Ian
Henderson finds out what thrill-seeking billionaires have to offer the rest of
us.
This article first appeared in Sphere magazine
If you had more money than you knew what do
with, what would you do with it? You’ve got the houses all over the world, the
McLaren and the Lambo, the Picassos and the Rothkos, the longer and longer
yachts, the football team, the toys …
what then? What happens when simply shopping is no longer enough? Where does
upward mobility end?
For a very few it simply continues,
straight up. Up past where the Gulfstreams fly, to where childhood dreams lie
among the stars. Dreams of travelling to Mars, of mining limitless resources in
the asteroid belt, of a new future for mankind. And for the very, very few, huge
wealth means those dreams can be made real. These are the thrillionaires, the
multi-billionaires who are investing in the ideas and inventions that will
define all of our futures.
The word thrillionaire seems to have made
its first appearance in the New York Times in 2005, in an article by John
Schwartz, about Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Allen grew up watching
Armstrong and Aldrin land on the moon and realised early on that to continue
what author John Wyndham called ‘the outward urge’ - mankind’s quest to go
beyond his village, continent or planet – private enterprise would have to step
in. Once Microsoft had become the world’s largest company, Allen was able to
use the wealth it created to fund SpaceShipOne, the first
independently-financed vehicle to go into space and the winner of the Ansari X
Prize.
Allen is far from alone as an investor in a
more ambitious future. Currently the best-known of these thrillionaires may be
Elon Musk, the creator of PayPal and now founder of SpaceX, a private spaceship
maker that has won contracts from NASA to launch the next generation into space.
It’s already the first private company to recover a space vehicle from orbit –
something not many countries have managed – and expects its first manned
flights in 2015. Musk clearly has a profit motive (NASA pays well for its
services), but when asked why he’s investing his billions in SpaceX rather than
other, more earthbound ideas he says, “Sooner or later, we must expand life
beyond this green and blue ball—or go extinct."
He’s a billionaire inventor, engineer and visionary,
and space is not his only goal. Musk also founded Tesla Motors, the first
viable all-electric vehicle manufacturer – and the first to build a truly sexy non-polluting
sports car. Less glamorous but possibly more important from an investment point
of view is SolarCity, another of Musk’s creations. It’s a pioneer of
mass-affordable clean energy; safer than nuclear and less polluting than carbon
fuels. Through Musk’s charitable foundation SolarCity has exported its
technology all over the world including to the earthquake and tsunami-wrecked
city of Soma in Japan and to US towns devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Elon
Musk is still only 41 years old and has already been applauded as one of the
most influential figures of the 21st century.
More groovily still there’s an
easily-missed scene in Ironman 2 where Robert J Downey’s lead character, a thrill-seeking billionaire
inventor, engineer and visionary (sound familiar?), walks through a restaurant
and pauses at a table to acknowledge another diner by the fictional-sounding
name of Elon. They briefly discuss Elon’s idea for an electric-powered jet
aircraft; equally fictional-sounding, but another of Musk’s real-life projects.
Musk was recently asked if he was starting
to feel like a modern-day Howard Hughes, subject of the Leonardo di Caprio film
Aviator and one of the earliest examples of the thrillionaire breed. Already one of the world’s richest men in the
1920s he conquered Hollywood, designed the perfect bra for film star Jane
Russell, personally held the world air speed record, crashed into the Beverley
Hills country club (designing the modern hospital bed as he recovered), built what
is still the world’s largest-wingspan plane and created Trans-World Airlines. Small
wonder that in later years Hughes famously became a reclusive obsessive-compulsive,
sorting peas (his favourite food) by size, watching Ice Station Zebra 150 times
without a break and being terrified of germs and infection. Says Musk, "I'm
starting to hear the Howard Hughes thing quite a lot, which always makes me
want to check my fingernail length and curtail any urges to pee in a jar."
Another emerging space entrepreneur is
Michiel Mol, son of software pioneer Jan Mol, video game king, motor-racing
investor and co-founder of SpaceXC. His criteria for what it means to be a
thrillionaire are simple; “is it fun, is it meaningful and can I make any money
with it?” SpaceXC’s re-usable two-seater spaceplane is called the Lynx, powered
by four motors that can be throttled up and down in flight just like a jet
engine. It takes off and lands on a runway just like the average billionaire’s
Gulfstream too, but can keep going beyond the atmosphere, past the Karman line
62 miles up where space starts. In theory, the next-generation spaceplane would
be able to take off in New York and land in Sydney only a couple of hours
later, with far less atmospheric pollution. To Mol, this is more than fun; it’s
a meaningful first step towards making travel sustainable for the future. And
with a queue of would-be astronauts already paying $60,000 each for their
flight into space starting in 2014, he’s quietly confident it’ll make him money
too.
Not every space investor has the same views
on how the infinite resources to be found beyond our atmosphere should be
exploited. Besides the evangelism of people like Musk and Allen there are others
who take a simpler, more old-fashioned view; if them there asteroids are full
of gold we should simply do what humans have always done, which is to get out
there and mine them for all the profit they can deliver. For anyone brought up
on science fiction movies like Bladerunner and Alien, Planetary Resources is just
the kind of understated, everyday name that an asteroid-mining company ought to
have. And that’s exactly what it is; an asteroid mining company, backed by
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and set up by one of the main theorists
about what thrillionaires can offer to the rest of humanity, Peter Diamandis.
The hyperactive Diamandis – a medical
doctor, space engineer, academic and entrepreneur – was also responsible for
creating the Ansari X Prize, which as we’ve seen was won by Paul Allen (the way
the thrillionaires, real and fictional, seem to be part of a club in Ironman
may be fairly accurate, it seems). He also recently wrote a book called
Abundance; The Future is Better Than You Think in which he argues that
technology and innovation – much of it driven by the private sector – is going
to unleash a tidal wave of benefits for mankind over the next three decades. Sounds
somewhat Utopian – but he means what he says. In fact, he says he’s “pissed” at
anyone who doesn’t believe it.
“My message is that the world is getting
better than you think … By almost every measure, it is getting better,” he
says. In recent generations, life expectancy has doubled and personal income
has tripled he points out. Interestingly, he blames the fact that people are
hard-wired to listen to negative news for the public’s generally pessimistic
outlook – explained, he says, by primitive man needing to be aware of anything
harmful, and why the world’s media tends to put stories of doom and disaster on
the front page. Instead, we should pay more attention to technologies that are
going for a better future – innovations like artificial intelligence and
robotics to extend what we are capable of, DNA therapies to prevent disease,
digital manufacturing that can make anything anywhere, nano technology fabrics
that will mean people can take flight, fusion energy promises limitless clean
power … All these dreams, he says, are within reach. They will lead to enormous
social and corporate changes – but that’s not to be feared, but welcomed. It’s
only our own pessimistic, wary, primitive brains that tell us to be afraid.
Of course, there are rational voices whose
strong opinions that oppose such Utopian views. Not everyone buys the idea that all human
problems can be solved with more technology or by launching capitalism into space.
Indeed, some would argue that by relying on more and more innovation we may be
simply spreading the bad habits we’ve developed on Earth – pollution,
strip-mining, and so on – to worlds other than our own. It’s the kind of
dystopian future predicted in films like Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner – and of
course, lapped up by our risk-averse brains. Even among the thrillionaire
community there are strong voices arguing for another, more Earthbound approach
such as Italian biodynamics activist Sebastiano Cossia di Castiglioni.
He shares with his fellow thrillionaires a
passion and urgency for investing in the future – he was the first in Europe to
order one of Elon Musk’s Tesla sports cars, believes strongly that solar and
wind energy are the way forward, and has dedicated his Querciabella wine farm
in Tuscany to a vegan biodynamic regime which uses no animal products and which
exists in balance with the natural environment. (He claims that the regime
shows a measurable positive impact on the environment, and the fact that he
produces some of the world’s best wines without any of the fertilisers or
chemicals many agriculturalists deem essential certainly helps his case.) Di
Castiglioni is far less convinced about space mining or fusion power, but sees
“positive signs of change” in a new generation of emerging entrepreneurs who,
like him, believe that it is irresponsible to invest in anything without
considering its ethical and environmental implications.
When talking about alternative visions of a
better future for mankind, you’d expect some differences of opinion. But having
that vision, having the determination to make it happen – and of course, having
the means to do so – seem to be the main qualifications for joining the
thrillionaires club. Our atavistic selves might worry and fret that these
seekers after fun, meaning and profit will get us all into trouble – and of
course, we might quietly enjoy watching those who fail, ending their dreams
with madness, addiction and an unkempt beard lost in the jungle somewhere,
rather than among the stars.
But Hughes, Allen, Musk and the rest of the
thrillionaires are people who through a combination of talent, determination
and opportunity are able to define and create better possible futures for the
rest of us. They are the modern pioneers, and if Diamandis is right, they are
the people who have already put the world in better shape than it’s ever been –
and whose investment is set to make it better still.
