Mostly true. What matters is securing the long-term future of consciousness, both on Earth and other heavenly bodies.
We cannot just focus on Earth, because there are irreducible external (eg massive meteor) and internal (eg global nuclear war) cataclysmic risks.
The Moon is faster to make self-growing, but is more susceptible to problems on Earth. Mars will take longer to make self-growing, because it is so hard to reach, but is more secure from Earth disasters for that same reason.
Both the Moon and Mars should have self-growing civilizations. Making this happen is the prime directive of SpaceX.
Former SpaceX astronaut Garrett Reisman reveals the single prism Elon Musk runs every major decision through
"He measures pretty much every major decision by whether or not it brings the day when we have a self-sustainable colony on Mars sooner or later"
"That's the prism by
Elon Musk’s goal for The Boring Company is to solve one of the most miserable daily experiences on Earth: traffic
Cities are three-dimensional
But transportation is still mostly trapped in a two-dimensional surface network
Roads, intersections, bottlenecks, traffic lights, accidents, construction, weather - everything gets stacked on the same flat layer until the entire system chokes
The Boring Company’s answer is simple but radical: Go underground
Build fast, low-cost tunnel networks under major cities and turn transportation into true 3D infrastructure
Right now, the focus is on making tunneling dramatically faster and cheaper with machines like Prufrock, which is designed to mine continuously while installing tunnel liner at the same time
But the long-term vision goes much further
Local Loop tunnels could move people across cities without surface traffic, while future Hyperloop-style systems could connect entire cities at ultra-high speed
Imagine going from Los Angeles to San Francisco, New York to Washington D.C., or Dubai to Abu Dhabi in a fraction of today’s travel time - underground, electric, direct, and protected from surface congestion
That is the real mission: Building the missing third dimension of transportation
This is how you actually attack soul-destroying traffic at civilization scale
As a young socialist, Hayek read Ludwig von Mises’ 1920 paper “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.”
Mises showed that socialist central planning isn’t merely inefficient, it’s impossible.
Without private property and genuine market prices, planners lack any
"Elon Musk still works incredibly hard. I visited him recently, I left around midnight and he was still working. I think he must have gone till 2am. So I don't know anybody who works as hard as him. He's really in the technical details of it."
一 David Sacks
Elon Musk on why humanity must become multiplanetary:
“I think it's important for the long-term preservation and ultimately the expansion and extension of the scope and scale of consciousness... that we must become a multi-planet species
Because there are all these risks that we can't control existential risks. There's asteroids, super volcanoes, we could have a World War III... History does not suggest that civilization lasts forever”
Elon is optimistic about the future, but he is also realistic
Civilization has survived so far but history shows that catastrophic events eventually happen. The only chance is becoming a multi-planet species
Elon Musk explains the importance of Starlink and how it will increase GDPs of the countries
“If you don’t have access to the internet, or it’s too expensive or low bandwidth, you cannot access MIT lessons, you can’t access information, and you can’t sell your goods and services”
Starlink changes all of that
“Starlink will actually move the GDP of countries. It’s going to be that kind of thing”
Because GDP is simply average productivity per person and connectivity massively boosts productivity
Elon Musk:
“I don't think most people understand just how quickly machine intelligence is advancing.
It's much faster than almost anyone realizes, even within Silicon Valley and certainly outside Silicon Valley. People really have no idea.”
SpaceX completed its 50th Starlink launch of 2026 today. With this mission, SpaceX has deployed 1,375 Starlink satellites so far this year, and another Starlink launch is scheduled for later tonight.
(photo below is real)