Louise Perry, How History Will Remember Elon Musk, NYTimes, June 3, 2025.
For better or worse, Elon Musk is a visionary. I have no doubt that he’s volatile and reckless, but those who dismiss him as a fraud or an idiot have not been paying close attention. Yes, his time meddling with the federal government has come to an end. And yes, perhaps his foray into politics was, in part, a disappointment to him. But Mr. Musk’s vision goes well beyond Washington. He has always been clear on this point and continues to tell anyone who will listen: “Eventually, all life on Earth will be destroyed by the sun,” he told Fox News last month. “The sun is gradually expanding, and so we do at some point need to be a multiplanet civilization, because Earth will be incinerated.”
This is why, 23 years ago, Mr. Musk resolved to go to Mars — his first step toward interstellar colonization. He says he wants to die there (“just not on impact”). He also says that space exploration will lead to a process of mass psychological renewal. “The United States,” he says, “is literally a distillation of the human spirit of exploration. This is a land of adventurers.” His goal is to save humanity not only from the future loss of our planet but also from our own lethargy and cowardice. If he succeeds in this project, then Mr. Musk’s time in Washington will be just a minor detail in the histories written about him.
It’s not as if this past year has done Mr. Musk long-term harm. Those indulging in schadenfreude at his apparent fall from grace don’t seem to have noticed the success of his space program. In the first half of 2024, his SpaceX company launched seven times as much tonnage into space as the rest of the world put together, and Mr. Trump’s Golden Dome (an imitation of Israel’s Iron Dome) could well consume as many taxpayer dollars as NASA’s Apollo project. Much of this funding will be diverted to SpaceX, given the need for an enormous number of satellites, meaning that Mr. Musk’s fortune will grow still further as a result of his political interventions. Mr. Musk’s obsession with space isn’t just ideological — he is also making money from it. “Pure philanthropy is all very well in its way,” as Cecil Rhodes once said, “but philanthropy plus 5 percent is a good deal better.”
Perry then goes on to review the short career, who made a fortune in the diamond trade (De Beers is his company) and went on to found Rhodesia, dying at the age of 48. She then observes:
The similarities between the two men range from the minor (if suggestive) to the uncanny. Both were difficult and complex men who escaped their tyrannical fathers by migrating to the other side of the world, alone, at a young age — Mr. Musk moved from South Africa to Canada at 17, Mr. Rhodes from Britain to South Africa also at 17 — and made their fortunes in industries that favor the ruthless and the energetic. Both rejected the Christian faith in which they were raised and also the conventions of monogamous marriage. (Some biographers now believe that Mr. Rhodes was gay.) Both developed reputations for volatility and eccentricity; Mr. Rhodes, like Mr. Musk, disliked formal dressing.
And both, importantly, were children of the British Empire. Mr. Musk has never lived in Britain, but he takes a particular interest in the country as a consequence of his British ancestry, and he spent his childhood within the British diaspora of South Africa, during the apartheid era. He and Cecil Rhodes are products of the same culture — a culture that has, for whatever reason, produced a disproportionate number of these strange, ruthless and single-minded men.
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