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For the past several years, Jeff Bezos has been the richest person in the world, even after losing a large chunk of his fortune in a divorce. That changed this week when a surge in Tesla shares made Elon Musk the richest man in the world. To celebrate, he will not go to Disneyland. No, Elon Musk apparently takes the idea of living on Mars very seriously, and wants to take a million people on the trip.
After Musk officially became the world’s most successful capitalist Thursday, he posted a 2018 tweet on his Twitter page announcing his intention to use his wealth to start a colony on Mars. According to a recent interview, this is also why he is selling his entire property, including a house that once belonged to Gene Wilder. Oh, he might have a thing for Musk to move to Texas for tax reasons, but he’ll tell you it’s about Mars.
It won’t be easy or cheap to start a colony on the red planet, but Elon Musk has $ 188 billion. That includes stocks and assets that you probably can’t sell, but cash doesn’t hurt either. SpaceX and the Starship rocket in development are key to Musk’s plans. By 2050, Musk has said he hopes to have a fleet of 1,000 starships with three ships launched every day.
The Starship is still a long way from carrying passengers, but Musk thinks we’re only a few years away from setting foot on Mars.
Musk has talked about the cost of a trip to Mars, and recently pegged the cost at around $ 500,000. For wealthy Americans, that’s within reach if you sell everything you have on Earth, as Musk puts it. For everyone else, Musk says there will be loans. However, I am still not convinced of the wisdom of going into debt to travel to the private planet of a billionaire where there are no laws. I’ve read this science fiction novel and it doesn’t end well.
This all feels so much more real today: the richest person on Earth wants to go to Mars. You can probably make that happen thanks to the unfathomable wealth at your disposal. Whether it is a good idea or not is another story. NASA has generally spoken about its plans for Mars, which could include a manned mission in the 2030s. NASA is more cautious because, for one thing, it doesn’t have billions of dollars poking a hole in its proverbial pocketbook. There are also many unknowns about life on Mars. Low gravity and high radiation could make long-term colonization dangerous or impossible until technology advances considerably. And yet Elon Musk seems determined to go to Mars sooner rather than later.
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