Visionaries can be terrifying, far more terrifying than the selfish and venal, who are easy to predict and to understand. Visionaries with the means to realize 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 Mr. 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 multiplanet civilization, because Earth will be incinerated.”
This is why, 23 years ago, Mr. Musk resolved to go to Mars — his first step toward interstellar colonization. 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 United States,” 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 Mr. Musk’s time in Washington will be just a minor detail in the histories written about him.
It’s not as if this past year has done Mr. 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 Mr. Trump’s Golden Dome (an imitation of Israel’s Iron 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 Mr. Musk’s fortune will grow still further as a result of his political interventions. Mr. 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 percent is a good deal better.”
Mr. Rhodes was another businessman, politician and visionary who bent reality around his will, one of these strange and polarizing figures who crop up throughout history and — to use one of Silicon Valley’s favorite maxims — “just do things.” One thing Mr. Rhodes did was make a lot of money, initially through the diamond trade, which he entered as a teenager, 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 Mr. 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 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 United States, 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 Mr. Rhodes’s vision, given the ideological distance between our era and his. He truly felt that the spread of British influence across the world was an unalloyed good, just as Mr. Musk truly believes in the spread of humanity across the universe.
Although no one in Britain doubted that Mr. Rhodes was a great man, there were plenty who doubted he was a good one. According to one estimate, Mr. Rhodes was responsible for the deaths of as many as 20,000 Africans during the conquest of what is now Zimbabwe — a military campaign that was condemned at the time by his critics, even those who backed the imperial project more broadly. Mr. Rhodes also supported the restriction of the Black franchise in the Cape Colony and is considered by some to have laid the foundations for apartheid. His supporters thought he ought to be feted; his critics thought he ought to be hanged. Some, like Mark Twain, held both views simultaneously: “I admire him, I frankly confess it,” he said in 1897, “and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.”
Mr. Rhodes’s memorial in Cape Town is graced by a statue of a horse and rider titled “Physical Energy.” The artist, George Frederic Watts, said he intended the piece to be symbolic of “that restless physical impulse to seek the still unachieved.” I imagine Mr. Musk would rather like that phrase, since it is exactly this spirit he brings to his space project.
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 — Mr. Musk moved from South Africa to Canada at 17, Mr. Rhodes from Britain to South Africa also at 17 — and made their fortunes in industries that favor 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 Mr. Rhodes was gay.) Both developed reputations for volatility and eccentricity; Mr. Rhodes, like Mr. Musk, disliked formal dressing.
And both, importantly, were children of the British Empire. Mr. 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.
Such personalities don’t come along very often, and their influence doesn’t necessarily endure. Within 50 years of Mr. Rhodes’s death in 1902, the British Empire was crumbling, and by the end of the century, Robert Mugabe had begun to seize white-owned farms in what was once Rhodesia. When Mr. Rhodes’s name is mentioned now, it is most likely to be in association with the “Rhodes must fall” campaign, a decolonization movement that seeks to remove all traces of the man from public life, including from the international scholarship program that bears his name. His project, in the end, was repudiated.
Mr. Musk’s might be, too. There is no shortage of critics who are rooting for his failure. And yet, for all that I am alarmed by the danger posed by such visionaries, he’s not wrong about the fragility of our planet. I don’t want to go to Mars, but I would like someone to. And I suppose that someone will have to be unusual, in good ways and bad. I’m reminded of what Mr. Musk once said during a monologue on “Saturday Night Live”: “To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars, and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”
Louise Perry is a journalist based in Britain. She is the author of “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution” and the host of the podcast “Maiden Mother Matriarch.”
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