There has been much speculation around why Elon Musk — who’d thus far been focused on getting humanity to Mars — had entered politics in 2024, but his PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has some insight into why.
Peter Thiel has indicated that Elon Musk entered politics in a big way in 2024 because he believed that woke ideologies would follow him to Mars, and end up corrupting the new civilization that would be set up there. “This is a conversation I had with Elon back in 2024,” Thiel said on a podcast. “I had this sea-steading version with Elon where I said, you know, if Trump doesn’t win, I wanna just leave the country. And then Elon said, ‘There’s nowhere to go. There’s nowhere to go. This is the only plan’,” he added.
Now Musk had been saying that humanity will become multiplanetary, and had plans to take the first humans to Mars in a few years, so it was surprising to Thiel that Musk believed that there was nowhere to go — if his plans worked out, he could’ve definitely ended up going to Mars in the long run. But Thiel said that Musk believed that even Mars wouldn’t be immune from the same problems that were plaguing the US at that time.
“You always think of the right arguments to make later,” Thiel continued. “And it was about two hours after we had dinner and I was home that I thought of, wow, Elon, you don’t believe in going to Mars anymore. 2024 is the year where Elon stopped believing in Mars, not as a silly science tech project, but as a political project. Mars was supposed to be a political project. It was building an alternative. And in 2024, Elon came to believe that if you went to Mars, the socialist US government, the Woke AI, it would follow you to Mars,” Thiel added.
“It was the (Google DeepMind CEO) Demis (Hassbis) meeting with Elon that we sort of brokered. He was doing Deepmind. This is the rough conversation. Demis tells Elon, I’m working on the most important project in the world. I’m building a superhuman AI, and Elon responds to Demis, well, I’m working on the most important project in the world. I am turning us inter interplanetary species. And then Demis said, well, you know, my AI will be able to follow you to Mars. And, and then Elon sort of went quiet,” Thiel said.
It appears that Musk believed that the threat of socialist and woke policies was so great that they’d jeopardize his Mars project. Around the same time, Musk had endorsed Donald Trump for the 2024 election, and then put his weight behind helping him win. Musk had not only donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the campaign, but also personally overseen his campaign in the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania. Musk’s efforts bore fruit — Trump was elected President of the United States, and reversed many of the woke policies of the previous administration. And having successfully staved off the threat from woke socialism, it appears that Musk can again focus on taking humanity to Mars like he’d originally planned.