Interplanetarische Raumfahrtmissionen und klimaverträgliche Verkehrslösungen – das sind nur zwei Visionen des Elon Musk, die er leidenschaftlich und kompromisslos vorantreibt. Für die einen ist er ein Vorbild, andere sehen in ihm ein Risiko. Lesen Sie hier Argumente zu beiden Sichtweisen.
Elon Musk is one of the most important and innovative people of our time. He looks at the big problems, such as climate change and other existential threats, because we’re a species on a single planet, and he thinks about ways to address them through engineering solutions. This is why he runs companies like SpaceX and Tesla. There are few people who have done more to address the problem of climate change than Musk. His designs have inspired the global growth in electric vehicles.
He’s the world’s richest person, but still has the drive and the mindset to innovate and disrupt. He is always pushing forward at maximum speed, and sometimes that gets him into trouble. When he runs into regulators or people who don’t like what he’s doing, his first reaction is to punch through that wall. Fighting the establishment is part of his world. He uses Twitter to amplify his message and sometimes he says things that are incorrect or controversial. You’ve got to take the good with the bad.
Musk and others share the vision that humanity should be a spacefaring species. In Musk’s mind, going to Mars is part of that destiny, especially if there’s a risk that an asteroid, disease or nuclear conflict could wipe out our species.
Elon Musk uses iterative design, which means things often change from how they were first envisaged. People criticize him for making promises that never happen, but at the time, those promises were the solutions that made the most sense. A willingness to change plans, according to the latest evidence, is a sign of intelligence. Musk was told time and time again that reusable space rockets weren’t technically feasible.
Now, the reusable SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is the safest rocket in the world. He is extraordinarily brilliant — even people who don’t like him have respect for his penetrating intelligence. Elon Musk could be the greatest aerospace engineer of our time, the Einstein of the age.
Gurus generally are a bad thing. We should be wary of the power of rich industrialists to set the agenda for society’s future and to attract large numbers of followers based on their personal visions. Musk is particularly dangerous because he gives people romantic science-fiction dreams: going to Mars, revolutionizing transport. A lot of the time, his promises are outright fraudulent.
He told us he would be going to Mars in 2010, again in 2015, he promised the Hyperloop and a submarine to rescue Thai children trapped in a cave. A lot of the time, it’s just hype — and not always harmless. People have been killed because they believed their Teslas would drive themselves, just as Elon Musk said they could.
There’s a great YouTube video that explains how engineers distinguish between what they call AM, the world of “actual machines” (real engineering), and FM, which is the world of “fucking magic”. Elon Musk is often in the world of FM. That’s certainly true of his tunnel plans, which do not revolutionize public transport by reducing traffic as claimed because you get clogs at their entrance and exit. He told the City of Miami he could build tunnels for a fraction of the costs their engineers calculated. It hasn’t happened. All the experts say that he’s promising the impossible.
The climate crisis is urgent, America has to make huge public investments to build green cities and Musk is talking about Mars. Billionaires like the idea of fleeing to space — it means they don’t have the responsibility of trying to care for the earth. These guys are very good at selling a vision. Trump is the same. They’re storytellers with a feudalistic vision. That’s the problem with Musk, along with cryptocurrencies and his stupid tweets about Covid-19.
We need better dreams than Elon Musk’s: we need to believe in a wonderful, possible human future.