Space Billionaires and the Theology of Abandonment

Mars colonization rhetoric is Earth nihilism with better branding

Apr 23, 2025

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Elon Musk’s January 2020 tweet landed with the cheerful certainty of a tech keynote: “There will be lots of jobs on Mars!” The half-million-dollar ticket price came with a solution: loans, payable upon arrival through labor. Space colonization meets the gig economy.

The internet immediately identified this as indentured servitude with a better user inter…

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