Beautiful piece. How I wish I had used my 20's to work for space x. I was the right age, at the right time, and had ~ the right skills, but I spent my time instead in other very similar areas of engineering because all I knew then is that rockets meant ULA and boredom and red tape. And now... well, I still ask myself once a week how bad it would really be to live with my family near McGregor. I now work in rockets but the entire field is just an embarrassment compared to Space X, and everyone knows it. At conferences they will send maybe 2 people and everyone in attendance hangs on their every word.
What a great and refreshing review of Musk. A recent narrative has emerged that he was “just lucky” or is “a political idiot with a very narrow set of skills”, but this analysis shows that even his seemingly erratic behavior actually makes sense in light of his single-minded goal: getting humanity to Mars. He cannot be compared to usual CEOs because he has other priorities than them.
This also shows why he could empathize with Trump. After all, they were both trying to succeed in a hostile environment where all the experts said they couldn’t, because they weren’t following the tried-and-true methods of success.
Yah. I keep telling people who don't understand Musk that he is not playing Capitalism. He has won that game, game over. Trying to interpret his actions according to that game will lead you astray. And: it was only ever a side quest for him.
This is a great review of how SpaceX came to dominate the space launch industry; it makes me want to pick up the book being reviewed (a high compliment).
I have a mixed opinion of Musk overall - he paints himself as a populist even though he’s not one at all, he bails out his failed businesses (Solar City) with other businesses (Tesla) to protect his reputation, he relies on endless government subsidies (Tesla), he lets the ADL control Twitter censorship policies, he publicly throws out his support for New World Order stuff and Satanism, his mother is a straight-up witch - but I remain in awe and support of SpaceX, and hope that humanity - which is blindly locust-like, consuming all in it’s path - will become a multi-planetary species, because otherwise we will destroy ourselves here.
I love Musk. An American hero. He reminds me in many ways of the fictional D.D. Harrison. "The Man Who Sold the Moon". In my best of all possible worlds, I'd love him to have his "Requiem" and spend his last days on mars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_(short_story)
Huh? Look, I'm not on twitter and I don't pay attention to the news. I've listened to Musk on several podcasts with Lex Fridman and Rogan. I also did watch the oval office press thing with Trump and Musk (w/ son in tow :^) (I thought the son in tow was darling, though some may complain.) I don't think this is the space for a political discussion. My opinion of Musk hasn't changed.
I would say "great review," but its impact is ambivalent as it's so penetrating, punchy, and well-written that I'm not convinced I need to prioritize reading the actual book (though I will). Regardless of one's personal views of Musk, feels like you've really captured the lightning of his genius in a bottle here.
An unpopular opinion that occurred to me several times as I read this essay: there are remarkable parallels between the way Elon Musk runs his companies and Donald Rumsfeld ran the Pentago. The invasion of Iraq was planned and executed on a similar shoe-string budget and "lets make this faster" management style (one employee had a bobblehead of Rumsfeld with the word 'NOW' printed on it). Rumsfeld was a famously terrifying boss, always ready to fight the world. He was a famous micromanager in the Muskian sense. He was a man addicted to risk, contemptuous of bureaucracy, a decided enemy of the deep state.
And well... we did manage to defeat Saddam Hussein with one fourth the troops and in one sixteenth the time (and even less casualties) than was projected. But like you said, the problem with big risky gambles... is that they don't always turn out well.
Incidentally, I think you should consider this book, in which Rumsfeld is a leading star, for your next review: Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America's Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy [link: https://amzn.to/40hPEku]
To the contrary, betting against Musk was and remains a pretty good deal in my book; so long as you're betting on whether any of his claims will come true. If you're betting on whether he'll still become wealthier and more powerful despite not fulfilling those claims, on the other hand, I'm not touching that bet with a ten foot pole.
That's the issue I have with these more hagiographic biographies: they're focusing on the successes, and assuming that his audacious claims will come true based on those, while ignoring all the audacious claims of the past which haven't been forgotten so much as they've been buried under new promises.
I recall, back in 2011, we were supposed to be on Mars by 2021. I recall, in 2014, There was supposed to be a vacuum tube pod network across America. I recall, in 2021, Starship was going to be on the Moon by 2024. And now we're supposed to expect humans on Mars in 2029. That's not an exhaustive list.
If anyone's willing to bet on Musk's 2029 Mars landing, or any of his other claims, I'm happy to take the other side of that.
Does it bother you that your critique is "He tried to do this impossible thing that literally no one else on the planet even dares to try, and he's late according to his own utterly batshit crazy timeline, so therefore I can ignore all the other impossible things he's actually done, like landing giant skyscrapers on the ground safely"?
I agree that it *would* be unreasonable nitpicking, if it weren’t such a consistent pattern. This is going to be a long one, but you did ask. Note that I am massively and admittedly biased against Musk, and have been since the Hyperloop in 2014. If you don’t want to bother with my BS, I recommend Rodney Brooks’ most recent scorecard. He gives a much more generous, informed, and diplomatic take on several of these topics:
My very first exposure to Musk was in 2014 via the Hyperloop announcement. It was the coolest thing I’d ever heard, the revolutionary fifth mode of transport, a maglev on steroids. Pretty quickly, it became clear that this couldn’t possibly work: it would be simultaneously the least economical and most dangerous mode of transport ever invented. And yet he continued to promote it, his fans continued to believe in it and spread it, and the doubters were told that this man was a genius, and he had a whole company of expert engineers at his back. The objections were invalid, all those problems would be fixed. Multiple companies around the world started working towards it, along with SpaceX’s own Hyperloop project.
A decade on, nothing has come of it. Every company that was trying to make it work dropped it, and SpaceX never put significant resources towards the idea. Because it was a terrible idea from the beginning.
Around the same time, everyone knew Tesla was massively, massively overvalued relative to its actual car-making ability. The pat explanation? It’s not actually a car company, but a [] company. Sometimes [] is batteries, and Tesla is going to provide order of magnitude improvements to battery density. To my knowledge, this has not come to pass. Other times [] is full self driving, which was already safer than a human in 2015 (it wasn’t) and has been announced to be just a year away for the last decade since then. It too has not come to pass, despite staged demos making it appear otherwise. Other times, [] is robotics, and Tesla is going to deliver a humanoid robot that can do everything. Its big unveiling event, as I covered on my own substack, was carefully staged to hide the fact that the robots were teleoperated while not making explicit claims to the contrary.
Add to that things like the 2nd gen Tesla Roadster, whose preorders (an unknown quantity overall, but at least $250 million for the Founder series) have yet to be filled after a decade. When asked what is happening with them, Musk responds that it’s taking a long time because he’s adding rocket engines to it. Or, via reporting by Edward Niedermeyer, that Tesla benefited from enhanced EV credits for vehicles that could recharge in under 15 minutes, even though this was not possible for Tesla batteries, because they promised to build a network of fast battery-swapping stations, which never got built.
SpaceX has its own similar track record. That includes the previous Mars promises and the Hyperloop mentioned above, as well as the dearMoon mission, recently canceled, and the human landing system for the Artemis mission. That last one was originally supposed to be launching around the next couple months. Instead, the orbital launch test, originally estimated for Q2 2022, was accomplished earlier this year. That was step 1, and it’s a safe bet that the remainder of the project will be much, much more than 2 years behind, in addition to the original contract most likely already being spent.
Now, you can argue that none of this is unusual. Big aerospace projects going years or decades and billions over contract (and in so doing filling the coffers of private contractors) is distressingly common, and the pattern of hype and under-delivery seen here is very, very common across the private sector.
More to the point, the same source for the HLS schedule that put the launch in 2025 also put the launch of Artemis 1 in summer 2022 (actually delayed by 6 months) and the Artemis 2 launch in mid-2024 (presently delayed to 2026, little faith that deadline will stick either). So it would seem very unfair and nitpicky to single out Musk/SpaceX in this regard.
If we approached Musk the same way we approach other business magnates and treated Tesla and SpaceX the same way we treat big car companies and aerospace contractors, I wouldn’t be making this comment.
But we don’t. GM and Ford don’t have valuations inflated hundredfold thanks to explicit claims that they will one day be the most valuable company in the world. Boeing and Lockheed Martin don’t have cults dedicated to their missile systems.
Their value and influence is predicated on promises about the future; not just one or two, but a continuous stream of promises going back over a decade, which media and the public treat with far too much credibility, without stopping to seriously evaluate the track record of these promises, which are made by a man who is plainly willing to not only overpromise and underdeliver, not only to lie about the most likely future outcomes of his projects, but to also lie about his current capabilities, in electric vehicles, in self-driving, in robotics, in aerospace. As the review above claims, SpaceX works by convincing our youngest and brightest to work themselves to the bone and accept a complete lack of job security for the privilege of working on a dream. The crazy timeline isn't quirky, it's not just Musk being overoptimistic and embarrassing only himself when he's wrong, it's the article of faith that holds it together, just like the promise that Tesla will be the most valuable company in the world one day keeps its shareholders holding despite never returning a single dividend.
The Hyperloop was only the most egregious of these: someone who lies on such a massive scale, so frequently, and keeps getting away with it, cannot be trusted on anything. This is also why I refuse to justify all of this with the promise of Mars. I don’t believe for a moment that’s his actual mission, given that he keeps claiming boots on Mars are just a few years away despite pretty much none of the work of keeping colonists alive has been done. It’s pretending that building the rocket is the big challenge, and pointedly ignoring everything that comes after it. Check out Kelly and Zack Weinersmith’s *A City on Mars* for a full treatment of that issue.
So no, it doesn’t bother me. I like ambitious people and I like audacious acts. Check out my article on the 1X Neo robot, and you’ll see I have a lot of generosity for people trying difficult things in good faith. But I don’t think Musk acts in good faith, and I have much less tolerance for audacious plans built on misleading investors and the public. No amount of cool rockets can outweigh or justify the manifest lies.
Musk famously tried to buy Twitter, then tried hard to get out of buying Twitter, then gave up and bought Twitter. Arguably it's useful to him now, but the idea that this was all part of the plan is pretty dubious.
The real story, like others in this review, has to involve trying something ambitious, screwing up spectacularly badly but not fatally, and then improvising. "Why did he do this" must have evolved over time.
One point — if Musk hadn’t been able to credibly threaten an appeal to an impartial judiciary, SpaceX might have been strangled by favoritism. An independent court system is worth a lot.
In On the Edge Nate Silver describes Musk as fundamentally blind to risk.
This piece paints such a narrow picture of Musk - like he's just some calculated machine who can only chase one goal at a time. The idea that he's just putting on a show of caring while destroying everything on his way to Mars? That's really missing the bigger picture.
What really gets me is how the reviewer explains away why young people work at Musk's companies. Saying it's just because "young people do better with sleep deprivation" and haven't learned to question unreasonable demands? Come on. That completely ignores how passionate young people, or anyone, can be when they believe in a mission. Say what you want about Musk (and yes, sometimes he makes us cringe), but both he and the people who work for him are driven by genuine excitement about what they're building. "Iron John" and "the Hero's Journey" do mean something and can take hold.
But what's really disturbing is @benjamin23's comment in this comment section about how it would be "reasonable" to stop Musk by killing him. Even with that "This is purely an observation" disclaimer - that's still a threat of violence. It directly violates Substack's rules against "credible threats of physical harm." In a discussion that's already so negative about Musk, letting a comment like that stand is genuinely dangerous.
I get that I might be in the wrong crowd here - the whole conversation feels pretty grim - but these takes seem way off base.
> When you run a rocket company, the algorithm sometimes demands that you buy Twitter14 and use it to take over the United States government. It’s far from the riskiest thing Musk has done on his path to Mars. At this point, it might be wise to stop betting against him.
This is purely an observation: Since he seems to be willing to do anything to reach his goals it would be reasonable to stop him by killing him. Obviously, Elon Musk knows that and for reasons of instrumental convergence he will try to take as much control over the lightcone as he can and if he has to kill a few billion people or create a dystopia for everyone else that's no problem either. If everyone has to work to their literal bones to reach his goals ...
At some point the conclusion is always to take over the whole universe and become god or become enlightened and see that it was all a joke.
As the relevant Charles Haywood, I approve and admire this review, totally aside from its mention of me.
Probably one of the more insightful pieces on Musk that's been written, great job
Beautiful piece. How I wish I had used my 20's to work for space x. I was the right age, at the right time, and had ~ the right skills, but I spent my time instead in other very similar areas of engineering because all I knew then is that rockets meant ULA and boredom and red tape. And now... well, I still ask myself once a week how bad it would really be to live with my family near McGregor. I now work in rockets but the entire field is just an embarrassment compared to Space X, and everyone knows it. At conferences they will send maybe 2 people and everyone in attendance hangs on their every word.
What a great and refreshing review of Musk. A recent narrative has emerged that he was “just lucky” or is “a political idiot with a very narrow set of skills”, but this analysis shows that even his seemingly erratic behavior actually makes sense in light of his single-minded goal: getting humanity to Mars. He cannot be compared to usual CEOs because he has other priorities than them.
This also shows why he could empathize with Trump. After all, they were both trying to succeed in a hostile environment where all the experts said they couldn’t, because they weren’t following the tried-and-true methods of success.
Yah. I keep telling people who don't understand Musk that he is not playing Capitalism. He has won that game, game over. Trying to interpret his actions according to that game will lead you astray. And: it was only ever a side quest for him.
This is a great review of how SpaceX came to dominate the space launch industry; it makes me want to pick up the book being reviewed (a high compliment).
I have a mixed opinion of Musk overall - he paints himself as a populist even though he’s not one at all, he bails out his failed businesses (Solar City) with other businesses (Tesla) to protect his reputation, he relies on endless government subsidies (Tesla), he lets the ADL control Twitter censorship policies, he publicly throws out his support for New World Order stuff and Satanism, his mother is a straight-up witch - but I remain in awe and support of SpaceX, and hope that humanity - which is blindly locust-like, consuming all in it’s path - will become a multi-planetary species, because otherwise we will destroy ourselves here.
I love Musk. An American hero. He reminds me in many ways of the fictional D.D. Harrison. "The Man Who Sold the Moon". In my best of all possible worlds, I'd love him to have his "Requiem" and spend his last days on mars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_(short_story)
This didn't age well. I think Musk has no respect for the rule of law, and is acting far outside the norms of a normal democratic republic.
He's an anti-hero if anything.
Huh? Look, I'm not on twitter and I don't pay attention to the news. I've listened to Musk on several podcasts with Lex Fridman and Rogan. I also did watch the oval office press thing with Trump and Musk (w/ son in tow :^) (I thought the son in tow was darling, though some may complain.) I don't think this is the space for a political discussion. My opinion of Musk hasn't changed.
I would say "great review," but its impact is ambivalent as it's so penetrating, punchy, and well-written that I'm not convinced I need to prioritize reading the actual book (though I will). Regardless of one's personal views of Musk, feels like you've really captured the lightning of his genius in a bottle here.
Very insightful review.
An unpopular opinion that occurred to me several times as I read this essay: there are remarkable parallels between the way Elon Musk runs his companies and Donald Rumsfeld ran the Pentago. The invasion of Iraq was planned and executed on a similar shoe-string budget and "lets make this faster" management style (one employee had a bobblehead of Rumsfeld with the word 'NOW' printed on it). Rumsfeld was a famously terrifying boss, always ready to fight the world. He was a famous micromanager in the Muskian sense. He was a man addicted to risk, contemptuous of bureaucracy, a decided enemy of the deep state.
And well... we did manage to defeat Saddam Hussein with one fourth the troops and in one sixteenth the time (and even less casualties) than was projected. But like you said, the problem with big risky gambles... is that they don't always turn out well.
Incidentally, I think you should consider this book, in which Rumsfeld is a leading star, for your next review: Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America's Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy [link: https://amzn.to/40hPEku]
Adding it to my reading list, thank you for the recommendation!
By the way, a year or two ago I wrote a review [https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-medieval-chinese-warfare-300] of David Graff’s Medieval Chinese Warfare that was largely inspired by your wonderful essay at Palladium here [https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/03/30/a-school-of-strength-and-character/]. Thank you for writing it, and for your consistently excellent blog!
He sounds like an asshole, and I'm very glad he exists.
I'd never want to work there, but I'm glad someone does. I mean, you can always just...not work for SpaceX. And maybe, someday, we'll get to Mars.
That was a hell of a review! Thanks.
To the contrary, betting against Musk was and remains a pretty good deal in my book; so long as you're betting on whether any of his claims will come true. If you're betting on whether he'll still become wealthier and more powerful despite not fulfilling those claims, on the other hand, I'm not touching that bet with a ten foot pole.
That's the issue I have with these more hagiographic biographies: they're focusing on the successes, and assuming that his audacious claims will come true based on those, while ignoring all the audacious claims of the past which haven't been forgotten so much as they've been buried under new promises.
I recall, back in 2011, we were supposed to be on Mars by 2021. I recall, in 2014, There was supposed to be a vacuum tube pod network across America. I recall, in 2021, Starship was going to be on the Moon by 2024. And now we're supposed to expect humans on Mars in 2029. That's not an exhaustive list.
If anyone's willing to bet on Musk's 2029 Mars landing, or any of his other claims, I'm happy to take the other side of that.
Does it bother you that your critique is "He tried to do this impossible thing that literally no one else on the planet even dares to try, and he's late according to his own utterly batshit crazy timeline, so therefore I can ignore all the other impossible things he's actually done, like landing giant skyscrapers on the ground safely"?
"Nitpicking" hardly begins to cover it.
I agree that it *would* be unreasonable nitpicking, if it weren’t such a consistent pattern. This is going to be a long one, but you did ask. Note that I am massively and admittedly biased against Musk, and have been since the Hyperloop in 2014. If you don’t want to bother with my BS, I recommend Rodney Brooks’ most recent scorecard. He gives a much more generous, informed, and diplomatic take on several of these topics:
https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions-scorecard-2025-january-01/
My very first exposure to Musk was in 2014 via the Hyperloop announcement. It was the coolest thing I’d ever heard, the revolutionary fifth mode of transport, a maglev on steroids. Pretty quickly, it became clear that this couldn’t possibly work: it would be simultaneously the least economical and most dangerous mode of transport ever invented. And yet he continued to promote it, his fans continued to believe in it and spread it, and the doubters were told that this man was a genius, and he had a whole company of expert engineers at his back. The objections were invalid, all those problems would be fixed. Multiple companies around the world started working towards it, along with SpaceX’s own Hyperloop project.
A decade on, nothing has come of it. Every company that was trying to make it work dropped it, and SpaceX never put significant resources towards the idea. Because it was a terrible idea from the beginning.
Around the same time, everyone knew Tesla was massively, massively overvalued relative to its actual car-making ability. The pat explanation? It’s not actually a car company, but a [] company. Sometimes [] is batteries, and Tesla is going to provide order of magnitude improvements to battery density. To my knowledge, this has not come to pass. Other times [] is full self driving, which was already safer than a human in 2015 (it wasn’t) and has been announced to be just a year away for the last decade since then. It too has not come to pass, despite staged demos making it appear otherwise. Other times, [] is robotics, and Tesla is going to deliver a humanoid robot that can do everything. Its big unveiling event, as I covered on my own substack, was carefully staged to hide the fact that the robots were teleoperated while not making explicit claims to the contrary.
Add to that things like the 2nd gen Tesla Roadster, whose preorders (an unknown quantity overall, but at least $250 million for the Founder series) have yet to be filled after a decade. When asked what is happening with them, Musk responds that it’s taking a long time because he’s adding rocket engines to it. Or, via reporting by Edward Niedermeyer, that Tesla benefited from enhanced EV credits for vehicles that could recharge in under 15 minutes, even though this was not possible for Tesla batteries, because they promised to build a network of fast battery-swapping stations, which never got built.
SpaceX has its own similar track record. That includes the previous Mars promises and the Hyperloop mentioned above, as well as the dearMoon mission, recently canceled, and the human landing system for the Artemis mission. That last one was originally supposed to be launching around the next couple months. Instead, the orbital launch test, originally estimated for Q2 2022, was accomplished earlier this year. That was step 1, and it’s a safe bet that the remainder of the project will be much, much more than 2 years behind, in addition to the original contract most likely already being spent.
Now, you can argue that none of this is unusual. Big aerospace projects going years or decades and billions over contract (and in so doing filling the coffers of private contractors) is distressingly common, and the pattern of hype and under-delivery seen here is very, very common across the private sector.
More to the point, the same source for the HLS schedule that put the launch in 2025 also put the launch of Artemis 1 in summer 2022 (actually delayed by 6 months) and the Artemis 2 launch in mid-2024 (presently delayed to 2026, little faith that deadline will stick either). So it would seem very unfair and nitpicky to single out Musk/SpaceX in this regard.
If we approached Musk the same way we approach other business magnates and treated Tesla and SpaceX the same way we treat big car companies and aerospace contractors, I wouldn’t be making this comment.
But we don’t. GM and Ford don’t have valuations inflated hundredfold thanks to explicit claims that they will one day be the most valuable company in the world. Boeing and Lockheed Martin don’t have cults dedicated to their missile systems.
Their value and influence is predicated on promises about the future; not just one or two, but a continuous stream of promises going back over a decade, which media and the public treat with far too much credibility, without stopping to seriously evaluate the track record of these promises, which are made by a man who is plainly willing to not only overpromise and underdeliver, not only to lie about the most likely future outcomes of his projects, but to also lie about his current capabilities, in electric vehicles, in self-driving, in robotics, in aerospace. As the review above claims, SpaceX works by convincing our youngest and brightest to work themselves to the bone and accept a complete lack of job security for the privilege of working on a dream. The crazy timeline isn't quirky, it's not just Musk being overoptimistic and embarrassing only himself when he's wrong, it's the article of faith that holds it together, just like the promise that Tesla will be the most valuable company in the world one day keeps its shareholders holding despite never returning a single dividend.
The Hyperloop was only the most egregious of these: someone who lies on such a massive scale, so frequently, and keeps getting away with it, cannot be trusted on anything. This is also why I refuse to justify all of this with the promise of Mars. I don’t believe for a moment that’s his actual mission, given that he keeps claiming boots on Mars are just a few years away despite pretty much none of the work of keeping colonists alive has been done. It’s pretending that building the rocket is the big challenge, and pointedly ignoring everything that comes after it. Check out Kelly and Zack Weinersmith’s *A City on Mars* for a full treatment of that issue.
So no, it doesn’t bother me. I like ambitious people and I like audacious acts. Check out my article on the 1X Neo robot, and you’ll see I have a lot of generosity for people trying difficult things in good faith. But I don’t think Musk acts in good faith, and I have much less tolerance for audacious plans built on misleading investors and the public. No amount of cool rockets can outweigh or justify the manifest lies.
Musk famously tried to buy Twitter, then tried hard to get out of buying Twitter, then gave up and bought Twitter. Arguably it's useful to him now, but the idea that this was all part of the plan is pretty dubious.
The real story, like others in this review, has to involve trying something ambitious, screwing up spectacularly badly but not fatally, and then improvising. "Why did he do this" must have evolved over time.
One point — if Musk hadn’t been able to credibly threaten an appeal to an impartial judiciary, SpaceX might have been strangled by favoritism. An independent court system is worth a lot.
In On the Edge Nate Silver describes Musk as fundamentally blind to risk.
Amazing review and really captures what make SpaceX and Musk himself so special.
This piece paints such a narrow picture of Musk - like he's just some calculated machine who can only chase one goal at a time. The idea that he's just putting on a show of caring while destroying everything on his way to Mars? That's really missing the bigger picture.
What really gets me is how the reviewer explains away why young people work at Musk's companies. Saying it's just because "young people do better with sleep deprivation" and haven't learned to question unreasonable demands? Come on. That completely ignores how passionate young people, or anyone, can be when they believe in a mission. Say what you want about Musk (and yes, sometimes he makes us cringe), but both he and the people who work for him are driven by genuine excitement about what they're building. "Iron John" and "the Hero's Journey" do mean something and can take hold.
But what's really disturbing is @benjamin23's comment in this comment section about how it would be "reasonable" to stop Musk by killing him. Even with that "This is purely an observation" disclaimer - that's still a threat of violence. It directly violates Substack's rules against "credible threats of physical harm." In a discussion that's already so negative about Musk, letting a comment like that stand is genuinely dangerous.
I get that I might be in the wrong crowd here - the whole conversation feels pretty grim - but these takes seem way off base.
> When you run a rocket company, the algorithm sometimes demands that you buy Twitter14 and use it to take over the United States government. It’s far from the riskiest thing Musk has done on his path to Mars. At this point, it might be wise to stop betting against him.
This is purely an observation: Since he seems to be willing to do anything to reach his goals it would be reasonable to stop him by killing him. Obviously, Elon Musk knows that and for reasons of instrumental convergence he will try to take as much control over the lightcone as he can and if he has to kill a few billion people or create a dystopia for everyone else that's no problem either. If everyone has to work to their literal bones to reach his goals ...
At some point the conclusion is always to take over the whole universe and become god or become enlightened and see that it was all a joke.