Barefoot Elon Musk talks travel to Mars - not just for the rich, he says - while announcing $100 million XPrize Carbon Removal contest
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Elon Musk laid out the details of the $100 million XPrize Carbon Removal project on Thursday.
Elon Musk sat barefoot, donning a mullet, with XPrize's chairman, Peter Diamandis, in Florida.
Musk said "a bunch of people will probably die" at the start of Mars exploration.
During a Thursday livestream announcing the $100 million XPrize Carbon Removal competition, Elon Musk sat barefoot, donning a mullet, with XPrize's chairman, Peter Diamandis, in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The competition is asking people to develop large-scale projects to help stow away and extract carbon dioxide and rebalance the Earth's dangerously high carbon-emission trends.
To win, "teams must demonstrate CO2 removal at the 1,000 tonne per year scale, model costs at the million ton per year (megatonne) scale, and present a plan to sustainably reach gigatons per year scale in future," according to the competition site.
The Elon Musk Foundation, Musk's relatively new philanthropy arm, is sponsoring the venture, and $100 million would be the largest sum of money handed out by the organization so far. Since criticism of his meek philanthropic efforts as the second-richest man in the world, Musk has injected money into numerous organizations and causes.
During the chat, Musk also talked about space travel to Mars, a planet he hopes to transport humans to and colonize through his space company, SpaceX.
"Is this some escape hatch for rich people?" Musk said.
"No, it is not," he said, laughing. Musk then cautioned that "a bunch of people will probably die" at the start of Mars ventures, but he likened it to any prior danger associated with exploration.
Read the original article on Business Insider
