Earth faces an imminent threat, and unless we change our course, human life as we know it will become impossible here. What do we do?
Most would say we must do all we can to prevent that bleak scenario by limiting the harmful impact of human activities. “There is no planet B,” environmentalists point out.
Ask the billionaire Elon Musk, however, and you may get a very different reply. “We don’t want to be one of those single-planet species,” Musk said in 2021 at the launch of a SpaceX rocket into orbit. “We want to be a multi-planet species.” Musk added that he is “highly confident” that SpaceX will land humans on Mars in the near future.
It’s a mindset akin to that of the Krypton scientist Jor-El, father of DC Comics’ Superman: As your planet explodes, send your offspring away in a space pod to ensure the survival of your species elsewhere in the galaxy. And indeed, Musk doesn’t seem to have let go of his childhood fascination with dashing, planet-hopping superheroes.
Growing up in Pretoria, South Africa, “I read all the comics I could find, or that they let me read in the bookstore before chasing me away,” Musk has said in a documentary. In those tales, superheroes vanquished evil on Earth and beyond, and humans and other species faced off in faraway galaxies.
The Musk we know today—the bombastic entrepreneur, admired and abhorred around the world—has styled himself as the embodiment of these fictional characters: a man who believes in his ability to singlehandedly save humanity. His superhero philosophy puts him at odds with environmentalists, who believe in the power of the collective, rather than that of any individual “great man,” to solve humanity’s greatest challenges.
And it’s one clue to unpacking a fundamental conundrum about Elon Musk. Why is a person whose technology for electric vehicles, solar energy, and energy storage has done so much to advance the green transition so reviled in the environmentalist community? Why do climate activists abandon his social
