Topline
SpaceX Elon Musk predicted SpaceX would send humans back to the Moon and Mars in the next five years and build permanent cities on the lunar surface in the next ten years—offering wildly optimistic targets for space travel in a recent interview with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
Key Facts
In the interview with Abbott, who was guest hosting Sean Hannity’s talk radio show on Wednesday, Musk said he hoped to transport up to “tens of thousands” of people to a base on the Moon in the next ten years—what he admitted was a “pretty outrageous number given that you know, there’s only about a dozen or so people that have been to the Moon so far.”
He said the company hoped to land an astronaut on the Moon in the next two to three years, then “expand rapidly from there,” up to the point that “any member of the public who wants to go to the moon, can go to the Moon and Mars.”
Musk said the company’s eventual goal was to build a “full blown, self-sustaining city on the Moon, like an actual metropolis,” where people could move permanently or visit on vacation.
It will be much harder to transport people to the red planet, Musk said, due to the amount of time it takes to reach the planet, but the SpaceX CEO still predicted the company would send the first humans there in the next five years, before “hopefully” sending thousands in the next ten to twelve years.
Musk also made promises about expanding data centers in space, another one of his company’s stated goals, claiming SpaceX would be launching its first “AI satellites” next year, before doing so at a “large scale” in the next two years.
Contra
Musk has a long history of failed predictions, including multiple overly-optimistic promises about sending humans back to the Moon or setting up a colony on Mars. He has been predicting humans would reach Mars in the next ten years as early as 2011, repeating similar claims at least 19 times in interviews and on social media over the years, a New York Times review found. In 2017, he announced plans for SpaceX to begin flying private citizens around the moon by 2018—a trip that never happened.
Big Number
1 billion. That’s how many SpaceX shares Musk would receive if the company reaches a market cap of $7.5 trillion and builds a colony on Mars with at least 1 million inhabitants, according to the company’s S-1 filing. Analysts have already cast doubt on the lucrative pay package, with one previously telling Forbes the cost of maintaining a Mars colony could eat into the company’s profits from its Starlink internet satellites.
Forbes Valuation
We value Musk’s current net worth at $934 billion, making him the wealthiest person in the world. He briefly became the world’s first trillionaire after SpaceX’s initial public offering, but the company’s falling share price has brought Musk’s fortune below that mark in recent weeks.