This trope needs to die. SpaceX has no plans to go to Mars. Elon meanwhile regularly says forward looking stuff to attempt to justify the lofty valuations of his companies. Let's just say there is a ... mixed track record on these proclamations (Full self driving, Hyperloop anyone?)
> the gigantic Starship Factory and multiple launch pads under construction in Texas, Florida and Louisiana (plus potentially foreign countries) only make sense with Mars.
There's a few other things that also make sense as use-cases for that infrastructure. Orbital manufacturing is already starting to get interesting. I don't want to bet either way on space-based data centres, the research I've seen from Google says that makes sense at $200/kg which Starship can only reach if SpaceX solves re-use and that's clearly difficult but I don't want to say impossible.
Scientific organizations like NASA would jump on a Mars Starship in a heartbeat, but how many missions will they want?
SpaceX is a corporation first and foremost, not a research org.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
Do explain to me his evil plan of becoming rich by lying about going to Mars and yet agreeing to only get paid when he does go to Mars.
The rest of his compensation isn't tied to that, but is tied to the bubble and hype that the lie of Mars living helps prop up.
He already owns hundreds of billions of dollars worth of SpaceX. He "gets paid" whether or not these goals are achieved (a million people on mars definitely won't be achieved this century, as the place is fucking awful; one thousand is vanishingly unlikely, one million is flat-out not happening). In fact, hyping the company up ahead of IPO gets him paid, to the tune of thousands of working people's lifetime earnings.
Mars could make for an interesting prison, though. Like the Australia of two centuries ago. If nobody volunteers to live there I wouldn't put it past Musk to meet his target that way.
Nobody is spending trillions to build a prison on another planet.
But it isn’t like he lied about full self driving for over a decade and then recently admitted none of his cars that people bought for that promise will be able to do that or anything…
The Antarctica population peaks at about 5,000, which is a paradise compared to Mars, with drinkable water and breathable air. It even has naturally occurring food! You can get there with a mere boat!
One million people on Mars within our lifetimes is a total fantasy. Like the Nigerian Prince emails, its main purpose is to identify marks.
I may be overly-generous to the guy (bad habit, billionaires don't need or benefit from best-faith interpretations of the stuff they do, leads to sycophancy), but I think this may be more like grandiose delusion than a 419 scam.
The continual promises of full-self-driving, however, those definitely seem like a 419: up-front fees for promises never delivered on, repeated again with newer better hardware. What version is the hardware on now?
"When" is inaccurate. The original shareholder vote for Musk's 2018 compensation plan was on 2018-03-18. Tornetta was filed on 2018-06-05, well before the first tranche vested in 2020.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/19/musk-tesla-pay-delaware-supr...