Whenever you think you’ve plumbed the depths with these guys, somehow there’s always deeper to go. One of their fantasies is building actual cities to manifest their ideologies.
Seems like more people should be talking about how a libertarian charter city startup funded by Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, and Peter Thiel is trying to bankrupt Honduras.
Próspera is suing the govt for ⅔ of its annual state budget. An op-ed in Foreign Policy states that the suit’s success “would simply render the country bankrupt.”
Silicon Valley billionaires are backing a project that is trying to bankrupt a poor country for reneging on a deal struck with people who have been indicted on corruption, drug trafficking, and weapons charges.
It was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought. They couldn’t get the most basic pieces of the government to work.
Thiel is now back supporting Trump, as he gave $15 million to his former employee, JD Vance, Trump’s VP pick. There’s a nice article on this “New Right” from Vanity Fair:
In true Musk style, this latest report came in the form of a response to a post by billionaire Bill Ackman on a new campaign by Trumpists to “Make America Healthy Again”. This is an “I’m not an anti-vaxxer but” campaign led by JFK jr. acolyte, the billionaire conspiracist Nicole Shanahan, who, by chance I guess, is said to be one of Musk’s exes. Her Wikipedia page is a wild example of how apparently intelligent and talented people get lost in a mire of conspiracy and madness.
But to briefly respond to Musk’s post:
“Making life multiplanetary” is not “fundamentally a cost per ton to Mars problem”. It’s a question of desire: what do we want? Humanity is not economics.
Obviously his projections are nonsense. But it doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous. Every Starship launch is a disaster for all of us.
Building a self-sustaining city on Mars is impossible, but trying to do it will certainly massively harm life on earth and accelerate climate chaos. Never forget, though, no matter what extremes of damage the likes of Musk do to the earth, even in the worst case scenario, it’ll still be better here than it is on Mars.
