- The SpaceX IPO and US AI strategy have more in common than is healthy
- Musk’s Mars shot: The farce that launches a thousand starships?
- Outer space is key to the future of both the communications industry and the world economy. Mars, not so much
Elon Musk’s stupid million-man Mars colony is back in the news after he confirmed that SpaceX will IPO in 2026. There’s only one problem: there will be no colony on Mars.
Reports suggest that SpaceX is shooting for a valuation of $1.5 trillion, a level matched only by Aramco in 2019. But to reach those astronomic heights, SpaceX will need more than its existing revenue streams.
That’s where the Mars colony concept comes in handy for Musk. Building it would require a new fleet of 1,000 Starship rockets per year, made by SpaceX, funded by shareholders, and then monetized in the same way Musk funds his existing space business: government cheddar. (This model is a variant of the AI valuation virtuous circle/doom spiral that I covered in last week’s Infradig, which is itself an iteration on the bubble formula used by optical networking startups back in 2000).
Despite the growth of its Starlink division, around 40% of SpaceX’s 2024 revenue came from activities such as ferrying NASA astronauts to the International Space Station and launching not-so-secret spy satellites for the Department of Defense and CIA.
Musk knows that the promise of bringing some American-brand freedom to Mars will be catnip to any U.S. administration, and that its immense financial support, combined with enthusiastic contributions from a host of dumb-money investors, will propel SpaceX’s stock price to record-breaking heights.
Welcome to the Muskiverse
This mountain of cash is supposed to enable Musk to fund his Mars mission, which he says is essential to the survival of the human race. He argues that humanity is at a crossroads: either we perish on Earth in a mass extinction event or we become a spacefaring civilization. And Mars is the first step on that intergalactic journey, he claims.
It’s all nonsense, of course.
It would be far easier and cheaper to “fix” planet Earth for everyone than to treat it as a disposable BicTM lighter to enable one person in every 10,000 to live on Mars (while everyone else dies, presumably?).
And if you really want to live off-world, your best option is an O'Neill Cylinder, obviously, not a Mars colony. (Note: Jeff Bezos likes the cylinder idea and it’s absolutely vital, as a species, that we band together and don’t let him build one.)
But also, and this is important, Mars is not “livable.” At all.
Even if you ignore its remoteness, lack of heat (-60°C), atmosphere (1% of Earth), oxygen (trace levels), or gravity (38% of Earth), Mars is constantly bombarded by lethal levels of space radiation, forcing anyone who goes there to live underground, like a coypu.
To paraphrase President Trump — Mars is a "shithole" planet. Any one of its characteristics will kill you. Combined, they mean it is not a survivable environment for one person, let alone the million people Musk envisions living there by mid-century.
The fact is, anyone who actually goes to Mars will die there, in pain, bitterly regretting their decision to Elonigrate as they stare at the wall of their fetid underground Martian burrow, picking at their melanoma scabs while sucking on a sachet of the tasteless algae gruel that barely sustains their atrophying muscles and osteoporotic bones.
I don’t think Musk really believes his own Martian rhetoric. It’s more likely this is all just part of his Bobby-big-bollocks, self-aggrandizing blather — a cynical play to add another trillion dollars to his net worth and then quietly move on to something else.
U.S. delusionism vs. Chinese pragmatism
It’s a classic example of U.S. tech delusionism. And what concerns me is that this trait extends beyond space exploration to encompass America’s artificial intelligence strategy as well.
U.S. Big Tech executives view today’s AI as a stepping-stone towards their ultimate goal: artificial general intelligence (AGI) — a hypothetical technology capable of understanding, learning, and applying knowledge across a wide range of tasks at a level outstripping human cognition.
Contrast that with China, which sees AI as a practical tool for building a new, highly efficient yet human-centric digital industrial economy. This difference is reflected in where each superpower sees humans fitting in the picture. U.S. Big Tech bosses envision a future in which robots replace humans. China is building a present in which the robots make humans more efficient.
The endgame of China’s AI strategy — which it crafted in 2006, almost two decades before the U.S. — is economic dominance at best, and, at worst, a nation left with world-class power and water infrastructure.
The endgame of the U.S. tech world’s blind charge toward AGI looks very different. Best case, they can’t get AGI to work; Middle case, life gets markedly worse for everyone who isn’t a billionaire; Worst case, a global extinction event exactly like the ones Musk uses to justify his Mars expedition.
Reckless endangerment
It is the combination of extreme irresponsibility with a complete absence of common sense that makes both America’s AI strategy and Musk’s space gamble so disturbing.
Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and OpenAI are investing billions to invent something — AGI — without knowing what it will do. It may be ok. On the other hand, maybe it turns out to be the equivalent of unleashing a self-mutating airborne plague in the middle of Central Park and pretending it’s “progress.” Either way, the hyperscalers don’t care.
The same total lack of common sense applies to Mars exploration. There is zero commercial reason to go to Mars (it’s a rock; no indigenous life). In contrast, our very own moon is replete with Helium-3 (He-3), the non-radioactive isotope that may well be a holy grail fuel for nuclear fusion, and chock full of the rare earth minerals needed to forge the next digital industrial revolution.
If the U.S. were serious about securing its forever status as a superpower, it would have already landed a battalion of unmanned (no meat-puppets!) fully autonomous regolith excavators and deep-surface drills on the Mare Tranquillitatis to send tons of He-3 miracle gas back to Earth. That’s a 10-year, trillion-dollar effort, but all the technology to do it exists today. It’s also significantly less expensive than President Trump’s absurd Golden Dome missile defense project; another case study in U.S. tech delusionism that relies on technology that doesn’t yet exist and won’t work even when it does.
Ego über alles
What the U.S. needs is a new technology rationale in which strategy is separated from Big Tech ego and strategies are formulated to deliver defined, demonstrable benefits. Instead, we get Musk, God of Bore.
In the 1997 sci-fi movie Contact, humanity’s first signal to the cosmos turns out to be Hitler’s 1936 Olympic speech — the first broadcast powerful enough to escape Earth. Musk is aspiring to make a real-world sequel, starring himself, in which our first off-world emissary isn’t a representative of humanity at its best, but an Ur-fascist trillionaire techno-messianic narcissist.
Musk’s Mars colony is a grotesque symbol of the worst Tech Bro instincts: escape over repair, spectacle over responsibility, colonization over stewardship — ego über alles. The U.S. must recognize these characteristics in its AI strategy and steer it back toward a path that benefits the US economy and the world’s population as a whole.
Steve Saunders is a British-born communications analyst, investor and digital media entrepreneur with a career spanning decades.
Opinion pieces from industry experts, analysts or our editorial staff do not represent the opinions of Fierce Network.