The techno-futuristic philosophy behind Elon Musk's mania

As Elon Musk prepared to make a less-than-triumphant exit from Washington, he told Fox News host Jesse Watters a few weeks ago that his rampage through the bureaucracy had made "significant progress" in cutting waste and fraud. But there was no hiding that the man whose rockets can gracefully return to Earth standing tall on their launchpads had made a bit of a crash landing.

His projected cut of $2 trillion from the federal budget had shrunk on paper, at that point, to $165 billion. Tesla stock took a nosedive along with his personal wealth and popularity. And, as he rewrote Silicon Valley's mantra into "move fast, break things and get out of town," no one was urging him to stay.

Prompted by Watters, Musk shifted the interview seamlessly from eradicating waste to another obsession: the looming eradication of life on Earth. "The sun is gradually expanding, so we do at some point need to be a multiplanetary civilization because Earth will be incinerated," Musk said.

"I'm hearing this for the first time," Watters said, bemused.

"We have several hundred million years, so don't hold your breath," Musk assured him.

Say what you will about Musk, the man thinks ahead.

Over the past couple decades, Musk has devoted himself to three grand engineering projects, all with the long-term mission of sustaining humanity far into the future. The goal of his rocket company SpaceX is to establish a city on Mars. Tesla is accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots. Neuralink aims to eventually wire artificial intelligence into human brains so people can keep pace with machines.

"The guy is our Einstein," JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon said two days after President Donald Trump's inauguration.

That was before Musk etched a new image for himself -- a hyped-up man all in black with dark sunglasses, strutting before a roaring crowd, punching the air with a chain saw, declaring it "the chain saw for bureaucracy."

Musk embraced Trump after a MAGA conversion, motivated by his fear that regulation was choking innovation and his vow to "destroy the woke mind virus" after one of his children underwent a gender transition. But Musk split with the president on tariffs and the budget bill and the billionaire buddies formally fissured Wednesday night. Musk took to his social media network X to thank the president for allowing him to serve and indicated that he was permanently moving on.

Musk's tumultuous four-month adventure shifted his gaze from the long term to the ultimate short-term arena -- politics. The wild ride through the halls of official power perhaps fed his taste for drama, celebrity and the adolescent heroism of comic books and sci-fi.

But there is another strand that runs strong in Musk, a techno-futuristic philosophy that might help explain how the man who has fancied himself Batman on a mission to save humanity could also play the dark jokester -- the world's richest man who gleefully proclaimed the demise of aid for the world's poorest with a callous quip about how he and his Department of Government Efficiency troops had "spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper."

That philosophy emerged from the world Musk now returns to full time, a world of engineers and utilitarian thinkers and tech billionaires, who seem to have designs on everything -- past, present and, especially, future.

Existential threats, technological solutions

In 2022, Musk reposted a link to a 2003 paper by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who was then at Oxford University, with this line: "Likely the most important paper ever written."

In the paper, titled "Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development," Bostrom took a stab at calculating the potential lives lost by delaying the development of technology needed to survive "in the accessible region of the universe" for millions of years. "The potential for over 10 trillion potential human beings is lost for every second of postponement of colonization of our supercluster," he wrote.

Such pie-in-the-sky calculations urging the colonizing of space might seem like unusual territory for a philosophy professor -- even one with advanced degrees in physics and computational neuroscience. But Bostrom is among a group of philosophers and technologists that promotes a strain of thinking clunkily labeled longtermism. It's a worldview that aligns with -- and supports -- Musk's futurist, sometimes fantastical, vision.

Longtermism is deeply entwined with effective altruism, a more widely known movement. Effective altruism, which developed from ideas put forth by philosopher Peter Singer in the early 1970s, argues that well-off people and societies are morally obligated to combat poverty, even far from home. It encourages a strict, utilitarian process for calculating how philanthropy can do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Insecticide-treated bed nets that protect against mosquito-borne malaria in remote regions on the other side of the world, for example, are far more "effective" when it comes to saving lives than donations to a local food bank.

The longtermists radically changed the equation by asserting that we have a similar moral obligation to the well-being of our brethren yet to come, those thousands or even millions of years in the future. Of course, there are potentially many, many, many more future people than there are current ones, particularly when you throw in the possibility of nonhuman sentient beings, which some longtermists do.

So, simply by the numbers, the case can be made that ensuring the existence of future human civilization by preparing for species-ending risks such as a massive asteroid strike or global nuclear annihilation outweighs addressing poverty or starvation for a few hundred million current people.

For longtermists, the most pressing threats are often existential, and technology is almost always the cure.

This is Musk's sweet spot. The focus of so much of his technology -- rocketry, humanoid robotics, even his tunneling company -- is intended to converge on making "human consciousness" multiplanetary, an urgent mission he complains is frustrated by rules and regulators. He calls colonizing Mars "life insurance of life collectively." Like an insurance salesman, he has his pitch down.

"For the first time in the 4 1/2-billion-year history of Earth, it is possible to extend consciousness beyond our home planet," he said on Joe Rogan's podcast in February.

"We have to see this as a race against time," he said. "Can we make Mars self-sufficient before civilization has some sort of future fork in the road where there is either like a nuclear war or something, or we get hit by a meteor or simply civilization might just die with a whimper in adult diapers instead of with a bang?"

Musk took his first step toward Mars in 2001 when he donated $5,000 to the Mars Society, which was started by Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer who had written the book "The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must." The next year, Musk started SpaceX.

Coincidentally or not, this was about the same time Bostrom published a paper titled "Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards." It looked at a range of threats: a meteor strike; global disease; runaway AI; even the admittedly slim possibility that a future society created a simulated reality that we were now unknowingly living in and which could be turned off. Musk has occasionally invoked this "simulation theory," which harks back to "The Matrix," one of his favorite movies.

"The balance of evidence is such that it would appear unreasonable not to assign a substantial probability to the hypothesis that an existential disaster will do us in," Bostrom wrote, adding later in the paper, "With technology, we have some chance, although the greatest risks now turn out to be those generated by technology itself."

Whether or not Musk read the paper, he has echoed Bostrom and other proponents of longtermism, including philosopher William MacAskill. MacAskill became something of a celebrity intellectual among technologists and financiers, to whom he preached an "earning-to-give" approach to philanthropy. Sam Bankman-Fried, a now-disgraced crypto magnate, was one of his biggest acolytes. Musk touted MacAskill's 2022 book, "What We Owe the Future," saying on X that the explication of longtermist thinking is "a close match to my philosophy."

Not surprisingly, Musk, who did not respond to a request for comment, does not explicitly identify himself with any movement defined by anyone else -- or didn't before falling in with MAGA. Bostrom takes no credit for Musk's long view, saying in an email, "My impression is that Musk is not a follower of any one particular school of thought but is rather inclined to do his own thinking and to reach his own conclusions."

But it is unmistakable how frequently Musk warns of existential threats, usually arrived at via a "fork in the road."

In 2023, he said AI becoming "far smarter than the smartest human" was "one of the existential risks that we face, and it's potentially the most pressing one."

In February, referring to "the woke mind virus," he said in a post on X that "the biggest existential danger to humanity is having it programmed into the AI." He claimed that some AI platforms (but not the one he owns) will answer that misgendering someone is worse than thermonuclear war. "The existential problem with that extrapolation is that a super powerful AI could decide that the only 100% certain way to stop misgendering is to kill all humans," he said.

In 2022, he posted that "population collapse due to low birthrates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming."

This year, wielding his celebrity and money unsuccessfully to swing a Wisconsin Supreme Court election, he told a crowd of supporters: "I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it's going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will."

And in August, in a conversation with Trump on X, he said he was endorsing him for president because "I think we are at the fork in the road of destiny of civilization."

'Civilizational suicidal empathy'

There appears to be a tautology to Musk's longtermism: If Musk is battling a threat, it is, by definition, existential.

"Musk is a hero in the Homeric sense, in his mind and in his action," said Zubrin, of the Mars Society. "He is someone who is striving to do great deeds to earn eternal glory. He has done some. Just as in Homer, this sort of motivation also has a pathological side."

For Musk, countering existential risks gives him broad license. Fathering 13 children by several women is Musk combating the societal risk of falling birthrates worldwide. "If you don't make new humans, there's no humanity," he said in a live interview last fall with Peter Diamandis, an entrepreneur and a Musk associate. "I do have a lot of kids, and I encourage others to have lots of kids."

In a long-running legal battle between Musk and Tesla shareholders over his projected $55.8 billion compensation package, an email emerged that he wrote to a company lawyer in 2017, explaining, "The added comp is just so I can put as much as possible toward minimizing existential risk by putting the money toward Mars if I am successful in leading Tesla to be one of the world's most valuable companies. This is kinda crazy, but it is true."

From that perspective, one can see why it makes sense for Musk to feed tens of billions worth of government programs for the global poor into the "wood chipper" while, two months later, $5.9 billion in government contracts was fed into Musk's space company.

Like many donors to Trump, Musk has gotten a return on his investment in the election. Trump promoted a Mars mission in his inaugural address. A close Musk associate is now the head of NASA. Before the election, Musk complained that because of the profusion of regulations, it would "eventually become illegal to do very large projects, and we won't be able to get to Mars." Now, many of Musk's governmental annoyances are melting away.

Critics of longtermism say it appeals to wealthy tech moguls precisely because it adds a sheen of morality to their masters-of-the-universe projects. They also say that the moguls' ultimate goal is a utopian civilization of humans, biological and robotic, all AI enhanced.

Mollie Gleiberman, an anthropologist at the University of Antwerp who has studied the rise of effective altruism, highlights a paradox of the futuristic tech moguls: Some of the same people warning of the dangers of superintelligent AI are also developing AI, such as Musk himself. It's another tautology -- technological risk necessitates a technological response. "The vivid articulation of a fear conjures the thing to be feared into existence," Gleiberman wrote in a 2023 paper.

Take humanoid robots, for example. During an interview this year with Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Musk was asked how real the prospect was of killer robots annihilating humanity. "Twenty percent likely," he shot back.

But given his belief that robots will unleash never-before-seen levels of productivity, Musk reassured Cruz that, barring human annihilation, it is "80% likely we will have extreme prosperity for all."

At a Tesla promotional event last year captured on video, Musk's robots were on the move, serving drinks, posing for pictures and dancing. "It can do anything you want, so it can be a teacher, babysit your kids, walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks," Musk told guests. "I think this will be the biggest product ever of any kind."

Max Tegmark, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist and AI researcher, said he bonded with Musk a decade ago over a shared belief that "AI was going to hit us like a tsunami." Tegmark said Musk distinguishes himself among business leaders by his devotion to not just thinking long term, but acting on it. "He makes money now and spends it on making the long-term future good," Tegmark said.

Regardless of whether his ultimate goal is reached, the ambition births breakthrough creations along the way for the here and now -- reusable rockets, electric cars, a satellite-based internet service, a human-computer link aiding people with neurological damage.

Tegmark is president of the Future of Life Institute, which is devoted to the safety of technology, bioengineering and nuclear weapons. Musk, an adviser to the group, donated about $10 million to the institute, which used some of the money to help fund a now-shuttered center at Oxford founded by Bostrom called Future of Humanity Institute.

"People can quibble about his methods and politics," Tegmark said. But he said Musk's focus on the long-term future and protecting against threats has remained unchanged. Committed longtermists aren't convinced that Musk has it right, though. "Longtermism isn't about ignoring present-day suffering in favor of speculative futures," MacAskill, the philosopher, wrote in an email, adding that the best way to safeguard the future is by "maintaining the international cooperation needed to address global risks -- not dismantling the very institutions that make such cooperation possible."

Singer, a retired Princeton University professor whose 1972 essay "Famine, Affluence and Morality" was the initial spur for the effective altruism movement, is similarly skeptical. "If you were altruistic at all, you would have paid more attention to the impact that you are having on hundreds of millions of people by the cutback in USAID, or the freeze in USAID, plus the many other things that are happening as well," he said.

Musk is now headed back to the future. Days ago, SpaceX launched another test flight of its supersize Starship. The spacecraft spun out of control and wound up as a debris field in the Indian Ocean. But Musk claims he still plans to shoot for Mars next year.

Even Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, thinks Musk's Mars colonization plan is "nuts." He wants the United States to pursue Mars for the challenge and for science. And he worries that Musk's short-term dive into politics has hurt the long-term goal, since the Mars mission might now be seen as a Musk project and become prone to political turbulence.

In February, still deep in the turbulence of Washington, Musk regaled Rogan, the podcast host, with tales of waste from the federal budget. Like USAID, which stands for US Agency for International Development, the care and feeding of migrants was a particular DOGE target. It's plausible that a tough, careful audit could find money poorly spent, but Musk also came to a more ominous and more predictable conclusion: He had found a new existential threat.

"We've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on," he told Rogan. "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They are exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. And I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot."