Glenn Reynolds on Musk

Headline:

Elon Unbound

There are lots of consequences to this week’s election, ranging from economics, to diplomacy, to outright freedom. But I want to focus on one in particular, what it means for Elon Musk.

It’s quite possible that, had Musk not become actively involved in Trump’s campaign after the first assassination attempt, Trump wouldn’t have won. It’s certain that, had he won, it would have been much closer, not the landslide it turned out to be. And had Musk not bought Twitter earlier, thus disrupting the Democrats’ message-control strategy, Trump’s chances of winning at all would have been much, much lower.

But let’s look at what it means for Musk, and what that means for America.

The first-order effect is that the campaign of bureaucratic harassment aimed at Musk under the Biden Administration, which likely would have escalated, will now recede. After facing a suspiciously simultaneous assault from the SEC, the EPA, the FAA, and various other regulatory agencies, Musk can now expect reasonably clear sailing. He won’t be free from regulation, of course, but he will be free from bureaucrats’ efforts to weaponize regulatory powers, and bureaucratic discretion, against him. Knowing his clout with the White House – and possibly his own budget-cutting powers if Trump actually makes him efficiency czar – they will be reluctant to cross him.

The second-order effect of that is that Musk will be able to move his space plans forward more rapidly. Instead of having to fight against bureaucratic headwinds, he’ll be able to move at the speed that his technological capabilities permit. Musk’s plans for 5 uncrewed test missions to Mars in 2026, followed by human missions in 2028, will proceed if the rockets are ready.

There will also be Moon flights, Moon bases, at least one new space station, and possibly orbital solar power stations and asteroid mining beginning within a decade. The second-order effect of Trump’s election is that humanity will likely take over the solar system, and do so decades earlier than it might have. (It’s also much more likely that the humanity doing so will be largely American, instead of Chinese.) The result of this takeover will be incalculable amounts of resources available to humanity, and eventually a diversity of human settlement rivaling or exceeding that of Earth.

The [third-order] effect, however, will be the biggest. This space expansion will turn America into a dynamic frontier nation again. As I wrote a few years ago in America’s New Destiny in Space, the existence of the frontier had a huge impact on the character of America, making opportunity a positive-sum game rather than a zero- or negative-sum game.

And even beyond that, it imbues a sense of purpose. For her next book, my wife has been interviewing men of all ages, but what has struck her most is that younger men are looking for some grander purpose than working in a cubicle or going to school. (Many of them mentioned Elon Musk or Jordan Peterson as role models or influences.) And that search for purpose, and Musk’s role in providing one, already bore fruit in this election.