Elon Musk’s Outlook on Our Future Turns Dour

The billionaire entrepreneur has made his fortune and reputation chasing a future bettered by technology. The flip side of his optimism is a fixation on worst-case scenarios he is determined to avoid.

And these days, Musk sounds worried—everything from cyclical business jitters to existential global concerns. He choked with emotion during a recent public conference call with Tesla analysts about the economy. This past week he warned during a forum on X about “civilizational risk” stemming from the Israel-Hamas war cascading into a wider conflict that would pit the U.S. against a united China, Russia and Iran.

“I think we are sleepwalking our way into World War III,” Musk said Monday.

Not exactly the jovial Elon Musk many are familiar with from “Saturday Night Live” or his X feed, where he often shares crude and childish jokes with his more than 160 million social-media followers.

But over the years, Musk has framed his business endeavors as striving to prevent calamity, a motivating ideal that helps inspire employees, investors and fans while inducing eye rolls among critics and rivals.

For him, Tesla is about trying to save humanity from global warming while SpaceX is about making humanity a multiplanetary species in case things don’t work out on Earth.

A year ago, with the purchase of Twitter-turned-X, Musk couched the decision as keeping the social-media platform as a bastion for free speech in what he sees as a larger battle against cultural forces trying to squash diverse thought—or, as he calls it, the “woke mind virus.”

“I tend to view the future as a series of probabilities—there’s certain probability that something will go wrong, some probability that it’ll go right; it’s kind of a spectrum of things,” Musk said last month. “And to the degree that there is free will versus determinism, then we want to try to exercise that freewill to ensure a great future.”

Comments this past week about World War III echoed concerns Musk has raised about the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. “Nuclear war probability is rising rapidly,” he tweeted last fall after months of fighting between the two countries.

Musk has been praised and criticized for his involvement in that war, including when he said last year that Crimea rightfully belonged to Russia, a statement seen by some in Washington as being pro-Russian. He drew further rebuke after declining to activate SpaceX’s Starlink satellite communications system in Russia-occupied Crimea to aid a planned attack.

He said he worried that activating Starlink then would have further stoked the conflict. “I think if the Ukrainian attacks had succeeded in sinking the Russian fleet, it would have been like a mini Pearl Harbor and led to a major escalation,” he is quoted as saying in Walter Isaacson’s new biography, “Elon Musk.”

This past week, Musk returned to calling for peace, saying U.S. policies risk pushing Russia into an alliance with China just as the Israel-Hamas war has the potential to expand. He cautioned that many people overestimate U.S. military might in such a scenario.

“We’re like a pro sports team that has been winning the championship for so long and so many years in a row that we have forgotten what losing even looks like,” Musk said. “And that’s when the champion team loses.”

Over the years, employees and investors have had to learn how to interpret and navigate Musk’s emotional ups and downs.

Shares of Tesla, where he is chief executive, are down about 15% since the electric-car maker’s third-quarter earnings call on Oct. 18, when he worried aloud about the threat of high-interest rates to the business and suggested a slowdown ahead. “I apologize if I’m perhaps more paranoid than I should be, because that might also be the case because I have PTSD from 2009—big time,” Musk said, referring to a painful year for Tesla and the rest of the auto industry. Both General Motors and Chrysler went through government-backed bankruptcy restructurings that year after credit seized up and sales collapsed.

“And then,” Musk continued, mentioning another near-death experience for Tesla, “2017 through 2019 were no picnic either. There was very tough going.”

Those close to him know that he can become paranoid—sometimes rightfully so, other times not so much.

In spring 2022, Musk was predicting a recession would last as long as 18 months. “Companies that are inherently negative cash flow (ie value destroyers) need to die, so that they stop consuming resources,” he tweeted. Weeks later, Tesla announced it was shedding workers.

That predicted recession hasn’t occurred.

“My brother believes an economic winter is coming every single day,” Kimbal Musk once told lawyers about his older sibling’s mindset during a legal procedure.

The older Musk isn’t just worried about the fragility of markets but humanity itself.

“To be frank, civilization is feeling a little fragile these days,” Musk said last year during an update on SpaceX’s large rocket development. “I’m an optimist, but I think we got to protect the downside here and try to build that city on Mars as soon as possible and secure the future of life.”

Among his stated worries, of which he has tweeted: “a big rock will hit Earth eventually & we currently have no defense” and “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”

His darker thoughts have influenced his consumer products. For years, Musk has touted an air-filtering system on Tesla vehicles that could defend against a bio attack and has promised the coming Cybertruck is bulletproof.

“Things are seeming more apocalyptic these days,” Musk said in summer 2020 during an interview with Automotive News. “Let me tell you, the truck you want in the apocalypse is the Cybertruck.”

This summer, he framed his creation of an artificial-intelligence startup called xAI in his typically grandiose terms, cautioning that the technology has the potential to spiral out of control and essentially turn on its master, something akin to “The Terminator” movie.

“I think it’s actually important for us to worry about a `Terminator’ future in order to avoid a `Terminator’ future,” he said.

Voicing his concerns about such calamity might be the best way for him to deal with his worries. Or, at least, that is the advice he has given others.

“Accept worst case outcome & assign it a probability, which is usually very low. Now think of good things in life & assign them probabilities—many are certain!” he tweeted a couple of years ago. “Bringing anxiety/fear to the conscious mind saps it of limbic emotional strength.”

“Cheery fatalism is very effective.”

Write to Tim Higgins at [email protected]