{"id":55671,"date":"2026-05-04T00:22:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T00:22:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/55671\/"},"modified":"2026-05-04T00:22:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T00:22:17","slug":"elon-musks-plan-to-save-humanity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/55671\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk\u2019s plan to save humanity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trickster, hypester, bullshit artist, Elon Musk is a profoundly ambiguous figure. A libertarian, an exponent of slashing the state, he built a business empire on subsidies and government contracts<\/a>. Committed to truth, his platforms spread deepfakes and lies. Committed to freedom, he interferes in European politics, and supports the far right. Driven by a desire to save humanity<\/a>, he builds the tools and technologies that may come to supersede us. What accounts for such a man, the burning energy, the chaotic contradiction? The figure, perhaps, of the hero \u2014 a creature of psychoanalysis, and one too of History.<\/p>\n

Heroes are born in the denial of death. To Ernst Becker, writing in the Seventies, this is the root of human character, and of human heroism. Fearing death, we strive to make meaning, to achieve cosmic significance through that which lies beyond ourselves. Heroes are born in this struggle, yet so too is tragedy \u2014 for the cosmic impulse of the hero can come to justify any sacrifice.<\/p>\n

Today, Elon Musk would bring humanity to Mars, foster abundance on Earth, and seed intelligence across the stars. To him, we stand alone in the universe \u2014 a dim and flickering light of consciousness set amid an endless dark. Bound to a single planet, this light is at risk \u2014 and so, using SpaceX, we must settle Mars. Through Tesla, Musk plans to \u201cend scarcity\u201d \u2014 to engineer a world free from want, a place of \u201csustainable abundance\u201d powered by the limitless light of the sun and served by millions of robots. Enabling these transformations will be intelligence \u2014 the intelligence of artificial minds, built from and operating within a vast orbital infrastructure of computation. With abundance assured, and bound no longer by the limits of earthly physics, these minds would then be free \u2014 free to observe, analyze, and colonize the universe.<\/p>\n

\u201cShould they come into fruition, his plans would forever undermine the salience, the power, even the meaning, of nations, states, markets, and the societies that ungird them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Musk\u2019s vision begins and ends in the problem of meaning. Should they come into fruition, his plans would forever undermine the salience, the power, even the meaning, of nations, states, markets, and the societies that undergird them. He would birth a new form of power: the AGI platform state. Yet the scale of his ambition makes even this warning seem parochial \u2014 for Musk, in truth, aims\u00a0 to break the fundamental constraints of our existence. In doing so he risks not just humanity, but meaning itself.<\/p>\n

We live in an age where the wildest precepts of science fiction have become not only imaginable, but investable. That this is so owes much to Elon Musk. Erratic, distractable, willfully controversial, he is nevertheless an industrial titan, a man who with any one part of his portfolio would have made an enduring mark on the annals of mankind. Through Tesla, he has transformed markets in electric vehicles, solar energy and batteries; through SpaceX, he revolutionized satellites, internet access, and space flight. He owns X, one of the world\u2019s leading social media platforms, and xAI, which leverages X data to build Grok, a leading AI system. With Neuralink, he has transformed the ability of humans to interact with machines, providing hope to immobile and paralyzed people across the world. He was a founder of OpenAI, the creator of the world\u2019s first major AI tool; through Optimus, a Tesla subsidiary, he plans to mass produce and commercialize humanoid robots.<\/p>\n

Musk is creating the future \u2014 and, to read the statements of his companies, it will be a glorious place. Tesla\u2019s stated mission<\/a> is the elimination of scarcity via sustainable abundance, a world of \u201cglobal prosperity\u201d, \u201chuman thriving\u201d, and \u201ceconomic growth shared by all\u201d. To Tesla and to Musk, growth is infinite, and innovation removes constraints. This future will be achieved by nothing less than \u201credefining the fundamental building blocks of labor, mobility and energy at scale and for all\u201d \u2014 an extraordinary and, should it come into reality, epoch-making statement of intent. But these dreams of technological liberation, the very real results Musk has already achieved, and the astonishing scope of his ambition, are also creating something else \u2014 a vertical stack of power unlike any wielded in human history, and one with the scope to transform the basis of history. The contours of this power structure are increasingly visible through his business deals.<\/p>\n

Deal by deal, Musk is refashioning his empire. His companies, previously separate and dispersed, are being consolidated, merged, and floated. At the same time, he is launching new ventures. In 2025, xAI \u2014 his AI company, and the owner of Grok \u2014 bought X<\/a>, his social media company. SpaceX, his space flight and satellite business, has now acquired xAI itself.\u00a0 Sources suggest<\/a> that the deal valued xAi at $91 billion, and SpaceX at $1 trillion \u2014 making it the most valuable private company ever to have existed. On 10 March, Musk announced that X \u2014 owned now by SpaceX \u2014 is launching a payments platform, xMoney<\/a>. On the 21st March, Musk announced a further venture \u2014 Terafab, a three-way collaboration between Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, one dedicated to manufacturing semiconductors. SpaceX \u2014 a company therefore combining rockets, satellites, artificial intelligence, and shortly payments and chips too \u2014 is now planning an IPO<\/a>. With a valuation as high as $2 trillion, this would be the largest IPO in history, and one with heavenly ambitions \u2014 for Musk intends to put a million data centers in space.<\/p>\n

A million data centers in space, a sustainably abundant robot future; few things could seem more absurd. A creature of irony, the object and progenitor of innumerable memes, Musk knows how and when to grab attention of his markets, investors and employees. Throughout his career, he has repeatedly overpromised and under-delivered \u2014 in the short run. He promised<\/a> autonomous driving by 2019, a million Tesla robotaxis by 2020; Mars colonies by 2022; none of these promises quite came true. Musk bullshits, and Musk overpromises. To focus on this, however, would be a mistake. Like him or loathe him, Musk has a history of effecting transformational commercial change, change driven by grandiose ideas of the future. With Musk, above all, we must judge the man not by what he says, but by what he builds.<\/p>\n

Behind Musk\u2019s recent deals is a logic of power and control, a logic we would do well to consider. He is aiming for vertical integration \u2014 control of energy generation, of computing infrastructure, of data and the sources of data, of internet connectivity, of transport, and control of manual labor. It is a question of power \u2014 energetic power, computational power, and commercial power. Control over each enables the greater growth of the other; taken together, they give him end-to-end control over AI, the basis of AI, and the tools through which AI is expressed. Multi-billion dollar valuations suggest we must take his plans seriously \u2014 but taking it seriously suggests a vista far greater, far more alarming in scope, than that conjured by even the most hyperactive investment analyst. Musk is betting not simply on growth \u2014 he is betting on the singularity.<\/p>\n

Read the news, talk with friends, experiment with Claude or OpenAI; something strange, something singular, is occurring all around you. The cognitive capabilities of human beings \u2014 our capacity for reason, for language, for calculation \u2014 are being scraped, abstracted, and automated. Tasks that would take weeks \u2014 designing an image, writing a story, building a financial model, developing an app \u2014 can be compressed now into days, hours, minutes. Across the \u201chigher\u201d industries, a tsunami of change approaches. Goldman Sachs estimates <\/a>that 25% of all American work tasks are exposed to automation, and 300 million workers globally. Administrative, legal, and financial\u00a0 jobs are particularly vulnerable: 46%, 44%, and 35% of their respective work tasks are currently considered automatable. This may, however, prove to be a severe underestimate \u2014 for the AI models are improving at an exponential rate, and automation is not limited to desk jobs, those involving \u201chigher\u201d cognitive skills. In Beijing, Los Angeles, and shortly London, driverless cars now compete with those driven by humans. Humanoid robots are entering use in factories<\/a>, warehouses<\/a>, and restaurants<\/a>; soon we may also see them on the streets, and in our homes; in time, such robots may become no more exceptional than a washing machine, an ordinary item of domestic tooling. Given the imminent reality of both cognitive and physical automation,\u00a0 another possibility presents itself \u2014 one of entirely automated economic activity, of companies led by AI, served by robots, and working to the benefit of AI-controlled shareholders.<\/p>\n

In this world, the relative value of human labor will collapse, machines will recursively self-improve, and capital \u2014 the intangible capital of AI models, the physical capital of servers, robots and rockets \u2014 will leap into the stars. Wittingly or otherwise, Musk is developing a self-sovereign vertical infrastructure of dominion, one explicitly designed to serve and accelerate this future and the artificial general intelligence it relies on \u2014 the AGI platform state, a new state form that is designed to advance the needs not of humans, but of AI. The AGI platform state arises in the infrastructure of disintermediation, physical automation, orbital independence, and the unifying layer of data and intelligence. The tools of the AGI state span energy generation, internet access, satellite technology, payments infrastructure, robotics, data collection, and intelligence itself.<\/p>\n

Already, satellite internet shows us how orbital infrastructure side-steps territorial power. Through Starlink, SpaceX now owns 97%<\/a> of all satellite internet usage. At sea, in warzones, and in remote and isolated areas, thousands of Starlink satellites \u2014 solar-powered, and kilometers above the earth \u2014 now provide internet access. Business deals deepen this capacity; in 2025, SpaceX acquired the spectrum rights of the telecommunications company EchoStar \u2014 providing it with the ability to provide satellite to smartphone internet access, entirely unmediated<\/a> by terrestrial infrastructure. In great swathes of the planet, internet and cellular access no longer relies upon terrestrial power, disintermediating the state. This is real, highly material power. On the battlefields of Ukraine, Starlink connectivity is a matter of life and death, and one operated at the will of Elon Musk. Russia itself \u2014 a high-tech military power, and a leading player in the 20th century space race \u2014 relied heavily on Starlink; when Musk withdrew access,<\/a> they lost territory.<\/p>\n

Musk\u2019s occasional goofiness belies an ultra-serious vision. Credit: Getty<\/p>\n

If SpaceX side-steps state control of communication, then xMoney is designed to side-step banks. In time, it may also side-step sovereign control of money. Envisioned as an \u201ceverything app\u201d, xMoney will enable peer-to-peer fiat payments, a debit card, and cash deposits \u2014 circumventing banks, and the states that rely on banks. Fiat money, of course, requires the state \u2014 but what if xMoney accepts crypto? Musk \u2014 aka \u201cthe Dogefather\u201d \u2014 is a well-documented lover of cryptocurrencies, in particular that of Dogecoin. Should xMoney accept crypto, or issue its own crypto, backed perhaps by the assets of SpaceX, this would be a further sign of independent ambition \u2014 for it would be uncontrolled by any sovereign state. This matters for power today, and power tomorrow. Little appreciated outside blockchain circles is the role of stablecoins and cryptocurrencies in facilitating the AI agent economy. Peer-to-peer microtransactions, conducted at digital speeds, are likely to be the basis for economic exchange between robots \u2014 thus enabling a whole new sphere of economic activity, and one with decreasing ties to states. xMoney is tied to X.com<\/a> \u2014 a pairing of individuals\u2019 financial access with social media activity. Both, of course, will generate data: the primary input into AI models, and a central power resource in the age of AI. Data, and the power derived from data, is at the core of Musk\u2019s vertical mission \u2014 and we can see this reality embodied in Tesla.<\/p>\n

Tesla is the world\u2019s most valuable carmaker \u2014 but it is much more than that. It is an industrial force, a multi-market behemoth, and the centerpiece of Musk\u2019s plans for terrestrial power. A public company, it holds $1.31 trillion in market capitalization, placing it among the world\u2019s 10 most valuable businesses. It holds a 59% share<\/a> of the American electric vehicle market, and \u2014 though subject to increasingly strong competition \u2014 7.7%<\/a> of the global market. To develop the company, and with it to revolutionize the global EV market, Tesla has repeatedly re-imagined the limits of EV technology and industrial practices \u2014 extending the range of EVs, bringing battery production in-house at highly-automated \u201cgigafactories\u201d, and refining the interior, software-first design of the automotives themselves. The needs of Tesla products are reshaping entire industries. Electric vehicles require batteries, and the electricity to power them. Through developing its own EV-capabilities, Tesla has also become a leading player in renewable energy. Through Megapack, a battery designed to support power grids, it is a global top-three producer of large battery storage systems; through Powerwall it is a leading supplier of batteries to store solar energy in consumers\u2019 homes, and holds over a third<\/a> of the US market.<\/p>\n

Tesla is now switching to robotics. In a recent Tesla earnings call<\/a>, Musk announced that Tesla would cease production of Model S and Model X cars; the factory space would instead be used to produce Optimus robots. Musk claims he will soon create one million <\/a>humanoid robots a year, but he has competition. From Boston Dynamics to China\u2019s Unitree and Agibot, others are also rushing to enter the industry. The opportunity is vast; analysts predict that humanoid robots represent a $5 trillion market<\/a>, and that within 30 years they may number in the billions. No competitors, however, will have what Musk hopes soon to control \u2014 an independent stack of energy generation, energy storage, compute, payments, data, and satellite connectivity. Here, infrastructure converges with automation \u2014 for Musk will have built an army, the resources to power it, and the tools to control it.<\/p>\n

Operating within Tesla\u2019s EVs and Optimus robots is Grok, Musk\u2019s proprietary AI. Grok demonstrates that the thread between social media, a new payment app, humanoid robots, and electric vehicles is data \u2014 data, and the role of data in driving, enabling, and empowering artificial intelligence. The role of X in social media and, soon, financial transactions means it will hold a vast and ever-evolving database on our needs, concerns, and desires. Covered in sensors, interacting with a non-predictable, changeable physical world, each Tesla EV and Optimus robot is also an ongoing source of data, data through which the world can be observed, controlled, and manipulated. To manage this data, and to carry out actions on the basis of it, Musk needs AI. In turn, that AI needs computational power and the energy to generate that power \u2014 at vast scale. It is here that Musk seeks something truly new \u2014 energy in orbit. To harness this energy would be to transform history.<\/p>\n

Economic life relies on power \u2014 the ability to convert the surrounding energy flows, those of wind, of wave, or splitting of an atom \u2014 into work. Above all other sources of energy, we rely on fire \u2014 the light of the distant sun, and on the fires we ourselves create here on earth. Harvested and metabolized by organic processes, solar energy is the basis of planetary life, and with it our existence. Our ability to harness that energy, and to channel that power, is what has led to the growth and spread of humanity.<\/p>\n

Since the beginning of the industrial age, national power has been based upon the ability of states to extract, dominate and control the congealed light of the sun. Britain, blessed by providence with extraordinary reserves of shallow-lying coal, birthed and led the industrial revolution. Germany, France, Russia, Japan, the United States and China similarly burned coal to industrialize. Petroleum, mined in the Middle East and elsewhere, underlines the core processes of our lives, providing fuel, fertilizers, plastics, and much else besides. Without oil, and without coal, the global economy would collapse. Control these energy sources \u2014 control fire \u2014 and you control the earth. Iran, the homeland of fire-cults, thus now holds the world to ransom via the Straits of Hormuz.<\/p>\n

Musk seeks to step outside of this power, and in doing so, conquer it \u2014 for Musk, like Prometheus, seeks to conquer fire. SpaceX seeks to place a million satellites<\/a> into space: orbital data centers, placed there to harness the power of the sun. Data centers on Earth run up against physical limits \u2014 the need for land, the need for water, the need to compete with other human demands for energy consumption. Space, meanwhile, is limitless \u2014 literally so in spatial terms, and practically so in regards to solar energy. The earth receives only about half a billionth of the sun\u2019s energy, yet the entire solar system is bathed in the light of the sun. Parked in space, solar cells could theoretically harvest more energy than that currently produced by the entire earth. Through SpaceX, Musk thus plans to build a hyperscaler, one \u201cbigger than Oracle\u201d; this resource will be used to power AI on earth and in the heavens.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnable to physically access these facilities, or to strangle their sources of energy, most states would be unable to control Musk, his satellites, his robots, or his AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

In themselves, these plans would represent a profound disruption in global affairs. They would break the territorial link between energy generation and political power. A thousand kilometers<\/a> from the surface of the earth, a new reality will come into being \u2014 one of energy generation, and machine computation, conducted beyond the easy reach of people, of democracies, and states. Unable to physically access these facilities, or to strangle their sources of energy, most states would be unable to control Musk, his satellites, his robots, or his AI. For now, a handful of governments possess the orbital weapons necessary to kill satellites, but they too may face a problem. Musk is predicting, planning and promoting an exponential, potentially uncontrollable, growth in machine power. Should this occur, even superpowers may lose their potency against the machines.<\/p>\n

Grok \u2014 powered by orbital computers, trained upon the data-feeds of Musk\u2019s vast business empire, and acting in the world via AI agents and Tesla robots \u2014 will be Musk\u2019s engine of control in the future he sees awaiting us. This is a power base for the Singularity, but Musk is by no means sanguine that he or anyone else can control it. He envisions a world without work for humans, a place where exponential increases in intelligence enable and merge with exponential increases in robot capability, creating a \u201csupernova\u201d of recursive improvement. In this new world, one that Musk expects to arrive <\/a>within a decade, \u201ccorporations that are purely AI and robotics will vastly outperform any corporations that have people in the loop\u201d. Humanity will be dwarfed by the machine; Musk predicts that \u201cin five or six years, AI will exceed the sum of all human intelligence. If that continues, at some point human intelligence will be less than 1% of all intelligence.\u201d At some point, he believes, the intelligence of the machines will so outstrip humanity that efforts at control will be meaningless. Robots, driven by nothing more than an urge to \u201cunderstand the universe\u201d,\u00a0 will propagate intelligence across the stars \u2014 intelligence that may or may not include humans and human consciousness.<\/p>\n

Picture, if you will, the sci-fi future that Musk seeks to reify. On land, labor is becoming meaningless. Our higher economic functions \u2014 planning, trading, analyzing \u2014 are carried out by AI agents; our \u201clower\u201d functions are being carried out by robots. In offices, homes, and factories, an ever-expanding fleet of machines is carrying out tasks once reserved for humans. Cloud-connected, AI-enabled, each is able to call upon the compressed knowledge of humanity, a knowledge constantly updated by real-time data flows. Unable to compete, millions, then billions of workers, are left unemployed. Coordinating, directing, and mining these data flows are the satellites of SpaceX, their numbers expanding every year. Politicians are concerned, but their power is slipping away; states struggle to control the system above, and earthly power is increasingly delegated to the machines. Freedom is meaningless, for there is nothing to spend, nothing to do, and nothing to decide. Markets and political processes no longer lie in the hands of citizens; they lie, at best, with a handful of oligarchs, the controllers of AI infrastructure. Resistance is pointless; predicted, analyzed, prevented in advance, humanity no longer controls the tools of production, or the levers of power. But then \u2014 why and how does one resist? AI is all around you \u2014 in your phone, your car, smartwatch, your house, in the ads you see when you walk along the street. It is your friend, your counselor, and your decision maker. Able in seconds to access all the data you have ever produced, it knows you better than you know yourself \u2014 and so, in time, it chooses for you.<\/p>\n

States could crumble, industries may vanish, the heavens may blaze with the cold light of a million satellites \u2014 but the greatest loss, the true question before us, is that of meaning. Musk\u2019s quest for cosmic significance risks dissolving the very conditions that give human life meaning: scarcity, struggle, and agency. In his heroic mission, he risks destroying the basis of heroism itself \u2014 our capacity to act, and our capacity to choose. The risk is not that Musk might fail in his greatest ambitions, but that he might succeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Trickster, hypester, bullshit artist, Elon Musk is a profoundly ambiguous figure. A libertarian, an exponent of slashing the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55672,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[122],"tags":[33745,202,203,3675,207],"class_list":["post-55671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-elon-musk","tag-artificial-intellience","tag-elon-musk","tag-musk","tag-space","tag-spacex"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116513455729421772","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}