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June 26, 2025 - 4:15pm
Elon Musk has abandoned his vision of colonising Mars, according to Peter Thiel. In a new interview with Ross Douthat for the New York Times, Thiel has claimed that the Tesla and SpaceX CEO no longer believes a Martian colony is a viable political project for humans to build a new society. According to Musk’s friend and fellow Trump backer, “2024 is the year Elon stopped believing in Mars.”
Interplanetary expansion has long been an ambition for Musk, but Thiel says that what was once an ideological project is now solely a technological one. The SpaceX CEO has previously said that humans could set foot on Mars by 2028, and told Fox News last month that colonisation of the Red Planet was essential to “ensure the long-term survival of civilisation in the hopefully unlikely event that something terrible happens to Earth”.
Musk’s departure from his role in the Trump administration last month and his ensuing falling-out with the US President has allowed him to spend more time focusing on SpaceX, his space technology company. However, Musk’s interplanetary ambitions suffered a setback last week when one of his “Starships” experienced a “catastrophic failure” and exploded.
Thiel told the New York Times that “Mars was supposed to be a political project; it was building an alternative. And in 2024 Elon came to believe that if you went to Mars, the socialist US government, the woke AI would follow you to Mars.”
Musk’s change of heart was reportedly inspired by a conversation with London-based Google DeepMind AI boss Demis Hassabis, in which the two discussed whether AI or interplanetary travel would be the most important technological advancement in the world. According to the New York Times interview, “Elon went quiet” after Hassabis told him: “Well, you know my AI will be able to follow you to Mars.”
In Thiel’s view, this was the impetus for Musk backing Trump so heavily in last year’s presidential election. The Palantir founder agreed with Douthat that this was the reason why the X owner had invested so much time in “battles over budget deficits or wokeness”.
Thiel also depicted Musk’s interstellar utopia as akin to American science fiction writer Robert Heinlein’s vision of the “moon as a libertarian paradise”. A Martian colony may have started out as purely scientific aspiration, but Thiel says that as this was “concretised”, it became clearer “that Mars is supposed to be more than a science project. It’s supposed to be a political project”.
Musk tweeted in April that “Starship will hopefully depart for Mars at the end of next year.” Nevertheless, Thiel claimed that Musk no longer sees space as the refuge from Earth he once thought it could be, with the SpaceX boss going so far as to say: “There’s nowhere to go. There’s nowhere to go.”
