When tech billionaires govern the sky: Musk, Thiel, Altman and the privatisation of space

The company SpaceX recently entered the stock market with record figures, with a plan to move AI into space and transform internet communication. What were its beginnings, and what does its success mean for the planet today?

In 2001, a party for PayPal employees took place in Las Vegas. Among those present was its former director, 30‑year‑old programmer and visionary Elon Musk, who held bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics.

He had not taken offence when, a year earlier, his colleagues had removed him from the position of company director (at that time the company was still operating under the name X.com), branding him an unbearable megalomaniac who scorned risk. He regarded the coup against him as an opportunity to start another, more ambitious business. After a brief period of sulking, he made peace with his colleagues.

At the mentioned party, however, people did not have much fun with him. He spent most of the time sitting in a shelter by the pool, studying a tattered manual for a Russian rocket engine. “I want to colonise Mars,” he explained his behaviour to a former colleague. “My life’s mission is to turn humankind into an interplanetary civilisation.” “Man, you have gone crazy!” came the reply.

Intelligent life might be extremely rare in the universe. What if Earth were destroyed by an asteroid, nuclear war or climate change? A colony on Mars could then be humanity’s only chance. Added to this was his own story, the difficult coexistence with a half‑deranged authoritarian father and the outlook of an immigrant who had come to the United States from South Africa.

For the young Musk, America was a land of pioneers who travelled west at the risk of their lives and conquered new territory. And in his view, this pioneering spirit was fading.

A journey to Mars could revive it. But how to get there? To his surprise, he found no concrete plan on the NASA website. On his own he could not achieve anything, he told himself; for a private individual, building a rocket would be far too expensive. Or would it? He went to a public library and borrowed books on rocket engineering. He started calling experts and begging them to lend him old manuals for rocket engines.

Among other things, Musk wants to start moving artificial intelligence into space, where there is plenty of solar energy, but this will require enormous costs. Investors fear that a company which ended last year in the red will burn through their money too quickly.

Are these fears justified? And should people who have not entrusted him with their money also be afraid of Musk’s energies?

Back then, at the beginning of the new millennium, Musk’s first idea was only to send a greenhouse with plants to Mars. He hoped this would excite the public and push it to exert pressure on Congress to give NASA more money. And it occurred to him that he could buy a rocket for such a mission in Russia.

Martin Uhlíř is a journalist at Czech magazine Respekt. He graduated from the Faculty of Science at Charles University (1991) and, during the 2004-2005 academic year, studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States as part of a journalism fellowship. From 1997 to 2004, he worked as an editor at Lidové noviny; he has been a member of the Respekt editorial team since February 2006. He focuses on science and research and also frequently covers environmental topics, particularly those related to climate change. He is the author of the popular science book Jak jsme se stali lidmi (How We Became Human, 2007) and the novel Sestry (Sisters, 2021).