14. Mars

After being oust­ed from Pay­Pal, Elon Musk, dri­ven by a deep-root­ed inter­est in aero­space and influ­enced by his fam­i­ly’s his­to­ry of fly­ing, pur­chased a sin­gle-engine tur­bo­prop to learn fly­ing. Despite ini­tial­ly fail­ing his Instru­ment Flight Rules test, his per­se­ver­ance led to suc­cess on his sec­ond attempt. His pas­sion for avi­a­tion evoked a desire for more thrilling expe­ri­ences, cul­mi­nat­ing in the acqui­si­tion of a Sovi­et Bloc mil­i­tary jet, the Aero L‑39 Alba­tros, allow­ing him to delve deep­er into aero­dy­nam­ics and the nuances of flight.

Musk’s jour­ney took a piv­otal turn dur­ing a Labor Day week­end in 2001, fol­low­ing a severe bout with malar­ia. A con­ver­sa­tion dur­ing a dri­ve back from the Hamp­tons with his friend Adeo Ressi ignit­ed Musk’s dor­mant aspi­ra­tions to ven­ture into space explo­ration. This con­ver­sa­tion trans­formed into a firm belief that pri­vate indi­vid­u­als could indeed con­tribute sig­nif­i­cant­ly to space explo­ration, a stark con­trast to the pre­vail­ing notion that such endeav­ors were sole­ly with­in the domain of nation­al agen­cies like NASA.

Upon the stark real­iza­tion that NASA had no imme­di­ate plans for Mars explo­ration, and feel­ing dis­il­lu­sioned with the state of tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment in aero­space, Musk attend­ed a din­ner host­ed by the Mars Soci­ety. This event fur­ther solid­i­fied his deter­mi­na­tion to con­tribute to space explo­ration, fos­ter­ing con­nec­tions with influ­en­tial fig­ures like film direc­tor James Cameron and Mars Soci­ety pres­i­dent Robert Zubrin. It was here that Musk’s vision to make mankind a mul­ti­plan­e­tary civ­i­liza­tion began to crys­tal­lize, mark­ing a shift from his pre­vi­ous tech-dri­ven ven­tures.

Musk’s moti­va­tions were mul­ti­fac­eted, encom­pass­ing a mix of tech­no­log­i­cal stag­na­tion fears, the exis­ten­tial threat to human­i­ty, and a pro­found belief in the pio­neer­ing spir­it, ingrained in him by his fam­i­ly his­to­ry and per­son­al ethos. View­ing the advance­ment to a mul­ti­plan­e­tary exis­tence as an epochal step in human evo­lu­tion, Musk embarked on a jour­ney, fueled by an unyield­ing pas­sion for space explo­ration and a mis­sion-dri­ven approach to tran­scend finan­cial and tech­no­log­i­cal bar­ri­ers.

The deci­sion to relo­cate to Los Ange­les, a hub for aero­space tal­ents, under­scored his com­mit­ment. This move, ini­tial­ly per­ceived by Jus­tine (Musk’s then-wife) as a lure towards the city’s glam­our, was a strate­gic step towards assem­bling a team of rock­et engi­neers. By host­ing meet­ings near the Los Ange­les air­port, Musk ini­ti­at­ed the foun­da­tion­al stages of what would lat­er become a mon­u­men­tal ven­ture in aero­space, mark­ing the begin­ning of SpaceX. Musk’s tran­si­tion from an inter­net entre­pre­neur to a pio­neer­ing space explor­er show­cas­es a relent­less pur­suit of human­i­ty’s expan­sion beyond Earth, blend­ing his tech­ni­cal acu­men with an auda­cious dream to col­o­nize Mars.