@jonboka has recently published this hit piece on Elon Musk which requires a more fulsome response that just my comment.
He alleges that Musk is "wolf in sheep's clothing" - Nothing could be further from the truth.
Who is Elon Musk?
Elon Musk's prime motivation and historic mission is to make humans a multi-planetary species by creating human civilisation on Mars.
Everything Musk does is directed toward that goal.
You can see that from many statements of Musk himself and also from interviews with those people who know him best - see https://www.wired.co.uk/article/whats-driving-elon-musk & https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/elon-musk-conversed-with-robert-zubrin
Here is are a few of many examples of Musk speaking directly on the topic.
Mars Society 2012
International Astronautical Association 2016
Mars Society 2020
Being "Chief Twit" or the world's richest man or head of Tesla is all secondary - just a means to an end.
The Mars Society & Dr Robert Zubrin
If you do any research into the origins of Musk's obsession with putting humans on Mars, the name Dr Robert Zubrin and The Mars Society will keep coming up.
The videos and articles above provide first hand testimony from Musk, Zubrin and close associates of them both, like Jim Cantrell (co-founder of SpaceX) of both the genesis moment and the close ongoing cooperation and mutual support between:
- the great rocket scientist and visionary (Zubrin) and his not-for-profit (The Mars Society); and
- the great entrepreneur (Musk) and his company (SpaceX).
My personal connection
I can tell some of that story because I was many years ahead of Musk in the space industry and few years ahead of Musk as a personal associate of Dr Zubrin and as a founding member of The Mars Society.
Like Musk and many others, I was interested in space from childhood.
Unlike many others, my early career at Australia's Overseas Telecommunications Commission (OTC) and its successor Telstra, had a substantial space industry component.
In the early 1990s I was responsible (in my early twenties) for OTC's contracts with the European Space Agency (ESA) and Intelsat for their use of the spacecraft tracking, telemetry, command and monitoring (TTC&M) station in Gnangara, Perth.
This involved annual visits to the station, meeting with ESA and Intelsat representatives on tours of the facility, writing submissions with the Australian Space Industry Chamber of Commerce and celebrating successful launches of ESA space probes.
Source: Tammy Zorde
In August of 1998 I flew from my then home in Sydney, Australia to Boulder, Colorado, USA to attend the Founding Convention of The Mars Society. At the convention I met such luminaries as Buzz Aldrin, James Cameron, Dr Chris McKay and of course Dr Robert Zubrin himself.
I was one of the people who ratified the Mars Society Founding Declaration.
Inspired by the conference I established the Australian Chapter of The Mars Society and founded Mars Society Australia Inc with key people such as Guy Murphy who is still very active today.
In early 2000 I organised an Australian tour by Dr Robert Zubrin to promote The Mars Society. He spoke to over 3000 people in 4 states and gained extensive media coverage which brought many people into the Mars Society Australia.
Today the Mars Society Australia is one of the most active and successful Mars Society chapters worldwide.
I got married in mid 2000 and reduced my Mars Society involvement and thus missed being more directly involved in a seminal moment in the history of humanity
Musk discovers The Mars Society in 2001
It was only a year later, at a Mars Society fundraiser in California, that Elon Musk met Dr Robert Zubrin, became inspired by the vision of The Mars Society and became one if its major donors.
A short time later Dr Zubrin introduced Musk to his longtime associate Jim Cantrell and they went to Russia looking to buy ICBMs as cheap launch vehicles. After that option was dropped (apparently one of the Russian space guys spat on their shoes) Musk and Cantrell (as a consultant) went on to found SpaceX. A short history of Jim Cantrell's involvment is here.
Unlike many previous rich guys who started a rocket company (and failed), Musk didn't just put in his discretionary cash.
He put his heart, soul, mind, energy and most of his money. As Zubrin says:
"When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people. You have to crack some books."
“There’s been a history of billionaires who decided that they’d be the one to open up the space frontier. In every case what happened was they’d throw in 50 million dollars of play money to some visionary engineer to play with and it would get to a certain point, and the difficulties would mount and then they would quit. When Elon started SpaceX, that's what a lot of us thought would happen there too. That had been the pattern: you get a rich kid, gets the Mars bug, plays it for a while and then walks away.”
“What Elon did was very different. He didn't just throw some play money in. He put in his heart, his soul and his mind. He put his talent into it – not just his technical talent, which while I would say is first class, there are other people that are comparable. What is incomparable is his business talent, in terms of recruiting the right people and creating the right company culture and defeating people out to destroy him in the political realm.”
Source: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/whats-driving-elon-musk and similar statements by Zubrin in 2012 Mars Society video above.
The Rest is History
The rest is (well documented) history.
After a number of early crash and burns (typical of all rocket startups) Musk built the biggest rocket company in the world, from scratch, and revolutionised the space industry, bringing down the cost of access to space by one and soon to be two orders of magnitude.
You can hear the story from a few perspectives:
- Elon Musk himself
Starship Update 2022
- Gwynne Shotwell, President and COO of SpaceX
- 60 Minutes 2012
Is Musk part of The WEF/Davos Crowd?
One of the problems with people who see the tentacles of the WEF Great Reset agenda / Davos Crowd everywhere is that they accuse people who clearly have a different and often opposite agenda of being part of the global conspiracy.
This undermines the sometimes legitimate points made about the nefarious activities of the Davos Crowd.
Musk has taken contrary positions to the WEF agenda on everything from global demographics (Musk rightly warns of population decline because of low fertility) to free speech, to being pro-GOP.
Musk has his own agenda, very different to the Davos Crowd, which he is quite explicit about and into which he has put not just billions into but also his heart and soul.
And to suggest that Musk is wearing sheep's clothing and is pretending to be something he isn't is utter rubbish.
The guy has Asperger's Syndrome - the main feature of which is that he says exactly what he is thinking without appropriate filtering.
He is the complete opposite of the Davos Crowd who pretend to be one thing and are something else entirely.
Musk is a unique phenomena - maybe a character from SciFi, maybe a super intelligent alien in human guise - but definitely no WEF stooge.
Musk is a genuine hero to humanity who may yet save the human race from the existentially dangerous stupidity of the current crop of global political leaders.
Although making the Starlink system and SpaceX itself a legitimate military target for Russia (by providing it to Ukraine for frontline communications) was not such a great idea, if you are trying to make the most of a limited time window to make humanity multi-planetary before it is destroyed.
He is proof that one man can change the world and that prior experience is not necessary to revolutionise atrophied industries (such as automotive and space)
As Zubrin says, "he is living disproof of the materialist view of history".
And yes, he is a personal hero of mine, but I would never work for him because he is a completely workaholic and is not great at sharing the credit.
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