What do you do when one of your rockets explodes on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, and when someone dies at the wheel of one of your company’s cars while it is set to self-driving mode? If your name is Elon Reeve Musk, you hardly miss a beat.
Catastrophes that would derail lesser mortals seem to have barely registered with the South African-born technology entrepreneur, 45, who is head of electric car company Tesla Motors and private space company SpaceX, as well as chairman of solar power concern SolarCity.
Mr Musk still resolutely claims that his driverless car technology is saving many more lives than it puts at risk. And this week he brushed aside the rocket setback to lay out his most improbable-sounding plan yet: putting humans on the surface of Mars by 2025.
It is all in service of a higher purpose. To a man whose thought exercises can sound like science fiction, populating other planets is the only way to insure mankind’s future against the risk of an extinction-level disaster on earth.
“To some extent we are life’s agents,” he mused when announcing the plan. “We can bring life as we know it and breathe life into Mars.”
His self-appointed role as humanity’s saviour does not sit well with everyone. At a time of soaring Silicon Valley self-confidence, Mr Musk’s hubris looms as large as anyone’s. And the risks and long-term consequences of the technologies he is developing stir misgivings.
“Elon Musk is a great visionary and a great inventor, and you have to admire his ambition and his moxie,” says Patrick Lin, philosophy professor and head of the emerging sciences group at California Polytechnic. “But it does seem he has a blind spot for ethical issues and their impact.”
Putting humans on Mars, he adds, could spread our shortcomings through the solar system: “It sounds like we’re going to be exporting our problems to another rock.”
The electric car and space travel entrepreneur is not the sort to be held back by such reservations. Like the late Steve Jobs, who was renowned for a “reality distortion field” that drew others into his vision of the possible, Mr Musk has a reputation for inspiring and driving his workers to achieve the improbable.
“The key to Elon’s magic is he puts forward a very bold, clear objective,” says Peter Diamandis, a fellow space entrepreneur. “He has the wealth, if not to complete the project, then to get the ball rolling.” Will anything hold him back? “The only thing he checks is, is this constrained by the laws of physics?” says Mr Diamandis. “If it isn’t, he’ll do it.”
It also helps to have a record that includes some of the most significant milestones in electric cars and private space flight, along with a personal fortune estimated at $12bn.
Mr Musk is almost as famous for his complex personal life as for his wealth and ambition. His second wife, British actor Talulah Riley, this year filed for divorce for a second time, and he has five sons from his first marriage.
He moved to Canada aged 18 and later took US citizenship. After two degrees, in physics and economics, he arrived in California in the mid-1990s to study for a PhD but dropped out within days to try the start-up world of the dotcom boom.
Mr Musk soon hit it big as a founder of online payments company PayPal and his fortune from that company went into launching SpaceX in 2002, which has developed one of the main commercial launch systems.
More recently, at Tesla, he has found other outlets for his techno-idealism. In pursuit of a post-carbon future, Mr Musk has opened the world’s biggest battery plant, to support the planned launch next year of what he hopes will be the first mass-market electric car. He is trying to merge SolarCity into Tesla to create the first alternative energy conglomerate, spanning solar panels with integrated electricity storage and the cars that consume the power.
In all of this, Mr Musk has never hesitated to go against social and business convention. The SolarCity plan, for instance, has put him at odds with many on Wall Street, partly because investors are worried that the solar merger will distract him as he tries to overcome production glitches at Tesla.
The grandiose goal for space will have detractors, concedes Mr Diamandis.
“The populace will be critical about everything: why risk this in space when there are so many problems on earth to fix?” he says. But he argues Mr Musk will eventually win the backing he needs, if he is “very clear about the overwhelming value of this to humanity”.
The car fatality raises another doubt. When Mr Musk released his driverless technology last year, others in the tech world were privately aghast: though not a fully autonomous system, it was still a riskier step than others have been prepared to take.
In Mr Musk’s moral universe, however, bigger goals usually win, and they do not come bigger than hedging humanity’s future by putting down roots on Mars. In Lo and Behold, a film about technology by Werner Herzog, Mr Musk explains the thinking for his Mars mission and the director, caught up in the idea, offers to go, if necessary on a one-way ticket. The idea brings a considered pause.
“I do think we’ll want to offer round trips,” Mr Musk says. “Because a lot more people would be willing to go if they think if they don’t like it, they can come back.”
The writer is the FT’s San Francisco bureau chief. Additional reporting by Leslie Hook
