“He is a humanist-not in the sense of being a nice person, because he isn’t,” says Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, who met Musk in 2001, when the young, newly minted dot-com millionaire sent a large unsolicited check to the organization. The man from the future where technology makes all things possible is a throwback to our glorious industrial past, before America stagnated and stopped producing anything but rules, restrictions, limits, obstacles and Facebook. If Tesla delivers on its pledges, it has the potential to strike a major blow against global warming. His rockets, built from scratch on an autodidact’s mold-breaking vision, have saved taxpayers billions, reinvigorated America’s space dreams and are launching satellites to expand Internet access across the globe. But he’s different: he’s a manufacturing magnate-moving metal, not bytes. Musk is easily cast as a hubristic supervillain, lumped in with the tech bros and space playboys, for whom money is scorekeeping and rockets are the ultimate toy. “I believe we’ve got to watch out for the erosion of freedom in America.” The vast expanse of human misery can seem an afterthought to a man with his eyes on Mars. Musk tells TIME he and his eligible children are vaccinated and that “the science is unequivocal,” but that he opposes vaccine mandates: “You are taking a risk, but people do risky things all the time,” he says of the unvaccinated. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he’s made statements downplaying the virus, broken local health regulations to keep his factories running and amplified skepticism about vaccine safety. “He is a savant when it comes to business, but his gift is not empathy with people,” says his brother and business partner Kimbal Musk. He recently separated from the experimental musician Grimes, the mother of his seventh son. Former associates have described Musk as petty, cruel and petulant, particularly when frustrated or challenged. The toll his hard-driving style takes on staff is legendary. The company’s expansion in China required cozying up to its repressive autocrats. The feds are probing Tesla’s Autopilot software, which has been involved in an alarming number of crashes with parked emergency vehicles, resulting in injuries and death. The businesses have also been fined for numerous regulatory violations. His companies have faced allegations of sexual harassment and poor working conditions in October, a federal jury ordered Tesla to pay $137 million to a Black employee who accused the automaker of ignoring racial abuse. Such cosmic ambition rarely comes without consequences, and Musk still must answer to earthly authorities. He dominates Wall Street: “The way finance works now is that things are valuable not based on their cash flows but on their proximity to Elon Musk,” Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine wrote in February, after Musk’s “Gamestonk!!” tweet vaulted the meme-stock craze into the stratosphere. He’s a player in robots and solar, cryptocurrency and climate, brain-computer implants to stave off the menace of artificial intelligence and underground tunnels to move people and freight at super speeds. That has made Musk, with a net worth of more than $250 billion, the richest private citizen in history, at least on paper. His car company, Tesla, controls two-thirds of the multibillion-dollar electric-vehicle market it pioneered and is valued at a cool $1 trillion. His startup rocket company, SpaceX, has leapfrogged Boeing and others to own America’s spacefaring future. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars. This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P.T. stainless-steel silos-are silhouetted behind him in the setting sun.
Two of his Starship rockets-gleaming, pointy-nosed, 160-ft. It’s a warm, windy December day at Starbase, his new rocket-fabrication and launch facility at the southern tip of Texas. “Sometimes I do hit some resonant notes with respect to humor,” Musk says of his puerile expressions.
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