Elon Musk’s Outlook on Our Future Turns Dour

livemint.com:

In many ways, Elon Musk is the world’s biggest doomsday prepper. 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