“The Elon”: How a Nazi Rocket Scientist Invented the World’s Richest Man
Errol Musk named his son after a character in a sci-fi book by the inventor of the V-2 Rocket, Wernher von Braun
In 1948, after being shipped to America from Nazi Germany in Operation Paperclip — a US intelligence program which sought to repurpose Nazi scientists to fight the Cold War — Wernher von Braun, the Nazi who invented the V-2 aka Vengeance Rocket, wrote a hard science fiction book in German called Marsprojekt at Ft. Bliss, TX and published it in 1952 in English and various forms in the years after.
In the book, which is extremely technical and detailed, scientists build rockets to send humans to Mars. On arrival to the red planet, they find an underground society (because the surface is uninhabitable) honeycombed with tubes for travel. There are no “nation states” per se on Mars because technology has made them obsolete.
The leader of the Martian government is called “the Elon.”
A coincidence? Ask Elon Musk’s father, Errol who says he named his son after books he was read as a child by von Braun and his mentor, fellow Nazi rocket scientist Hermann Oberth — who did not qualify for Operation Paperclip but came to America to work for von Braun in 1955.
Errol Musk says he built rockets as a youth in South Africa and was taught that “the head of the Mars colony would be called ‘the Elon.’” Since Musk’s maternal grandfather had the middle name Elon by coincidence he thought, “I like that name because it means something to me.”
Remarkably, Marsprojekt aka The Mars Project: A Technical Tale in English, appears to paint a fictional future Mars that Elon Musk is attempting to literally create in the real world. The parallels between von Braun’s vision and Musk’s actions cannot be a coincidence.
First, von Braun credits the three acknowledged pioneers of rocketry: American Robert Goddard, Oberth, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky — the late 19th-early 20th century Russian Cosmist and rocket scientist who Elon Musk regularly praises as his inspiration. But Tsiolkovsky was also a eugenicist who believed we should overpopulate the Earth to force humanity to become “multi-planetary” — two ideas Musk promotes constantly, although never quite admits the connection between them.
Some of Von Braun’s other ideas for a Martian government have parallels to Peter Thiel’s techno-fascist concept of “network states” — digital countries that replace “nation-states” as the dominant form of governance.
The Earth had not yet cast aside the concept that the riches of any particular region, whether in natural resources or skill and energy of its inhabitants, should be devoted primarily to the welfare and comfort of those same inhabitants. Thus each country of Earth attempted energetically to elect such representatives as would most effectively further its own, immediate welfare and interests
Thousands of years of civilization on Mars had permitted refined technology completely to remove all regional concepts. [emphasis added]
Notably, von Braun’s Martian government is also a technocracy, government by engineers, scientists, and generally, the intelligentsia. Elon Musk’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman was arrested in Canada in 1940 for being in a fascist, pro-Hitler movement called “Technocracy, Inc.”
From The Mars Project, practically a handbook for aspiring technocrats:
Instead of geographical differences of opinion, political debates went on between the representatives of various branches of science, technology and administration concerned with maintenance and improvement of living conditions.
Traders and transportation people would differ with sociologists; physicians could not agree with ventilation engineers; private industry would argue with government; employees had grievances against employers; and so on, ad infinitum.
The ultimate result of these differences was a congress of professionals from each of the complicated branches upon which the highly involved society of Mars was dependent, and each branch was represented in proportion to its importance. Mars appeared to be doing extremely well with this system.
What about Elon Musk‘s obsession with tunnels and underground transportation, embodied by his seemingly odd projects Hyperloop, and Boring Company? Von Braun has you covered there too:
Conditions of life on Mars, vastly different from those of Earth, made it possible for the planet to be governed without any form of regional representation. It was possible to make any conceivable journey within the confines of the planet in less than four hours in the high-velocity subways. This, and the fact that the very concept of nostalgia was unknown, due to subterranean existence which prevented Martians from developing attachment to local scenery or dwellings, together with the standardization of all ideas and desires, had much to do with it.
Musk’s worldview, ambitions and ideology seem to stem largely from science fiction, a series of visions that he’s obsessed with pushing towards, regardless of the harm it may do in the short term.
Elon and Errol Musk are estranged, although they seem to share the same views about women and reproduction, pro-natalism, which the idea that we should create as many humans as possible no matter the cost.
“The only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce”
— Errol Musk
Given Elon’s clear efforts to create the Martian technocratic colony that his father named him for, one must ask, is this all about daddy issues? Is Elon trying to prove that he can do what his father read about as a child — to build a fleet of rockets to go to Mars and build a utopia — no matter what pain, suffering and death it causes on Earth?
Well, consider the hellstorm raised by Musk on the former Twitter about H-1B visas — a red line for many MAGA supporters, that Musk rolled right over and Trump caved on.
H-1B visas are effectively indentured servitude, a way to trap people into jobs if they want to stay in the country. Another version of this idea was… Operation Paperclip.
Musk truly thinks Americans are just too stupid and too lazy to do what he wants, so he’s going to import people that will be forced to. The clash between MAGA and the PayPal Mafia is real — not just on this subject but many others. These are two fundamentally different belief systems that cannot be reconciled in the end. The battle between them will be brutal, and none of us, regardless of politics, will be on the winning side. The only winners are the oligarchy.
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Think how much different our world would be if Elon had been read the sci-fi of Asimov, Bradbury, Herbert … or better yet, Octavia Butler or Kurt Vonnegut!!
You're just too good at uncovering people's secret motivations and finding connections that others haven't yet made.
That's the only reason some want to silence you while others of us are grateful for your illuminations.💗