Radu Orban

This isn't exactly a lie, but it's not the whole truth. Sustainability is a side effect. Everything Musk does is actually focused on colonizing Mars. Not just SpaceX. Everything. SpaceX gets you to Mars, but there's a lot of things you need once you get there. First is the existing human tech stack. That requires raw tonnage lifted out of the gravity well. The point of SpaceX isn't just going to orbit and beyond. Existing rocket tech did that just fine The point is mass cargo lift. What's unprecedented about SpaceX is Starship. Starship is a mass hauler on an unprecedented level. And reusable rocket boosters, returning to the pad and being caught by the tower are about cheap and frequent launches. The idea is to create a massive pipeline to high orbit, stage the whole human toolchain there, then take it to Mars in as short a time as possible. But that's not all you need. Mars requires new technologies, for sustaining civilization in a new environment. Musk's other companies are all focused on developing them. Tesla is electric cars, and those are nice on Earth, but on Mars you need them. Even if @valaratomics succeeds in harnessing radiothermal energy to make gasoline out of carbon dioxide and water, which isn't as crazy as it sounds, you still can't use do it on Mars to any major purpose. Because you don't have oxygen in the atmosphere to burn things with. So you need electric vehicles. You also need electric infrastructure, and Tesla isn't just electric cars... it's power infrastructure, batteries, and solar panels. Solar power, on Earth, is pretty stupid. You're at the bottom of a thick atmosphere soup, with weather. Its only useful purpose is grid independence. Otherwise, you're way better off with radiothermal steam generators. In space, different story. And, while Mars isn't as close to the sun as Earth, there's not a lot of atmosphere to get in the way. This doesn't make it great, but there's very few other options. No moving water. No wind. Can't burn chemicals. Mars has active volcanoes, but geothermal is highly site-dependent, and unlikely to meet all your needs. Fissionables could maybe be mined from asteroids, but that's an external dependency with a lot of unknowns. And we don't know that Mars necessarily has an accessible native stock. So, while radiothermal energy is the long-term answer for Mars as well as Earth, solar capability will be needed to bridge the gap. That's Musk's real goal behind Tesla. Starlink makes communication satellites. This is a hugely profitable business for SpaceX, and that fuels more rocket development, but it also serves a primary Martian purpose... communications on Mars, and between Mars and Earth, which will be critically important in the early years of a colony. The Boring Company, if you consider it only from an Earth-based perspective, is Musk's only retarded idea. Tunneling doesn't make sense on Earth unless you're dealing with specific terrain that makes it the only sensible option, such as across the English Channel. Otherwise, building up is cheaper than building down. The Boring Company spent a lot of cash researching traffic tunnels that really didn't make any sense, and went nowhere, and they aren't even nearly profitable. But... what if this was all R&D for Mars? What if the intent all along wasn't to make a profit on Earth, but to develop technologies for building under the Martian surface, subsidized by Musk's other, more profitable ventures? Suddenly that idea doesn't seem so retarded anymore. Mars gets a daily dose of solar radiation that's guaranteed to cause existential problems for anyone who goes outside without one hell of an umbrella. But building under even a few meters of solid material makes that whole problem go away. So instead of bringing, or building, lots of heavy shielding, you just dig. xAI and robots are also pretty easy to explain. A Mars colony will need a lot of labor, and it helps if most of it can be done by workers who don't need to eat or breathe. So, yes, Musk's technical ventures line up with Mars? But what about buying Twitter? What about getting involved in politics? How does that help a Mars colony? Simple. A Mars colony doesn't happen without a viable launch pad, both literally and metaphorically. This means that Musk's companies have to stay viable, he has to retain control of them, and they have to be protected from political interference. This makes buying Twitter a no-brainer. It's where American political discourse happens. If he continued to allow the future left-wing administration in the tradition of Obama and Biden to censor free-market advocates out of the public discourse simply by picking up the phone to an ideologically-aligned company that doesn't care about free speech, then not only will the FAA continue to get in SpaceX's way and force him to do silly things like kidnap and molest seals, eventually radical leftist midwits like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez will spearhead calls to nationalize SpaceX itself. That's if the democrats didn't crash the economy first. Becoming involved in politics is a logical extension of this. By thwarting their efforts at social media control, Musk had blocked the left. And the left has no principles, only hatred, envy, and an insatiable greed for ever more money and power. Once he thwarted the least of their whims, he became their enemy whether he wanted to be or not, and they would harm him any way they could. So they had to be removed from power. In fact, they had to be removed from power even if they weren't hostile, because they were bankrupting America. Fraud, waste, corruption, and frivolous spending have driven the federal budget into previously unexplored territories of unsustainable debt. Pretty soon leftist regimes would have had no choice but to hyperinflate that debt out of existence, because the entire GDP would eventually be insufficient to pay it. This, of course, is Zimbabwification. And I don't see anyone launching rockets from Zimbabwe, do you? Remember that Musk was originally South African. He saw what happens when governments care more about performative expressions of alleged social justice than they do about maintaining a high-trust, law and order society with a functioning economy and technological stack. South Africa isn't launching any rockets, either. They're confiscating land from white farmers at gunpoint. Next stop, famine. Economic collapse, Zimbabwification, and famine do not coexist with functional space programs, public or private. Musk is a busy man, and probably didn't want to become involved in politics... but he had no choice when politics became involved in him. Stumping for the election of Donald, and implementing DOGE, are necessities. Musk needs America to survive so he has someplace to build and launch rockets from, and something to put on them. The man has one mission in life. He chose it the moment he became rich enough to stop asking himself questions like "how do I take care of myself and my family?" and start asking questions like "what do I want to build for the future of the world?" I like the plan. I'm pro-tech, pro-humanity, and pro-not-staying-on-one-tiny-speck-and-waiting-for-the-sun-to-kill-us. I wouldn't really call Mars "sustainable abundance", though... except in the sense that it helps you mine asteroids, climb the Kardashev ladder, and achieve a superhuman technological singularity. Which, now that I think about it, I suppose you could call... "Sustainable abundance for all" Even if that's just a bit of an understatement.