--- title: "Bernie Sanders Slams Elon Musk for “Unsustainable” Greed" description: "Progressive Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders suplexed tech billionaire Elon Musk in a Sunday tweet, excoriating the SpaceX CEO for pouring money into interplanetary space travel ambitions while inequality persists here on Earth. “Space travel is an exciting idea, but right now we need to focus on Earth and create a progressive tax system so that […]" date: "2021-03-22" modified: "2021-03-22" authors: - name: "Jon Christian" job_title: "Executive Editor" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/jonc" url: "https://futurism.com/bernie-sanders-slams-elon-musk" categories: - "Elon Musk" - "Future Society" - "Off-World" - "Space" - "The Industrialists" tags: - "bernie sanders" - "elon musk" - "NASA" - "SpaceX" --- # Bernie Sanders Slams Elon Musk for “Unsustainable” Greed ![Senator Bernie Sanders suplexed tech billionaire Elon Musk in a Sunday tweet, excoriating the SpaceX CEO for pouring money into interplanetary space travel.]() *\Image: Gage Skidmore (Left) and NASA/Kim Shiflett (Right) via Flickr / Futurism\* Progressive Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders suplexed tech billionaire Elon Musk in a [Sunday tweet](), excoriating the SpaceX CEO for pouring money into interplanetary space travel ambitions while inequality persists here on Earth. "Space travel is an exciting idea, but right now we need to focus on Earth and create a progressive tax system so that children don't go hungry, people are not homeless and all Americans have healthcare," Sanders said. "The level of inequality in America is obscene and a threat to our democracy." The tiff — and its background, which we'll get into below — are a crystal-clear illustration of a widespread tension in contemporary views of the future: whether we should wait until everyone is taken care of on our home planet before taking on the incredibly expensive task of sending people to other worlds, or whether it's feasible to pursue both tasks simultaneously. The spat between Sanders and Musk has been brewing since last week, when Bernie singled out Musk and fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos in an [earlier tweeted missive](). "We are in a moment in American history where two guys — Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos — own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of people in this country," Sanders said at the time. "That level of greed and inequality is not only immoral. It is unsustainable." Musk, who's [never been one]() to turn down a feud, [fired back yesterday](), asserting that "I am accumulating resources to help make life multiplanetary and extend the light of consciousness to the stars." And that, naturally, was when Bernie clobbered him with the tweet about children going hungry. The reality is that space travel is not currently an enormous drain on humanity's resources. NASA's budget is currently hovering around $22 billion annually, out of a national budget of nearly $5 trillion, and SpaceX's operation is significantly cheaper (though its ambitions are arguably just as large.) Instead, Musk and Sanders seem to be hashing it out in anticipation of a future in which off-planet exploration is a vastly more expensive endeavor than it currently is. Like Sanders admitted in his tweet, that's an exciting prospect — but hopefully it can grow in tandem with a comprehensive social safety net. **More on Bernie Sanders:** [*Bernie Sanders: Spend Money on the Climate Instead of Weapons*]() ## Author I'm responsible for editing, assigning, and scouting at Futurism, as well as occasionally writing for the site. That work involves keeping an eye on a wide range of narratives and issues, but over the past few years I've become increasingly interested in how AI is shaping the future of media, the web, and information itself. My day-to-day often involves collaborating on reporting and commentary projects bylined by my colleagues, but I try to find time to do my own reporting as well; stories I've broken for Futurism have been cited by publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Wired, Ars Technica, New York Magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, Bloomberg, and more. I grew up in Southern Vermont and attended Vanderbilt University. Prior to Futurism, I contributed to outlets including the Boston Globe, Vice, Wired, Slate, the Atlantic, the Outline, Ars Technica and more, and did stints in farming and food service. I currently live in Brooklyn, New York, and in my free time I enjoy pinball, word games, cycling, running, and music production. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()