According to Gizmodo, Elon Musk just won a years-long legal battle to reinstate his colossal $56 billion Tesla pay package. A court had thrown out that package last year after shareholders challenged its fairness. With his appeal victory, and because the value of the package has increased over time, Musk is now approximately $139 billion richer. This single legal win brings him nearly 14% closer to becoming a trillionaire. The pay package was originally what propelled him to super-billionaire status, and this ruling solidifies his position as one of the wealthiest people in history.
The Mars Mantra And Its Problems
So here’s the thing. Musk has a very public, very consistent excuse for this endless wealth accumulation. He frames it as a heroic mission: Earth is doomed, so we must become a multi-planetary species to preserve consciousness. He needs all the money possible to fund SpaceX’s mission to colonize Mars. It’s a compelling, sci-fi narrative. And look, he’s not entirely wrong about the long-term fate of Earth—eventually, the sun will expand. But that’s in about a billion years. The idea that climate change, or any near-term crisis, requires a frantic escape to Mars is just misplaced. As experts have pointed out, climate change won’t cause human extinction; it’ll make life brutally harder, and we have to fix it here. There’s no escape pod for eight billion people.
The Goofy Reality Of Mars
But let’s play along with his fantasy. The plan itself is, frankly, goofy. We’re talking about sending “combustion-powered fuel tubes” to a dead rock. Mars colonists would face lethal radiation and soil that can’t grow food without massive detoxification. Musk himself has acknowledged astronauts might die. He knows this! We all have the same Google. The timeline is the real tell, though. He’ll be pushing 60 before any crewed mission (by his own recent estimates), and in his 70s or 80s before a “self-sustaining city” exists. He’s running out of time to see his dream realized. Is it any wonder he’s now talking about etching AI-written encyclopedias on stone for Mars? It seems like flailing. The grand project is slipping beyond his lifespan, leaving behind just the pursuit of wealth.
Wealth, Inequality, And The Long View
This brings us back to the $139 billion. When you zoom out, this isn’t about saving humanity. It’s about consolidating an almost cartoonish level of wealth and power in the name of a salvation fantasy that won’t materialize for centuries, if ever. Humanity is built for survival. We’ll endure on a hot or cold Earth, with or without Teslas, for a very long time. The current era of extreme inequality will end. And if we’re lucky, maybe far in the future, we’ll figure out interstellar travel with technology we can’t yet imagine. When those future colonists read history, Musk will likely be a footnote on a list of ultra-rich guys, like others who had grand ideas. His time will end, and the species will have carried on without needing his specific, cash-fueled Mars plan.
What’s The Real Drive?
So what’s left? A man who tweets about declining fertility as a crisis while amassing a fortune that represents a staggering redistribution of resources. A man who just secured enough money to fund entire nations’ climate initiatives, all for a Mars colony that solves none of our actual, pressing problems. It’s hard not to see this as the final stage of a classic story: the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, wrapped in a grand, unachievable narrative. The legal battle was about fairness to shareholders, but the real-world impact is about power. And for now, with a slam of a gavel, Musk got a whole lot more of it. Good for him, I guess. The rest of us are still stuck on this planet, figuring out how to actually live here.
