Elon Musk’s latest venture is MarsX, a load-bearing colony where super-awesome pioneers will gather to build the first planet-hopping, spacefaring civilisation.

An AI-generated parody, MarsX reimagines how Elon Musk might have established a Martian colony in the 1970s, blending the decade’s distinctive futuristic aesthetic with a fictional tale of ambition, exploitation and deception. (The 1970s, after all, were arguably the nadir of design history.)

Beneath the retro-futuristic spectacle lies a darker philosophical question: how easily can humanity be seduced by the promises of those who claim to be building its future?

The fictional Musk is a charismatic visionary whose grand promises conceal a sinister reality. He offers the pioneers the chance to become part of something extraordinary, appealing to their desire for purpose, adventure and a place in history. Yet beneath the rhetoric of progress lurks a far more calculating ambition. The colonists are not merely participants in his grand experiment; they are its expendable resources.

On Mars, water is the difference between life and death, buried deep beneath the barren soil. Extracting it would require effort, technology and investment.

But what if the most economical source were the very people who had been persuaded to make the journey? In this dystopian vision, the colonists themselves become the water supply, their bodies reduced to a resource to be harvested in the name of survival and profit.

The cruelest irony is that those who believe they are pioneering a new civilisation are unknowingly sustaining the machinery of their own exploitation. They travel across the cosmos in pursuit of a better future, only to discover that the promised frontier offers no escape from the oldest human hierarchies: power, greed and the manipulation of the vulnerable.

The true horror of MarsX is not simply the villainy of the man at its centre, but the willingness of others to believe in him. Charlatans rarely present themselves as villains. They arrive dressed as visionaries, speaking the language of progress, promising to transcend the limitations of the present and usher humanity into a glorious tomorrow.

Their greatest weapon is not force, but persuasion: the ability to make exploitation resemble opportunity and submission feel like participation in something historic.

And perhaps this is where the parody becomes uncomfortably recognisable. Human beings are fallible not necessarily because they lack intelligence, but because they possess hope. We want to believe in extraordinary people, grand missions and transformative futures.

We can become so captivated by the promise of what might be that we stop questioning the motives of those who claim to lead us there. We mistake confidence for integrity, charisma for wisdom and technological ambition for moral progress.

MarsX therefore asks a question that extends far beyond Mars or any one billionaire: when we surrender our judgement to someone who promises to change the world, at what point do we become complicit in our own exploitation?

Perhaps the most sinister trick of the charlatan is not convincing people to follow him into the unknown. It is convincing them that, in doing so, they are becoming pioneers rather than pawns.

And by the time they discover the difference, the future they were promised may already have consumed them.