Louise Perry
Visionaries can be terrifying, far more terrifying than the selfish and venal, who are easy to predict and understand. Visionaries with the means to realise their visions are the most terrifying of all. They are also rare — in any given historical period, there are just a few men (they are always men) who bend reality around themselves, disregarding criticism and caution.
For better or worse, Elon Musk is a visionary. I have no doubt that he’s volatile and reckless, but those who dismiss him as a fraud or an idiot have not been paying close attention. Yes, his time meddling with the federal government has come to an end. And yes, perhaps his foray into politics was, in part, a disappointment to him. But Musk’s vision goes well beyond Washington. He has always been clear on this point and continues to tell anyone who will listen: “Eventually, all life on Earth will be destroyed by the sun,” he told Fox News last month. “The sun is gradually expanding, and so we do at some point need to be a multi-planet civilisation because Earth will be incinerated.”
This is why, 23 years ago, Musk resolved to go to Mars — his first step toward interstellar colonisation. He says he wants to die there (“just not on impact”). He also says that space exploration will lead to a process of mass psychological renewal. “The US,” he says, “is literally a distillation of the human spirit of exploration. This is a land of adventurers.” His goal is to save humanity, not only from the future loss of our planet but also from our own lethargy and cowardice. If he succeeds in this project, then Musk’s time in Washington will be just a minor detail in the history written about him.
It’s not as if this past year has done Musk long-term harm. Those indulging in schadenfreude at his apparent fall from grace don’t seem to have noticed the success of his space program. In the first half of 2024, his SpaceX company launched seven times as much tonnage into space as the rest of the world put together, and Trump’s Golden Dome could well consume as many taxpayer dollars as NASA’s Apollo project. Much of this funding will be diverted to SpaceX, given the need for an enormous number of satellites, meaning that Musk’s fortune will grow still further as a result of his political interventions. Musk’s obsession with space isn’t just ideological — he is also making money from it. “Pure philanthropy is all very well in its way,” as Cecil Rhodes once said, “but philanthropy plus 5% is a good deal better.”
Rhodes was another businessman, politician and visionary who bent reality around his will, one of these strange and polarising figures who crop up throughout history and — to use one of Silicon Valley’s favourite maxims — “just do things.” One thing Rhodes did was make a lot of money, initially through the diamond trade, which he entered as a teenager, and eventually to create in 1888 the De Beers diamond company. He would go on to become prime minister of the Cape Colony, the founder of Rhodesia and the most powerful agent of British imperialism in Africa, with all the violence that implies. He died in 1902, at age 48, as one of the richest men on earth.
The visionary facet of Rhodes’s character is often forgotten, including by his contemporaries, many of whom regarded him as a megalomaniac and a brute, interested only in his personal enrichment. But the vision was there, all the same. In 1877, a young Rhodes produced a document outlining his plans for the future of humanity. Writing in a shack on the diamond fields of Kimberley, South Africa, he dedicated his life and his fortune to “the extension of British rule throughout the world.” This was the high noon of the empire. Britain controlled roughly a quarter of the world’s land mass. And yet the 24-year-old Rhodes set his sights further: on China, Japan, South America, the entirety of the Holy Land and the recovery of the US to boot. This was not for Britain’s sake, he insisted, but for “the best interests of humanity.” A Pax Britannica, conceived under African skies.
It’s hard for modern people to grasp the sincerity of Rhodes’s vision, given the ideological distance between our era and his. Although no one in Britain doubted that Rhodes was a great man, there were plenty who doubted he was a good one. According to one estimate, Rhodes was responsible for the deaths of as many as 20,000 Africans during the conquest of what is now Zimbabwe. His supporters thought he ought to be feted; his critics thought he ought to be hanged.
The similarities between the two men range from the minor (if suggestive) to the uncanny. Both were difficult and complex men who escaped their tyrannical fathers by migrating to the other side of the world, alone, at a young age — Musk moved from South Africa to Canada at 17, Rhodes from Britain to South Africa also at 17 — and made their fortunes in industries that favour the ruthless and the energetic. Both rejected the Christian faith in which they were raised and also the conventions of monogamous marriage (some biographers now believe that Rhodes was gay). Both developed reputations for volatility and eccentricity — Rhodes, like Musk, disliked formal dressing.
And both, importantly, were children of the British Empire. Musk has never lived in Britain, but he takes a particular interest in the country as a consequence of his British ancestry, and he spent his childhood within the British diaspora of South Africa, during the apartheid era. He and Cecil Rhodes are products of the same culture — a culture that has, for whatever reason, produced a disproportionate number of these strange, ruthless and single-minded men.