Elon stopped believing in Mars

“Peter Thiel says 2024 is the year Elon stopped believing in Mars. 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, it would follow you to Mars. He says, if I had the seasteading version with Elon where I said if trump doesn’t win, I want to just leave the country, and then elon said there’s nowhere to go. There’s nowhere to go. This is the only place that. Maybe that was when elon decided to pump a quarter of a billion dollars into the trump campaign. I guess it was.”

Futurist and author Amy Webb, This Week In Tech episode 1040, 13 July 2025. [Around 1:12:17] Light editing for clarity.