--- title: "Elon Musk Just Ghosted a Huge Company Meeting" description: "On Tuesday, Elon Musk ghosted a huge SpaceX talk he was supposed to give about the company's Mars colonization plans." date: "2025-05-29" modified: "2025-05-29" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/elon-musk-ghosted-huge-company-meeting" categories: - "Elon Musk" - "Future Society" - "The Industrialists" tags: - "business" - "elon musk" - "SpaceX" - "Starship" --- # Elon Musk Just Ghosted a Huge Company Meeting ![On Tuesday, Elon Musk ghosted a huge SpaceX talk he was supposed to give about the company's Mars colonization plans.]() *\Image: Andrew Harnik via Getty / Futurism\* Elon Musk is doing his very best to rehabilitate his damaged image. DOGE and all that government twaddle is behind him, he [insists](). He's going to be working closely at his businesses again, instead of [chainsawing]() federal agencies and [getting screamed at]() by Trump cabinet members. He's [done with politics]() — or spending loads of money on it, anyway. There's robotaxis to roll out and Mars-settlement-shaped bridges to sell. But if this is his comeback tour, it's started in pretty much the worst way possible. On Tuesday, Musk was nowhere to be seen at a highly anticipated talk he was supposed to give about SpaceX's plans for colonizing the Red Planet, [*Gizmodo* ]()[reports](), leaving legions of his fans and spaceflight nerds — not to mention the thousands of SpaceX employees gathered at the company's Starbase headquarters in Texas for the occasion — hanging. No explanation was given (though he did fire off some tweets in the interim, albeit at nowhere near his typical spambot levels of frequency). But his truancy might have something to do with his Starship megarocket — an indispensable part of Musk's grand vision of "making life multiplanetary" and [spreading his seed]() across the cosmos — [exploding for the umpteenth]() time during its latest flight test that same day. Musk's pontification sesh was originally scheduled for 1 PM EST. Then it was pushed back to 1:10 PM, and then to 1:15, and finally, 9 PM, according to *Gizmodo*, with that last time block coming in after Starship's flight test, which was slated for 7:30 PM that evening. When Musk [announced]() that his speech was postponed until after the Starship test, noted science communicator Scott Manley [asked]() in the replies, perhaps presciently: "Is this going to have contingency elements that depend on the outcome of the flight?" Looks like the answer to that was, "no." To be fair to the centibillionaire multi-hyphenate, his plans quite literally blew up — or experienced a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" — in his face. It's understandable why he wouldn't want to wax about his future interplanetary dominion when his rocket that's supposed to make that happen lay in ruins. (Before the launch, Musk boasted that there's was an "80 percent chance" that his engineers had solved key issues related to the spacecraft's heat shield tiles.) In actuality, the Starship prototype, dubbed Ship 35, spun out of control and broke apart as it made a nasty, uncontrolled reentry into the Earth's atmosphere. Then, in an all too familiar final act, the Starship exploded somewhere over the Indian Ocean, putting it out of its misery. Around 40 minutes earlier, the Starship's Super Heavy booster also blew up before it could complete its landing burn. "Lot of good data to review," Musk [wrote in a tweet]() made at the near-exact time he was supposed to be giving his talk after the several delays. A new date for the Mars talk hasn't been announced. **More on Elon Musk:** *[Elon Musk Just Got Some Horrible New Sales Data About Tesla]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()