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Elon Musk says 'almost anyone' can afford $100,000, a hypothetical price point for a SpaceX ticket to Mars

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk next to rocket launch
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk Yasin Ozturk/Getty Images
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Elon Musk said that a $100,000 hypothetical price point for a ticket on his shuttles to Mars should be affordable for most people.

Musk's company SpaceX plans to build a self-sustaining city on the red planet in the coming decades.

In a conversation with the head of TED conferences Chris Anderson published Monday, Musk was asked about the price of a journey. Anderson asked if it could get as low as a few hundred thousand dollars.

Musk said the price point would be determined partly by economics but also a need to make Mars travel affordable enough to attract around a million of the kinds of people needed to build a city on Mars.

"If moving to Mars costs, for argument's sake, $100,000, then I think almost anyone can work and save up and eventually have $100,000 and be able to go to Mars if they want," Musk said around minute 46. 

 

"We want to make it available to anyone who wants to go," he said.

The scenario Musk described seemed predicated on people selling homes and other assets to go.

In the interview Musk mentioned other possible funding sources, like being sponsored by governments or taking out a loan.

Musk previously ballparked a round trip to Mars between $100,000 and $500,000.

In 2020, Musk said he hoped to build 1,000 of SpaceX's Starships over the course of 10 years in order to send 1 million people to Mars by 2050 to build a city on Mars, Insider previously reported. He later hinted that the first human on Mars might land in 2029.

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Doctor Marianne Guenot is a science reporter based in the UK who writes about health, AI, nuclear sciences, archeology, solar and planetary sciences, space exploration, and the commercial and political impact of science and tech. As part of her work, she visited the world's first final repository for nuclear waste, probed the economy of the climate crisis, untangled the complex factors playing into how the food chain pushes a health and climate crisis, tracked mysterious uranium cubes from the Manhattan project back to a Germany first prototype nuclear reactor, examined the motivations behind a tech tycoon's disastrous exploration of the deep sea, and deciphered the intricate business case behind NASA's return to the moon.Marianne holds a master's and Ph.D. in biomedicine and a master's degree in science communication. She worked with Business Insider from 2021 to 2024. Before then, she edited news and opinion at The Lancet and Nature Medicine. There, she wrote editorials read by leading policymakers. Selected works include.