans on another planet, which would genuinely be a monumental scientific achievement. But such a project exists only because one incredibly wealthy and powerful man decided that’s what he wanted to spend his money on, and only because he stood to gain from it.
Reaching Mars is possible, but so is distributing food to the world’s hungry and giving every homeless person a safe place to live. The climate crisis is presenting humanity with an immediate existential threat, and yet capitalism is incapable of addressing it.
A rational society would hit pause on any plans to explore the solar system until we’ve found solutions to the problems on Earth, as Musk will never do. Such a society would immediately reallocate the immense resources poured into building rockets, bombs and oil rigs into removing our reliance on fossil fuels and reversing the effects of climate change where we can. It would redistribute the immense wealth that already exists and make it so that no-one on Earth ever has to go hungry again.
To get to such a society, capitalism must be destroyed. The Elon Musks of the world must be overthrown and their power taken from them. A new world will need to be built based on meeting human needs instead of profit for the few.
Overthrowing capitalism, not moving to Mars, is the most urgent step in making sure humanity does not extinguish itself through climate collapse or nuclear war.
Once we have done that, then we can begin to direct the immense creative wellsprings of the working class towards scientific advancement for the genuine benefit of humanity. Then, and only then, should we set out into the stars to see what’s out there.
