‘A billionaire’s exit strategy, not humanity’s salvation.’: Elon Musk turns Donald Trump into a liar, warns America ‘Earth will be incinerated’

Elon Musk is back with another dose of cosmic doomsaying, recently telling Fox News that “all life on Earth will be destroyed by the sun. It’s gradually expanding, we do at some point have to be a multi-planetary civilization because Earth will be incinerated.”

Oh, good. Just what we needed — a billionaire with a plan for a future catastrophe that’s roughly 5 billion years away. It’s a bold, apocalyptic flex that puts Musk in direct conflict with his political buddy Donald Trump, who famously declared climate change a “hoax.”

With his recent Fox News comment, it seems Musk, in his quest to LARP as humanity’s savior, accidentally turned the former president into a climate denier on the wrong end of the timeline.

Skipping the crisis in front of us

The irony is thick. Musk wants to evacuate the planet to avoid an extinction event billions of years away, while Trump’s brand has long been about ignoring the one currently unfolding. It’s like watching two guys argue over whether the Titanic should worry about an iceberg while it’s already taking on water.

Musk’s plan for humanity to become a multi-planetary species is the ultimate billionaire fantasy — a vision of Mars colonies and red-dirt homesteads that sounds great until you remember that Mars is a frozen, airless wasteland. Yet Musk seems more concerned with prepping for this sci-fi pipe dream than addressing the very real, very immediate climate crisis here on Earth.

As a few particularly sharp tweets put it:

Another added, “Why escape to Mars when Musk’s companies contribute to Earth’s mess? Fix the planet first, climate change won’t wait a billion years. His plan sounds like a billionaire’s exit strategy, not humanity’s salvation.”

Those tweets nail it. Musk isn’t crafting a survival plan for humanity. He’s selling a story — the kind that turns shareholder meetings into TED Talks and fuels his legend as a visionary. But narrative engineering only goes so far when the world is quite literally on fire.

Mars or bust — but what about the rest of us?

Musk’s fixation on Mars isn’t just ambitious — it’s a distraction. It diverts attention, resources, and talent away from solving the crises we actually face. He’s pouring billions into rocketing humans to another planet, while the one we’re standing on is dealing with record heat waves, vanishing coastlines, and ecosystems in collapse.

It’s the ultimate billionaire play: ignore the mess you helped create (hello, Tesla factories and their not-so-green supply chains) and sell people a dream of escape instead.

A billionaire’s exit strategy

It’s hard not to wonder if Musk’s Mars fixation is less about saving humanity and more about building an exit strategy for the super-rich. When the seas rise and the skies darken, at least the Musks of the world can wave at the rest of us from their climate-controlled Martian domes.

But for the rest of us, that’s not a viable option. We can’t all blast off to Mars. We’re stuck here on this blue marble, wrestling with the consequences of climate denial and corporate greed.

So maybe it’s time to ask Musk and his fellow billionaire escapists to put down their Martian maps and pick up a shovel. The planet doesn’t need a space cowboy right now. It needs someone willing to dig in and fix the world we have. Because, as much as Musk might dream of a life on Mars, most of us are just trying to survive on Earth.