Elon Musk’s pay at SpaceX hinges entirely on two almost unimaginable goals: reach a $7.5 trillion valuation and build a million-person Martian colony, or run space-based data centers pulling in 100 terawatts—over a thousand times today’s global server load. Miss both, and he’s stuck with his $54,080 salary. The board backed this because Musk’s past bets—reusable rockets, commercial crew flights, Starlink’s $11.4 billion in revenue—have all paid off, even if his timelines were aggressive. He’s been chasing a vision straight out of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels, where superintelligent AIs run vast orbitals while humans pursue whatever they want. To pull that off you need roughly a star’s worth of energy, robots that build and repair everything autonomously, cheap AI brains, and ultra-low-cost mass transport off Earth. SpaceX’s roadmap hits each point: Starship will slash launch costs toward $100–500 per kilogram. Starlink funds it today with over 10 million subscribers and a 60%-plus EBITDA margin, fueling more launches and research. Working backward from a million-strong Mars city shows the scale: several thousand Starship flights over decades, each transfer window open only once every 26 months. On the Moon, Musk envisions factories using local ice and regolith to build solar-powered AI satellites launched by mass drivers. In orbit, solar arrays deliver four to ten times Earth’s output, so SpaceX merged with xAI and plans to deploy more compute in space within five years than exists on the ground now. All these pieces—Starship, Starlink and the xAI tie-in—are part of a single push to shift heavy industry and AI off our planet.