First, a big thank you to everyone reading this newsletter. You are one of what I’m sure will be over a billion subscribers by the end of 2028. In fact, I’ll be surprised if there aren’t at least a billion subscribers - I was just mentioning my plans for a billion paid subscribers. Also, I predict that I’ll have a leading role in a Christopher Nolan movie that same summer.
Predicting is fun!
I’ll add a caveat, however: Predictions, especially when made in public, turn out to be tough sledding. I say this from experience; I made a few in a book called Electric Cars for Dummies. As you might guess, those predictions involved which electric car companies flourish and which would fail in the coming years. I drafted that manuscript in the summer of 2022, the book was published that fall, and now the whole world has proof that I can be terrible at peering into the future. (I’ll save you the trouble of locating your copy: I predicted that Toyota would go out of business by 2030 because of their reluctance to electrification. But I also predicted that Nikola would go bankrupt, and that Tesla and BYD would thrive, so it wasn’t a complete showing of my ass.)
The point is that everyone occasionally engages in fortune-telling. Most times, it involves assessing available data to recognize patterns, anticipate risks, and prepare for what comes next. Especially when done in a team setting, it can spark discussion and generate new ideas, even when those ideas don’t pan out. Or, as Dwight Eisenhower famously said, “plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”
In fact, predicting the future is not only fun, but there are some who believe it’s a marker of intelligence. No. They believe it’s the marker for intelligence. As Elon Musk once told CNBC, “…the right metric for intelligence is probably the ability to predict the future.”
So by that “metric,” what might we conclude about the intelligence of the world’s richest human?
Or is this even a question worth investigating? After all, as Elon further said during an interview with Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief at The Economist, “I’m very good at predicting the future. Not perfect, but my batting average is high for a human… I can see into the future not perfectly, but with a higher probability of success than most people.”
Well there you have it. Predicting the future is the key intelligence metric, and Elon Musk is very good at predicting. I guess there’s no point in looking into this any further.
As I argue here and elsewhere, the predictions being made and funded by Silicon Valley tech bros about “the future” - that is, about work, finance, immortality, and more - not only tend towards moral bankruptcy, but they’re often based on ideas borrowed from 100 year-old sci-fi. However, because these predictions are backed with billions of dollars, and because some humans will chase those dollars into whatever abyss those dollars are thrown, and because a good many of those humans are politicians who could rein in these harmful pursuits but choose not to, the tech bros predictions are ruining things for most everyone else.
One of the loudest and most laughably incorrect predictions the tech bros have trotted out for the past 15 years involves how we’ll soon be drinking red wine on the Red Planet, along with related pursuits.
As it turns out, smart people like astrophysicist Adam Becker, author of More Everything Forever, predict that human beings will not colonize Mars. Never. Ever. Or, as Defector writer Albert Burneko points out, there is no magnetosphere on Mars, and “any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does.”
For those interested in discussing beyond that - and I think it’s an interesting discussion! - the science behind why we won’t ever colonize Mars is well known, especially among those whose paychecks are tied to the pursuit. I’m thinking here about the founders of Mars One. This was a now-bankrupt Dutch company that “predicted” it would send its first batch of astronauts to Mars - a one-way trip, no less - by the year 2020. (To illustrate how gawpingly dumb that idea was, know that Mars One planned to fund the multi-billion-dollar mission by turning the entire process into a reality TV show.) I’m also thinking here about a company called GRU Space, which will happily cash your check to reserve a spot in their hotel on the Moon. GRU Space gets its financial backing from Silicon Valley’s startup incubator Y Combinator. I’m also thinking about the many, many employees of the publicly-traded company called Space Exploration Technologies. Those employees at SpaceX happily cash their paychecks despite knowing that we’ll never, ever colonize Mars. They do this because, as discussed elsewhere, humans suffer from “prognostic myopia.”
What’s that? The short version is that humans aren’t as smart as we might like to think. In particular, we’re not smart about avoiding harmful long-term consequences of our actions even when the harmful long-term consequences are all but certain. (I suppose this is where I insert the Upton Sinclair quote about it being difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.)
Of course, I’m especially thinking about Elon Musk, whose compensation as SpaceX CEO is tied to a permanent human settlement on Mars that supports at least a million residents. Musk receives one billion shares of SpaceX stock if that happens.
This will not fucking happen! But also, it doesn’t have to! He already owns over six billion SpaceX shares. The shares he already owns, combined with the value of the shares he owns in Tesla, are already worth roughly $1 trillion.
Why are these six billion shares worth roughly one trillion dollars and not worth, say, a few thousand, or even a million dollars? In large part it’s because the value of those shares is based on so, so many predictions. Yet despite what Musk claims about his batting average, the track record says otherwise. Almost all of these predictions are wrong.
In the book Lies My Tech Bro Told Me, I share what science has to say about Musk’s plans to colonize Mars with a million humans, and also what it says about launching satellites from the Moon using a railgun. In fact, I tie the two together. We know that the more immediate claims about lunar railguns are nonsense - Musk says they will be a thing within 10 years - precisely because of what Musk has predicted about setting up shop on Mars. Here’s a representative sample:
In 2016, Musk promised to send unmanned missions to Mars in 2018, then manned missions in 2024. You may have noticed that SpaceX did not send an unmanned mission to Mars in 2018, and 2024 came and went without a single human anywhere near the Red Planet.
In 2020, Musk promised to send manned missions to Mars in 2026. The timer on 2026 hasn’t yet expired as I write this, but one prediction I can make with 100% certainty is that there will be no mission to Mars in 2026, nor will there even be a serious attempt.
In 2022, Musk promised to send humans to Mars in 2029. Still on the books as of this writing, technically, except for one small problem: SpaceX have now pivoted to the next item on this list.
In 2026, Musk pushed the timeline for sending humans to Mars by a full two decades. We’ll now begin Mars colonization in 2046 thanks to the new priority, which is building giant railguns on the surface of the Moon, designed to fling AI satellites into orbit.
So that’s how we know there won’t be lunar railguns on the moon. Here’s what Musk actually wrote on the topic, per Leonard David at Space.com "By using an electromagnetic mass driver and lunar manufacturing," he wrote, "it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year [terawatts per year] of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the sun’s power."
(I have plenty to say about dopes who mention the Kardashev scale in casual conversation, but I’ll have to deal with it in a separate post.)
While I was busy saving receipts from Musk’s predictions about Mars and the Moon, science reporter Sabrina Imbler, who also contributes to Defector, was doing the same. In a piece published in August of 2026, Imbler provides many more instances. (For the book, I figured 4-5 was a good “you get the idea” range.) What’s notable about Imbler’s coverage is how she takes the media to task for reporting/transcribing the Mars fabrications, rather than the man himself. In the setup for the article, Imbler asserts that: “Good science journalism is more interested in the truth behind big promises, or at least the likelihood of said promises coming true. By contrast, bad science journalism functions as a hype machine, regurgitating company statements verbatim.”
In any case, here’s what Sabrina calls a “small sampling” that communicates the “ubiquitous nature of this slop across a range of generally serious publications:”
CBS News, 2016: “SpaceX Chief Elon Musk Predicts People On Mars In 9 Years”
Los Angeles Times, 2016: “SpaceX could send people to Mars in 2024, Elon Musk says”
Washington Post, 2016: “SpaceX says it will fly a spacecraft to Mars as soon as 2018”
The Guardian, 2016: “SpaceX founder Elon Musk plans to get humans to Mars in six years”
ABC, 2016: “SpaceX CEO Elon Musk Wants to Send Humans to Mars by 2025, Years Ahead of NASA”
Futurism, 2016: “SpaceX Is Heading to Mars in 2018 and Sending Humans in 2025”
CNET, 2016: “Elon Musk: We’ll have people on Mars by 2025”
National Geographic, 2017: “Elon Musk: In Seven Years, SpaceX Could Land Humans on Mars”
CBC, 2017: “This is how SpaceX will get humans to Mars by 2024”
Wall Street Journal, 2017: “Elon Musk Aims to Land Humans on Mars by Middle of Next Decade.”
Space.com, 2018: “A Base on Mars? It Could Happen by 2028, Elon Musk Says”
Business Insider, 2018: “Elon Musk says SpaceX is on track to launch people to Mars within 6 years — here’s the full timeline of his plans to populate the red planet”
CNBC Make It, 2019: “Elon Musk says his Mars base will have a ‘fun, outdoorsy atmosphere”
CNBC Make It, 2021: “Elon Musk: ‘I’ll be surprised if we’re not landing on Mars within five years’”
Business Insider, 2020: “Elon Musk says he plans to send 1 million people to Mars by 2050 by launching 3 Starship rockets every day and creating ‘a lot of jobs’ on the red planet.” (sic)
New York Times, 2023: “Elon Musk Says SpaceX Could Land on Mars in 3 to 4 Years”
Yowser. And remember, that list is Imbler’s “small” sample. In the same article - here’s a gift link if you’re interested - they note that NBC carried a 2016 headline that read, “SpaceX CEO Elon Musk Says ‘We Plan to Launch People to Mars in 2024’”, which is the same article I cited in my bullet list of Musk’s failed Martian predictions. What’s more, NBC ran a separate headline earlier in 2016 that read: “Elon Musk Says SpaceX Will Send People to Mars by 2025.” (Neither of those two instances are included in the list above.)
So is this how it works? Rhetorical question. What I’m really asking instead, and what Imbler asks in her reporting, is essentially the same question, which is, How on earth does Elon Musk, whose companies famously do not employ PR departments, get most of the news media to fill this void? Do news outlets like NBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and many others, you know, look into the claims of someone in the news, especially when the person making those claims stands to benefit from credulous, uncritical acceptance of the claims, or super-duper especially if the claims, taken as factual and/or in good faith, might bring harm to the person acting on that claim? For example, if I claimed that adding cocaine to soda was a good idea for nursing mothers and their newborns, would NBC run that story? Or would that claim be fact-checked? I mean I’m just spitballing here, but if a prominent figure were to say something like drinking bleach is a great way to treat viral infections, shouldn’t the reporter hearing that claim see if the claim was rooted in scientific consensus? Isn’t that kinda the whole point of reporting?
When looking through Musk’s past predictions, we see that his “batting average” isn’t so great after all. By Musk’s own logic, then, we should conclude this is because he isn’t very intelligent. This is probably the correct conclusion! But also it’s not my main concern. Unlike much of Silicon Valley’s tech elite, I have no interest in the largely debunked notion of reducing intelligence to a single number.
The more pressing issue is that when those predictions arrive not in book or blog form, but instead via mass media and delivered to investors, such repeated, visionary claims get cast in a different light. I’m thinking here of the promise of 1000 new solar roof deployments per week by 2019. I’m thinking here of the promise of “over” one million robotaxis “for sure” by 2020. I’m thinking here of the promise of selling millions of humanoid Optimus robots by 2026.
These are just a handful of Musk’s predictions about companies he owns; whose engineers he can consult 24/7. But why limit yourself to predictions about fields about which you’re relatively well-informed? Musk sure doesn’t. I mean, who can forget this COVID prediction from March 2020, a topic about which he knows bupkis. On March 19th, Musk wrote, “Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in the US too by end of April.”
Lots of people in the media can forget, that’s who!
In any event, the issue is that when these predictions are made by the CEO of an aerospace company receiving large government contracts, they become outright lies. And the lies soon aggregate into a steaming mountain of bullshit.
So why does this matter? Why do I care, or why should you care, that Musk predicts, wrongly, that humans will land (have landed?) on Mars sometime in 2024? Or that a million humans will live on Mars sometime in the coming decades? Why should you care that all this Mars nonsense keeps getting uncritically reported by multiple otherwise prestigious news outlets? It’s their reputation, right? It’s his company and his money, right?
Wrong, or at least half wrong. It’s not your company, and you don’t have to read the news sources mentioned (most of whom generally do good work), but it is your money, and by extension your labor, that’s supporting this agenda. How so?
I’ll answer that in two ways. First, realize that even attempting Mars colonization will spell humanity’s doom unless something else does that far sooner. Thanks to companies that brought you single-use plastic silverware, and who profit from the incineration of fossil fuels, we’ve been trained to understand the concept of a carbon footprint, and I’m here to tell you that the carbon footprint of the first Egg McMuffin ever enjoyed on Mars would be the equivalent to hundred Exxons and Chevrons.
Second, this is a project that requires buy-in from almost all of humanity, yet almost none of humanity has been consulted about its merits. Recall that Musk’s SpaceX is a private company whose revenue stream has come almost entirely from US government contracts over the course of its 20-year history. And as of 2026, SpaceX is a publicly-traded company, one which was fast-tracked into indexes like the NASDAQ 100 after the exchange rewrote its rules in the days leading up to the SpaceX initial public offering (IPO). This means that workers saving for retirement all over the planet are passively funneling money into shares of SpaceX stock, six billion of which are owned by a single individual who can’t be voted out. In sum: it’s his company, but it’s your money (and mine) that’s bankrolling a morally reprehensible project, one which science tells us will ensure humanity’s demise.
The takeaway is that the bullshit is working. It’s time for that to end.
This piece draws on reporting, analysis, and excerpts from the book Lies My Tech Bro Told Me, which covers the real-world impact of Silicon Valley lies and what the non-billionaires can do about it.
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