Roundup: NYT's SpaceX stenography

Since the founding of SpaceX, Elon Musk has been saying he’ll take humanity to Mars and make us a multiplanetary species. Back in 2011, he told the Wall Street Journal, he’d have put someone on Mars in as little as ten years. That deadline came and went, and while SpaceX has certainly become a leading space company, it’s hard to argue any realistic path to Mars colonization is on the horizon. I’ve argued in the past that the Mars ambitions are little more than PR and distraction for what the company is really up to, but not everyone seems to have received the memo.

Earlier this week, the New York Times published [archive] its latest bit of stenography about Musk’s Mars plans. There are a few mentions of people questioning his vision and acknowledgement of some of the harm caused by SpaceX, but in general the supposed “paper of record” is happy to echo Musk’s bullshit.

The report explains that Musk has created a series of teams at SpaceX to try to better map out and research what would be necessary for a Mars colony of about a million people in about 20 years, a shift from a statement he made in 2016 that it would take 40 to 60 years for a self-sustaining civilization on Mars. That timeline was already hard to believe when you consider how thoroughly hostile to human life the Martian environment is. Supposedly, the teams are working on dome habitats, new spacesuits, and medical research that Musk has reportedly offered his sperm to help with. (Musk subsequently denied he’d said such a thing, though we know it’s something he’s mused about for decades.)

Probably the most honest statement the NYT makes, but doesn’t bother to probe any deeper, is quoting unnamed sources who say SpaceX’s Mars work is a “hype package” designed to fuel excitement and keep the cult excited. The paper repeats the ridiculous claim that all Musk’s companies are somehow linked to Mars colonization, rather than that being a PR line, and allows the vision of colonization to make otherwise very concerning ideas be treated as normal proposals. That includes a plan to “bioengineer new organisms that are better suited to living on Mars,” something that, if applied to humans, sounds a lot like the eugenic population ideas he’s already been accused of espousing.

The one thing that really came to mind as I was reading the piece is how much Musk’s interests seem to be increasingly unmoored from the reality of his businesses. Neuralink is a dangerous mess. At Tesla, he’s pushing for a robotaxi instead of a mass-market vehicle, sacrificing market share to bet the company on a technology the company has failed to make work. It’s also pretending a humanoid robot will make more money than cars ever did. Now at SpaceX, he’s less interested in making the underlying business work than playing in his fantasy Martian sandbox.

The guy needs to come back down to earth, though I’m not sure we want him among us either.

In the roundup this week, there are some stories about the human cost of Prime Day, how Twitter/X is funding spam instead of eradicating it, and what was behind the big Microsoft/CloudStrike outage in recent days. There are also the usual labor updates and other news you might have missed, including a prominent actor taking a dig at Amazon.

I wrote about Silicon Valley’s embrace of Trump and what tech billionaires want from him in the newsletter this week. Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I spoke to Sasha Luccioni about the climate cost of generative AI — and it’s not a pretty picture.

Have a great week!

— Paris