The recent flurry of headlines around SpaceX’s mega IPO makes it easy to forget that Elon Musk has been working toward establishing life on Mars for more than two decades.
This summer, the rocket company made its debut on the Nasdaq in the largest IPO in history. For the first time, analysts had the chance to examine the company’s inner workings. Within the prospectus, the SpaceX team wrote the company’s aim was to “build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”
So, no small task.
The undertaking may be a little too lofty for analysts more interested in the company for its AI, satellite, and rocket capabilities—and their skepticism wouldn’t be the first. Indeed, once upon a time, famed investor Ray Dalio warned Musk against committing too fully to the space race.
Speaking on the My First Million podcast in an episode released over the weekend, the Bridgewater Associates founder recalled telling Musk—fresh off the sale of PayPal—not to sink his $180 million in proceeds into a quest for life on Mars.
The hedge fund titan first met Musk in 2002, when Dalio was researching the personality types of founders and entrepreneurs. The Tesla CEO was a “shaper,” Dalio said—someone “who love[s] to go from visualization to actualization and to be on that mission.”
“Making money is not a big deal for him,” Dalio added. It’s a surprising claim given the fact that Musk is the wealthiest person on Earth. But Dalio explained that he doesn’t believe Musk is driven by wealth in a performative sense: ” He doesn’t need a house. He doesn’t need security. He doesn’t need anything. He didn’t even need my level of needing.”
Musk has been open about his unusual lifestyle: He said he slept under his desk while working for Tesla and referred to the EV-maker’s factories as his “primary residence.” He slept on sofas in the Twitter offices in 2023, having bought the business, and also reportedly told friends he was sleeping in the DOGE headquarters during his stint in D.C. last year.
Musk even recalled a “close call” of needing to borrow money to pay rent following the PayPal sale, because he invested all of that money into his businesses: $100 million into the then-newly founded SpaceX, $70 million into Tesla, and $10 million into solar energy company SolarCity.
Dalio warned the young entrepreneur against such a big bet on SpaceX, he said: “[Musk] decided that he was going to take half of that money and he was going to go to Mars. He had no experience in terms of going to Mars. I said to him, ‘I suggest you put aside a little bit of money, take a piece of that, just so that way, if things don’t work out, you’ve got that.'”
The response came: “No, I don’t need to do that.”
Back to the details
Dalio said Musk’s personality of being a “shaper” comes with a binary: Massive, big-scale thinking, but also a fanatical attention to the details.
He recalled seeing this up close: “The issue of a shaper is they want to go from visualization to actualization … they go from this very picture down to ‘What are those details?’ So, I remember Elon gave me the key to his car”—presumably a Tesla—”it had a little button and he showed me the screen and he got into the details a lot. And we’re talking about how he wants to put a watering can with a plant on a rocket to send it to Mars.”
“So, it’s a 10,000-foot level and a 10-centimetre level.”