How Hollywood Predicted, but Has Not Pinned Down, Elon Musk and SpaceX

Today, Elon Musk’s SpaceX became a public company on Wall Street following the biggest initial public offering in history, making the controversial businessman a trillionaire. While opinions still vary on how successful this may or not be — SpaceX lost $4.9 billion last year, while only making $18.7 billion — it shows how we have well and truly entered the age of the billionaire space baron.The long-term effects of having cosmically sized corporations control space exploration and even life on Earth, are still being debated. To quote the character Tim Bisley, played by Simon Pegg, from the British sitcom “Spaced,” which ran between 1999-2001: “Modern science fiction is pretty interesting. The thoughts and speculations of our contemporary authors and thinkers have probably never been closer to the truth.” Now, 25 years later, with reusable rockets, private astronauts and the prospect of the world’s first trillionaire emerging from the space industry, that sentiment feels remarkably prescient.The early days of space exploration were primarily motivated by the threat of Communism. Following the end of World War II, President Eisenhower felt compelled to react after the Soviet Union scored two massive milestones: launching the first man-made object into space, Sputnik 1 and putting the first human being into orbit, Yuri Gagarin.In 1961, President Kennedy pushed the fledgling US space program even harder, by announcing the country’s intention to put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth “before this decade is out.” The rest, as they say, is history. However, once Neil Armstrong and the crew of Apollo 11 had indeed set foot on our planet’s sole natural satellite, many began to believe it wasn’t necessary to continue the exploration of space. Budgets and missions got cut back and NASA had to fight for almost every dime. At about the same time, the concept of privately funded space flight began to appear in contemporary science fiction, albeit in subtle ways. Both Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke assumed in 1968 that by the early 2000s, space travel would be commercialized much like aviation and as such, in “2001: A Space Odyssey” we see branding for Pan Am, Hilton and Bell Aircraft. Both Ridley Scott’s “Alien” (1979) and Peter Hyams’ “Outland” (1981) feature the concept of deep space commercial mining operations. Even “Blade Runner” (1982) utilizes the notion of corporation-funded colonies in space.Ironically, building rockets solely to make money was the very foundation of the “Star Trek” universe. Zefram Cochrane, played by James Cromwell in the 1996 movie “Star Trek: First Contact,” builds a prototype spacecraft capable of warp drive, proclaiming, “You wanna know what my vision is? …Dollar signs! Money! I didn’t build this ship to usher in a new era for humanity.” That first warp flight was detected by a passing Vulcan survey ship, which then made peaceful first contact with humans. Subsequently all of Earth’s problems were solved and financial gain was surpassed by other, more intellectual traits.But while the idea seemed to rest organically in our imaginations, it mostly served as a simple device to move the story along. There were a few exceptions, where the multimillionaire megalomaniac element was introduced, most notably Eldon Tyrell, played by Joe Turkel, in “Blade Runner” and the delightfully unhinged Bond villain Hugo Drax, portrayed by Michael Lonsdale, in 1979’s “Moonraker.” Meanwhile, back on Earth the number of billionaires began slowly but surely rising, up to 140 by 1987, according to Forbes, with Bill Gates becoming the public face of a new generation of tech-made wealth.Michael Lonsdale in ‘Moonraker.’ Wikimedia Commons Then, in 2002, the company SpaceX was created by Elon Musk. Mr. Musk already had wealth behind him, but he furthered his fortune by creating technology ventures including Zip2 and PayPal. The latter was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. He used the proceeds to help fund SpaceX and Tesla, eventually becoming the world’s richest person.For years, Elon Musk insisted that SpaceX would not go public until a self-sustaining Mars transportation system was established. The concern was that quarterly earnings pressure from Wall Street could interfere with the company’s long-term goals.All the while, unlike the industrialists of previous generations, Mr. Musk became a celebrity in his own right. His two separate marriages to British actress Talulah Riley (2010 and 2013), appearances in films and television shows, and frequent presence in the entertainment press, in addition to the business pages, transformed him from entrepreneur into cultural figure, blurring the line between technology executive, science fiction visionary and public personality.Not only did he pop up briefly in Marvel’s 2010 blockbuster sequel “Iron Man 2,” but he’s also appeared in “The Big Bang Theory,” hosted “Saturday Night Live” and voiced himself in “The Simpsons” episode “The Musk Who Fell to Earth.”It could be argued that Peter Weyland, played by Guy Pearce in Ridley Scott’s 2012 “Alien” prequel “Prometheus” also has evidence of Elon Musk in the writing of his character. Like Mr. Musk, Weyland is portrayed as a technology entrepreneur driven by an almost obsessive belief that humanity’s future lies beyond Earth, willing to commit vast personal resources to turning an audacious vision into reality.All of this has firmly cemented the tech-billionaire space visionary trope in contemporary science fiction and we’re seeing characters that feel at least partially inspired by Mr. Musk, whether admiringly or critically. Two such characters include the beautifully-written Peter Isherwell, masterfully depicted by Mark Rylance, in Adam McKay’s epic all-star 2021 parody “Don’t Look Up,” and Dev Ayesa (played by Edi Gathegi) in Apple TV’s “For All Mankind.” While the former is more of a combined caricature of Apple CEO Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos and Mr. Musk, the character of Dev Ayesa is unquestionably based on the SpaceX CEO, albeit a somewhat less mercurial version. He even shares Mr. Musk’s vision of the colonization of Mars.Yet for all the inspiration Mr. Musk has supplied to screenwriters, we still await the definitive breakthrough depiction of him on screen, equivalent to the portrayal of his tech foe Mark Zuckerberg by Jesse Eisenberg in David Fincher’s 2010 Facebook-set drama “The Social Network.” Coincidentally, the trailer for the upcoming film “The Social Reckoning” — which director Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the screenplay to “The Social Network,” has described as a “companion piece” to the earlier film and which stars Jeremy Strong from “Succession” as Mr. Zuckerberg —got released a few days before the SpaceX IPO.Science fiction got some of the details wrong, of course, about the business of space travel, but it understood something more important. It suggested that one day the future of space exploration might belong not to governments, but to immensely wealthy visionaries willing to gamble their fortunes on the stars. Nearly half a century after Hugo Drax plotted to remake humanity from orbit, SpaceX’s IPO shows that the billionaire space baron is no longer a fantasy. He is a reality.

How Hollywood Predicted, but Has Not Pinned Down, Elon Musk and SpaceX

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