Mr.Musk goes to Mars

If you want to establish a human city on Mars you need the core infrastructure: people, cheap inter-planetary transport, reliable communication, surface workers, and a means of getting around on the surface.

Mr. Musk now has:

1. wildly enthusiastic, youthful, engineering crews at SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, and Neuralink - along with a rapidly evolving commitment to educational funding for employees and their families and deep connections with the professoriat at the nation's best universities and engineering schools;
2. SpaceX Starship System - on its way to reducing cost-to-orbit by an order of magnitude and cost to the moon or the planets by closer to two orders of magnitude;
3. SpaceX starlink and grok/X in production with orbital AI in development and early stage testing;
4. Tesla, nearly autonomous vehicles capable of surface operation using only electrical power - no oil, no refineries, no hydrocarbon infrastructure.

   And if you loved (as I did) the recent roadster demo - just wait until Musk et al meet the NASA requirement for a demonstration moon landing by putting a self driving cybertruck on the moon.

5. Tesla Optimus robots - capable of surface operation on the moon or Mars.

   The social issues these create are enormous: they will put millions of workers in manufacturing and transportation out of work very quickly and even with government taxing their users at 100% of imputed human equivalent earnings we'll soon have a very large number of highly capable people looking for somewhere to be useful. Mars maybe?

The two things he isn't known to have in progress (yet) are:

1. power plant technology - (He has known investments in gas/diesel generation and earth orbital solar generation, but nothing like the Gates/Google et al funding for Commonwealth Fusion Systems).
2. a strong succession plan. He's got children, but it's not obvious who might be in the pipeline to succeed him. Certainly if he dies, his ambitions die with him and, from his perspective, I'd guess it might not matter so much; but from some imaginary, generalized, "mankind" perspective, it could matter a lot and I could see that concern driving the sale of Tesla's vehicle business to an investor group with the robots coming under a separate SpaceX or Optimus Inc. umbrella.

And the greatest source of uncertainty? politics. You don't have to be John Galt to know that the left, along with the various crazies (Islamicists, Greens) want to go back to medieval feudalism -with themselves of course, as hereditary lords. And, if you know who Thompson, Taggert, and Ferris were you will understand that Trump et al are the only people now standing against a future dark age; or worse, one in which tens of millions of Optimus robots impose "democratic" order on a fractious world.