Elon Musk

SpaceX pays Elon Musk a salary of $54,080, unchanged since 2019, and nothing else unless the company clears one of two thresholds: a $7.5 trillion valuation alongside a permanent, self-sustaining, million-person city on Mars, or space-based data centers drawing at least 100 terawatts of power, more than a thousand times every data center on Earth combined. The board tied the entire package to the mission rather than to profit.¹

Musk is the founder and operating force behind SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI, three companies that investor Marc Andreessen has described as one compounding system in which each solves a constraint the others run into: launch, energy, compute, robots, and chips. Musk merged xAI into SpaceX on the reasoning that rockets and intelligence are becoming the same problem, giving the combined venture the stated mission of building toward what he calls a sentient sun.¹

The underlying economics keep improving: NASA-era launch costs of roughly $18,500 per kilogram to orbit have fallen through Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy toward a Starship target of $100 to $500 per kilogram, and Musk's stated logic for the orbital power push is that the 2030s AI bottleneck will be electricity rather than chips, since solar panels in orbit generate four to ten times what the same panels produce on Earth.¹

His operating method is codified as the Musk Algorithm: question every requirement, delete whatever can be deleted, simplify, accelerate, and automate last, on the reasoning that automating or optimizing a process that should not exist just locks the mistake in faster.² Accounts of his working style trace the intensity behind that method to a difficult childhood, with his father described, including by Musk's own family, as abusive and manipulative, and they reject the idea that his success rests on inherited privilege, noting he immigrated to Canada at seventeen, paid his own way through college, and put most of the proceeds from his first company's sale directly into his next one.²

Musk has also staked out a public position that society will eventually need to pay people not to work, a claim JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon has rejected on the record, arguing instead for a shorter work week alongside obligations, such as raising children and skilled trades, that Dimon says AI will not remove.³