Has Musk’s SpaceX already been publicly revealed as a Ponzi scheme?

23 May 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Elon Musk today (on May 23rd) has a net worth of $827.7 billion and is ranked #1 at Forbes, as the world’s wealthiest person. At Bloomberg, he is likewise ranked #1, but at $728 billion. However, the world’s wealthiest person is definitely NOT Musk, because the King of Saudi Arabia owns his country including its largest corporation, Aramco, which is the world’s largest oil company, which alone has a market valuation of $1.8 trillion. (How many other potentates might be wealthier than any that is listed by Forbes and/or by Bloomberg I don’t know. Perhaps some trillionaires have paid those ‘news’-media to exclude them from being listed, or else to vastly under-estimate their wealth. One trusts ‘news’-media at one’s peril, just as one trusts billionaires at one’s peril.)

On May 20th, Bloomberg News headlined alternatively “SpaceX Filing Reveals $4.28 Billion Loss, Musk’s Tight Grip” and “SpaceX Shows $4.3 Billion Loss as Musk Targets Record IPO” (perhaps that was one of the reasons for having estimated Musk’s wealth lower than Forbes did), and opened:

SpaceX filed publicly for what stands to be the largest-ever initial public offering, revealing billions in losses and the super-voting share plan allowing Elon Musk to keep the company under his control.

The rocket, satellite and artificial intelligence giant is giving the billionaire the power to outvote anyone else, and promising him outsize rewards, including as many as 1 billion shares, if he can pull it off, according to a filing Wednesday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

The goals Musk, 54, would need to hit include a human settlement on Mars with at least 1 million inhabitants, the filing shows.  …

Musk’s plan for an IPO of unprecedented size is set to transform both the public and private markets if it succeeds. A blockbuster listing, and a rising share price after, would help dispel concern over whether private companies with limited financial disclosures and largely illiquid shares are reaching unjustified valuations in venture capital-led funding rounds.

So, I asked ChatGPT “Is Musk’s goal for SpaceX of a human settlement on Mars with at least 1 million inhabitants physically impossible to achieve; and, if not, then what would be their life-expectancy living there?” I got the following answer:

No, it is not known to be physically impossible. But with present or near-term technology, a self-sustaining settlement of 1 million people on Mars would be extraordinarily difficult and would likely require centuries of continuous industrial development, enormous energy infrastructure, and biological/medical adaptations that do not yet exist.

The more serious question is not “Can humans physically stand on Mars?” — we almost certainly can — but whether humans can survive there long enough, reproduce there safely, and maintain a civilization there without constant support from Earth.

Key problems include:

• radiation
• low gravity
• near-vacuum atmosphere
• extreme cold
• toxic dust
• lack of a biosphere
• psychological isolation
• absence of planetary magnetic shielding

A million people implies not merely a base, but an entire industrial civilization: agriculture, mining, medicine, manufacturing, education, governance, reproduction, and multigenerational continuity.

Radiation: the biggest life-expectancy problem

Mars lacks both:

• a dense atmosphere like Earth’s
• a global magnetic field

That means inhabitants would receive much higher exposure to:

• galactic cosmic rays
• solar particle events

Measurements from NASA’s Curiosity rover suggest that unshielded Mars surface radiation is roughly 20–50 times Earth surface background levels.

Long-term effects likely include:

• elevated cancer rates
• cardiovascular damage
• neurological injury
• fertility problems
• developmental abnormalities in children

Without major shielding, life expectancy could be drastically shortened.

Could shielding solve that?

Possibly.

Most serious Mars settlement concepts assume people would live:

• underground
• inside lava tubes
• beneath meters of regolith (Martian soil)
• or inside heavily shielded habitats

Several meters of soil could reduce radiation substantially.

If shielding were adequate, radiation alone might not prevent near-normal human lifespans.

But then another major unknown appears:

Low gravity (0.38 g)

Mars gravity is only about 38% of Earth’s.

No human has ever lived long-term in anything except:

• Earth gravity (1 g)
• microgravity (~0 g in orbit)

We do not know whether humans can:

• remain healthy for decades at 0.38 g
• carry pregnancies safely
• raise healthy children
• avoid irreversible bone, muscle, cardiovascular, or neurological degradation

This is arguably the single greatest unknown.

Possible outcomes range from:

• “mostly manageable”
  to
• “humans become progressively unhealthy across generations”

If 0.38 g proves biologically insufficient, then a permanent million-person settlement may become impossible without:

• artificial gravity habitats
• extensive biomedical intervention
• or genetic modification

Psychological and civilizational issues

Mars settlers would live:

• months away from Earth
• in enclosed habitats
• under permanent existential risk

A single major failure in:

• power
• food production
• atmosphere recycling
• disease control
  could kill thousands or more.

A million-person colony would require redundancy on a massive scale.

So what might life expectancy actually be?

No one knows. But reasonable speculative ranges are:

Condition    Likely life expectancy

Early exposed settlers with inadequate shielding potentially much shorter than Earth norms

Well-shielded advanced colony with good medicine perhaps near modern Earth expectancy

Multigenerational low-gravity effects prove severe lifespan and fertility may progressively decline

Fully mature underground industrial civilization Earth norms if gravity issue manageable

The gravity issue is the real wildcard. Radiation can probably be mitigated technologically. Gravity cannot easily be changed for an entire planet.

So the most realistic answer is:

• A million-person Mars settlement is not known to violate physics.
• But it is far beyond current engineering capability.
• Its long-term biological viability is unknown.
• Human life expectancy there could range from severely reduced to nearly normal depending mainly on:
  • shielding quality
  • medical advances
  • and whether 0.38 g is sufficient for healthy multigenerational human life.

I then asked: “Please do a reasonable discounted present-value calculation of how long it would take for success on each of those parameters if success would be achieved on all of them, so that today’s investors may then reasonably calculate what a reasonable market-value for such a corporation today would need to be in order for the investment not to be just an incredibly stupid waste of the investor’s money.”

The lengthy answer opened:

A reasonable investor would not value SpaceX primarily as “a future million-person Mars civilization company,” because the discounted present value (DPV) of cash flows occurring that far in the future collapses toward near-zero unless one assumes:

extremely low discount rates,

near-certainty of success,

and enormous future monopoly profits.

Under ordinary venture-capital or equity-market assumptions, a million-person Mars settlement contributes surprisingly little to present valuation.

Here is a rough but economically serious framework.

It closed:

Bottom-line economic conclusion

A strictly rational discounted-present-value investor today would probably conclude:

A million-person Mars civilization contributes little to current intrinsic valuation unless it arrives within roughly 50–70 years.

Beyond ~100 years, ordinary discounting nearly annihilates present value.

Therefore SpaceX’s present valuation can only be rationally justified mainly by near- and medium-term Earth-based revenues and strategic dominance.

The Mars vision functions more like:

a civilizational mission,

geopolitical prestige project,

technological forcing mechanism,

or long-duration option on humanity’s future,
than as a conventional profit-maximizing investment thesis.

I know enough about AI responses to understand that their algorthms are rigorously controlled so as to avoid legal liability that might occur if, for example, the truth if clearly stated would cause financial harm to an actual Ponzi-scheme operator, particularly if he/she will likely be having at his/her disposal over a trillion dollars of investors’ money to hire the best lawyers in order to assure that he/she will easily be able to outlast in court-proceedings anyone who would be publicly saying that it’s a mere Ponzi scheme. The SpaceX claim to be aiming to achieve for its patrons resettlement of them (or their progeny) onto another planet might be a smart PR or advertising lure to start a public company based upon investors’ misinformation or stupidity, but to take it seriously as being a likely profitable private investment beggars rational belief.

I then asked “Has ANY respected physicist said that Mars cannot realistically become a place of long-term human habitation?” The response (and note that it likewise declined to assert that Mars cannot realistically become a place of long-term human habitation — it too is governed by the existing society’s corruptness more than by truthfulness):

Yes. A number of highly respected physicists and astrophysicists have expressed deep skepticism — sometimes extremely strong skepticism — about Mars becoming a realistic long-term human civilization.

The skepticism is usually not that “humans can never go there,” but rather that:

• permanent large-scale habitation may be biologically, economically, or civilizationally unrealistic,
• or vastly harder than Mars advocates imply.

One of the strongest prominent critics is:

Martin Rees

Rees (former Astronomer Royal of the UK and major cosmologist) has repeatedly criticized Mars-colony enthusiasm. He called Musk-style colonization visions a “dangerous delusion.”

Rees’s basic argument is:

• Mars is intrinsically hostile,
• Earth will remain vastly more habitable even after severe catastrophe,
• and robotic exploration is usually more rational than mass human settlement.

He does not say humans can never visit or even live there temporarily. His skepticism is specifically toward the idea of large self-sustaining civilization-scale habitation

Another major skeptical voice is:

Freeman Dyson

Dyson was generally enthusiastic about space exploration, but he repeatedly argued that:

• humans are poorly adapted biologically for hostile extraterrestrial environments,
• robotic or genetically modified systems may be more realistic than ordinary human colonization,
• and space settlement would likely require radical biological transformation of humans themselves.

Dyson often emphasized that ordinary Earth-evolved humans are extremely fragile outside Earth conditions.

Gerard K. O’Neill

Interestingly, O’Neill — one of the great advocates of space settlement — argued that free-space habitats might make far more sense than Mars colonies.

His reasoning:

• Mars has weak gravity but still enough gravity to make launch difficult,
• little atmosphere,
• severe radiation,
• no biosphere,
• limited accessible energy compared to orbital solar collection.

He thought giant rotating space habitats could ultimately be more practical than planetary colonization.

So even major pro-space physicists often preferred:

• orbital habitats,
  not Mars civilizations.

Robert Zubrin (important contrast)

Zubrin is probably the most influential serious advocate for Mars settlement. He argues that:

• Mars is the most practical extraterrestrial settlement target,
• local resource utilization could support industry,
• and civilization there is difficult but feasible.

So the scientific community is not unified.

The core scientific skepticism centers on several unresolved physical/biological problems:

Problem	Status
Radiation	probably technically mitigable
Low gravity	fundamentally unknown
Closed ecological systems	unsolved at civilization scale
Reproduction in Mars gravity	unknown
Long-term psychology	uncertain
Economic self-sufficiency	extremely doubtful
Terraforming	likely centuries to millennia, if possible at all

The low-gravity issue is especially important.

If 0.38 g turns out insufficient for:

• healthy pregnancy,
• childhood development,
• cardiovascular integrity,
• skeletal maintenance,
  then a permanent ordinary-human civilization on Mars may indeed prove unrealistic.

And no one presently knows the answer.

So the accurate answer is:

• Yes, several highly respected physicists and astrophysicists have expressed strong skepticism about long-term human habitation on Mars.
• Their objections are usually biological, economic, and civilizational rather than “physics says impossible.”
• None of them has definitively proved Mars settlement impossible.
• But some believe the obstacles may be so severe that large-scale permanent habitation is unrealistic for ordinary humans.

So, I then Web-searched “Robert Zubrin” and found that he is “A nuclear and astronautical engineer. Zubrin began his career with Martin Marietta (later Lockheed Martin) as a Senior Engineer involved in the design of advanced interplanetary missions,” and that virtually his entire career has been funded by NASA, and that his Mars Society has a section in its requests for donations titled “Anonymous Donations”, “through Silent Donor. Silent Donor is the largest anonymous donation platform in the world. Their platform allows for donors to send fully anonymous, tax-deductible donations.” So, for example, Musk’s SpaceX, or Bezos’s Blue Origin, or other rocketry and ‘defense’ contractor corporations, could be funding it and getting tax-write-offs (from us) for doing so.

I then asked Google’s AI “What physicists have said that a permanent human habitation of Mars would be virtually impossible?” and got this answer:

Prominent physicists and astrophysicists, such as Neil deGrasse Tyson and Adam Becker, argue that permanent human habitation on Mars is virtually impossible with current science. They base this on extreme survival hurdles like deadly cosmic radiation, toxic soil, and a freezing, unbreathable atmosphere. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

The key physicists and their specific arguments against permanent habitation include:

• Neil deGrasse Tyson (Astrophysicist): Tyson has frequently expressed skepticism about the feasibility of colonizing Mars. He emphasizes the immense biological and economic hurdles, often pointing out that the harsh environment makes establishing a self-sustaining colony—rather than just a heavily funded scientific outpost—foolhardy. He views the business models for widespread Martian settlement as scientifically and economically unattainable at this stage.
• Dr. John Brandenburg (Plasma Physicist): While Brandenburg has theorized about Mars’s ancient history, he acknowledges that the current surface is an entirely hostile environment. He has highlighted that surviving on the planet would require a nearly perfectly self-contained, resource-neutral system that is beyond our engineering capabilities.
• Adam Becker (Astrophysicist): In his critical work analyzing Silicon Valley space crusades, Becker dismantles the utopian ideal of colonizing Mars. He classifies attempts at permanent settlement as scientifically unfeasible, stressing that the energy and technological requirements needed to shield humans from lethal space radiation make long-term residency fundamentally implausible.
• The Radiation Barrier (Consensus): Independent researchers and physicists from institutions like UCLA and MIT have modeled the radiation limits for Mars. Because Mars lacks a protective magnetic field, their findings indicate that human exposure to deep-space cosmic rays limits a safe stay on the planet to roughly four years. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]

These people are not “engineers” but “physicists,”  which is the appropriate specialization to address such questions.

I then asked this same question of Musk’s own Grok AI, and got:

Neil deGrasse Tyson (astrophysicist and science communicator) is the most prominent physicist who has repeatedly expressed strong skepticism about permanent human habitation or large-scale colonization of Mars.

He has described the idea of colonizing Mars as “entirely absurd,” citing several insurmountable challenges rooted in physics and biology:

• Radiation: Mars lacks a global magnetic field and has a very thin atmosphere, exposing surface dwellers to high levels of cosmic and solar radiation. Protecting a city-scale population would require technology he considers effectively impossible with foreseeable means.
• Toxic environment: Ultraviolet radiation has turned Martian soil into a “toxic cocktail,” and the atmosphere is mostly CO2 with almost no breathable oxygen.
• Habitability and appeal: Even if short-term visits were possible, few people would want to live there permanently under harsh conditions (extreme cold, low gravity ~0.38g, dust storms, etc.). He doubts “legions of people” would sign up for it.

Tyson supports scientific outposts or research missions but not self-sustaining colonies or mass settlement. He has reiterated these points in interviews (e.g., with Futurism in 2018 and more recent StarTalk discussions).

Other Notable Voices

• Lord Martin Rees (British cosmologist, astrophysicist, and Astronomer Royal) has called Mars colonization a “dangerous delusion.” He argues that while robotic exploration is valuable, human settlement faces profound physical and practical barriers, and efforts should prioritize Earth’s sustainability instead.
• Adam Becker (physicist and science journalist) has pushed back against optimistic timelines for colonization. In discussions (e.g., with Neil deGrasse Tyson), he highlights radiation, lack of shielding, toxic regolith, communication delays, life-support logistics, and low gravity’s unknown long-term biological effects as making large-scale or permanent habitation extremely difficult.

Other physicists and scientists (e.g., in planetary science or space medicine) often echo these concerns about radiation, micro-/low-gravity effects on human physiology (including potential issues with reproduction and development), perchlorates in the soil, and the immense engineering required for self-sufficiency. Some view true terraforming as effectively impossible with current or near-term technology.

Context and Counterpoints

Many experts see short-term scientific bases as feasible but view permanent, self-sustaining human habitation (e.g., cities with families living multi-generationally) as extraordinarily challenging or unrealistic in the foreseeable future due to fundamental physics (radiation, gravity, resource extraction) and biology. Optimists like Michio Kaku see it as difficult but potentially viable long-term as an “insurance policy,” though even he acknowledges massive hurdles.

Critics argue that hype around Mars settlement (e.g., from Elon Musk) often downplays these issues. No major physicist has claimed it’s literally impossible in all future scenarios, but several, led by Tyson, argue it’s virtually impossible as a practical, thriving civilization in anything like the near-to-medium term.

I have, thus-far, found the most reliable AIs to be ChatGPT and Grok.

Ars Technicha headlined on 25 April 2025, “Silicon Valley billionaires literally want the impossible” and interviewed physicist Adam Becker, who said,

Living on Mars sucks. Mars isn’t even mid. Mars is just crappy. The gravity is too low. The radiation is too high. There’s no air. The dirt is made of poison. There’s very little water. It gets hit with asteroids more often than Earth does because it’s closer to the asteroid belt. And the prospects for terraforming technology in any meaningful way are not great. Making Mars as habitable as Antarctica during the polar night would be the greatest technological undertaking humanity has ever taken by many orders of magnitude, in order to create a place that nobody would want to live, and where the gravity would still be too low. It’s a deeply unpleasant place.

Presumably, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos know all this. But do their investors?

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.