Ultra-wealth gives someone like Elon Musk the power to do great good in the world — and great harm.
The thing about billionaire philanthropy is that it’s the worst possible system for getting things done that governments can’t be bothered with — except for all the other ones.
This is a recurring theme here at Future Perfect. We’ve written about how abortion and contraception access worldwide is almost exclusively billionaire-funded — indeed, major and crucial advances in safe abortion and contraception were developed through billionaire-funded research, not publicly funded research.
We’ve written about how in the early months of Covid-19, billionaire-funded Fast Grants got money quickly to promising research into treatments and vaccines, even as the expedited NIH approval process for funding still left many talented researchers with no way to get the money they needed for crucial Covid research.
In a piece grappling with the billionaire philanthropy dilemma, my colleague Dylan Matthews pointed to other cases from the past, like Julius Rosenwald, the Sears tycoon who funded schools for Black children in the Jim Crow South a century ago.
The unifying theme: Sometimes the ultra-rich are able to ensure that critical work for the people who need it most gets done, especially when the government — and the voters who put it in power — are unwilling to do it.
So that’s the good side. Then there’s the bad side.
Billionaires are high variance
To start a ludicrously successful company in the US these days, and not sell it to Google or whoever and retire quietly with a sizable fortune, you need to be an unusual sort of person.
Elon Musk’s greatest fans and greatest critics would presumably agree on this much: He is a particularly vivid example of just that. He’s clearly great at some of the fundamentals of running a business — most people, after all, could not leverage the investor capital he received into multiple successful businesses in tough industries. He also makes costly, terrible decisions all the time.
It’s quite possible these tendencies go hand in hand — the precise traits that made him decide he could do spaceflight better than anyone else are also the ones that made him decide he could tweet out a harebrained solution to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
And while we’ve most recently weathered a lot of Elon Musk drama surrounding his acquisition of Twitter, I’d say that Musk is unusually visible rather than unusually unique. A lot of billionaires are weird people, and their shenanigans often affect the rest of us.
It wasn’t long ago that a lot of tech company valuations were skewed wildly due to the eccentric betting of SoftBank billionaire Masayoshi Son, whose Vision Fund lost $27.4 billion last year. Some of the biggest obstacles to last night’s reelection of New York’s Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul were the contributions of Ronald Lauder, a billionaire who may be motivated in part because he wants to kill a wind farm near his house.
I think Musk’s Twitter activities will ultimately be a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Twitter will probably be fine. (Or at least as fine as Twitter can ever be.) The people addicted to it will still be there.
But some of his other decisions have been far more meaningful. He co-founded OpenAI on the principle that AI was a terrifyingly powerful technology, but the company went on to develop unprecedentedly powerful AI systems and releasing them to the public. (Musk stepped down as chair of OpenAI in 2018; in the meantime, the company has been doing a lot of developing of unprecedented systems, and is somewhat walking back the “releasing them” for a combination of safety reasons and profit concerns.)
That’s a big bet on something that could go very, very wrong, and the damage it could cause would be far worse than Musk’s efforts to charge people for verification on Twitter.
Where high variance is good — and where it’s really bad
There are some billionaires who I think are doing incredible good, like Bill Gates or Dustin Moskovitz, both of whom have literally saved millions of lives through their global health giving. There are some, like Musk, who manage to do both world-transforming good — like basically inventing the electric vehicle sector with Tesla — and world-transforming bad at the same time. There are some billionaires — many, really, though they often fly beneath the radar — who mostly try to get politicians elected who’ll represent their interests and lower their taxes.
The point is that there’s extremely high variance here. The difference between the best and the worst of billionaires is very large.
In some areas, variance is good. With scientific grantmaking, for example, I think the fact billionaires are often eccentric and working off their own theory of what matters in terms of what to fund is a straightforward plus. If they’re right, critical progress might happen that would never have happened otherwise. And if they’re wrong, worst case, they just lose their money. If the downside is limited, variance is good.
In some areas, though, variance is extremely damaging. With dangerous technologies, for instance, I am not so excited about a world where every billionaire is able to do whatever they want. I don’t think Musk founding OpenAI was a good idea, and I definitely don’t want any billionaire to be able to build super-powerful AI systems just because they can.
Likewise, it’s far from ideal for a small number of people to be able to take down or save banks and stock markets, as the cryptocurrency industry seems to be realizing recently, if belatedly. (Disclaimer: Future Perfect has received funding from Building a Stronger Future, a family foundation run by crypto philanthropist Sam Bankman-Fried and his brother Gabe.)
This seems like a good rule of thumb for where I’m pretty supportive of billionaire philanthropy or activism, and where I’m against it. Is the downside risk basically just that they’ll waste their money? I’m all for it.
Is the downside risk that they’ll inflict costs on tons of other people that we have, as a society, no way to make them pay for? I’m much less excited.
Is the downside risk that they’ll quite literally kill us all? I’m out.
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The original film, starting the late Chadwick Boseman, set a standard for Marvel excellence. The sequel is ready to meet it.
Four years ago, the conversation surrounding Black Panther was about whether it would succeed or if it would set back the cause of all Black-led superhero films. If Black Panther didn’t do well, the thinking went, studio executives would take that as a sign that Black superheroes and action movies wouldn’t be worth investing in, as they did for years with female superheroes after Catwoman and Elektra bombed. The future — not just of the franchise but of Black representation within pop culture — appeared to hinge on whether people would see Black Panther in theaters.
The people responded, giving studio heads $1.345 billion reasons they should believe in Black heroes.
Now, as the sequel Wakanda Forever hits theaters on November 11, Black Panther is Marvel’s flagship franchise. Iron Man and Captain America, Marvel’s superstar heroes, completed their stories in Avengers: Endgame with one sacrificing himself to save the world and the other retiring. New heroes like Shang Chi and the Eternals are just being introduced. Black Panther is arguably the most popular property in the MCU.
With that power comes a whole new set of questions, from how the new film will live up to the excellence of the first movie to how this sequel even exists, considering the tragic death of Chadwick Boseman, who originated the role of T’Challa, a.k.a. Black Panther.
To understand the sky-high storytelling and financial expectations that Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is facing, it’s important to understand the current state of Marvel, the background on the production of this sequel, and the standard set by the first film. But if the franchise has taught us anything, it’s to always bet on Black Panther.
The first Black Panther movie was the best movie Marvel ever made
In over a decade of storytelling, Black Panther is the only Marvel movie to have an Academy Award Best Picture nomination. It’s with good reason.
There are certain movies that are so good that you wish you could experience them again for the very first time. Black Panther is one of those. I wish I could tap into the initial thrill of seeing T’Challa and his general Okoye (Danai Gurira) zoom into Wakanda, the joy of the waterfall celebration and T’Challa’s coronation ceremony, and blood-pumping excitement from the thumps and beats of the Wakandan score. I could watch (and have watched) the movie over and over, but those first-viewing feelings are still so magical.
I don’t think I’m alone. The movie holds a 96 percent critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an A+ Cinemascore, a rating that measures audience reaction.
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Marvel
Black Panther wasn’t just a visual and auditory spectacle, it was also a superhero story with depth. Within the story of T’Challa’s superheroism was a tale about political isolationism; Wakanda protected itself, perhaps selfishly, from the world around it. Black Panther was also an allegory about the ills of colonization and, at the same time, a power fantasy about what a wondrous Black civilization could look like if it went untouched by imperialism.
Lush storytelling combined with stellar performances from Boseman and the cast, thrilling action sequences, the intricate and thoughtful world-building of Wakanda, and a convincing villain in Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) made Black Panther the best movie Marvel has ever created.
Since its release in 2018, nothing Marvel has produced has come close to sparking the same kind of pop cultural conversations about race, representation, and colonialism. Black Panther pushed the genre forward, unlocking the potential of what a superhero movie could be.
Inevitably, Wakanda Forever will be compared to the first movie. Fans and the industry alike want to know whether it’s as excellent as the original. But the more pertinent question might be whether Marvel’s other movies are as good as the Black Panther franchise, and if not, what’s keeping them from that?
What is Black Panther without Chadwick Boseman?
The runaway success of Black Panther was just one of the reasons it was so shocking when star Chadwick Boseman died in 2020. Boseman, who was only 43, kept his personal life private; he had stage four colon cancer unbeknownst to his fans and many of his colleagues.
“I got to watch him through the years — advancing out of student theater, on to TV and film, and then finally cast as T’Challa. He was perfect. He had T’Challa’s royal spirit, the sense that he did not represent merely himself, but a nation,” wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates in a eulogy that was printed in Marvel comic books.
Coates explained that there was no explanation or any remedy against the cruelty of losing Boseman. The solace, he explained, would be in remembering Boseman’s legacy. “It is the thought,” he wrote “that just as Chad once walked into the City of the Dead and harnessed the energy of those who’d gone before him, so he too may be harnessed, by all those warriors to come.” In holding tight to Boseman’s memory — the light he brought to the world, and the inspiration he was to so many people — his power could be handed down to future generations.
Director Ryan Coogler, who had befriended Boseman during the first movie, was one of the people who didn’t know what his friend had been going through. In interviews, he explained that Boseman’s death was such a shock that Coogler almost quit filmmaking. Boseman was supposed to be part of the second movie and the future of Marvel; Coogler reported that his initial script for a Black Panther follow-up centered on T’Challa experiencing the grief of losing five years to Thanos’s snap.
That all had to change.
Wakanda Forever and the controversies surrounding its lead star
The new script, which Coogler co-wrote with Joe Robert Cole, instead focuses on the character’s sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) and mother Ramonda (Angela Bassett) dealing with T’Challa’s death. Coogler and Cole did not shy away from writing a story that mirrors Boseman’s death.
That the movie deals with Boseman’s passing isn’t a spoiler. Both the movie and its soundtrack have been described as tributes to his legacy. The movie’s trailers feature a funeral procession. The basic premise of Wakanda Forever is simple: Wakanda needs a new Black Panther to protect it, and the movie is about Shuri both choosing but finding it difficult to live up to her brother’s legacy.
Shuri was a beloved character thanks to her appearance in the first movie, in which Wright was charismatic and buoyant. Building a movie around her wouldn’t be too far-fetched, and in the comic books there’s precedent, as the Black Panther mantle has been passed from character to character.
But when the movie finally started production, it was plagued with starts and stops, including an injury that Wright suffered and a Covid outbreak in 2022. When it comes to the latter, THR reported in 2021 that Wright had shared anti-vaccine sentiments on social media and a source told them that Wright espoused the same anti-vaccine talking points on set in Atlanta. Wright denied those allegations but did not confirm that she was vaccinated.
Marvel doesn’t like its stars to be embroiled in controversy, especially since they’re signed for multiple movies. It’s not a coincidence that the actress has kept a low profile on the Wakanda Forever press tour. It was already tough enough to fill Boseman’s shoes and carry on his legacy, but Wright’s controversy doesn’t make it any easier.
Why Marvel needs Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Since 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, Marvel has released six live-action movies and seven television shows, an absolute mountain of content. Endgame was what Marvel refers to as “Phase 3” — Marvel releases a series of interconnected movies that usually culminates in a team-up movie and refers to that batch of movies as a phase. The studio is now in Phase 4.
But of those six movies — Spider-Man: No Way Home (Marvel says No Way Home is technically the end of Phase 3 but it takes place in a post-Endgame world), Shang Chi, Black Widow, Eternals, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Thor: Love and Thunder — only No Way Home, a collaboration with Sony, was able to break the billion-dollar worldwide box office mark. In the previous Marvels cycles, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Captain America: Civil War, and both Infinity War and Endgame all passed that billion-dollar benchmark.
There are some caveats, though.
To be very clear, the pandemic affected those numbers. In 2019, when Captain Marvel came out, no one was risking contracting a serious illness to see it. Meanwhile, Black Widow was released in July 2021 in theaters and on streaming, the combination of which affected its box office numbers. Still, when No Way Home was released in December 2021, it did close to $2 billion worldwide. Multiverse of Madness and Love and Thunder were released in 2022, the same year as the blockbuster Top Gun: Maverick, but do not have box office numbers close to that figure, with $955 million and $760 million worldwide, respectively.
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Marvel
It’s also worth noting that Marvel’s Phase 3 movies (the aforementioned Black Panther and Captain Marvel) were all leading up to Infinity War and Endgame, which were touted as the final chapters to a decade of Marvel moviemaking. Those movies benefited from the “last chapter” bump that Infinity War and Endgame created.
That said, Marvel still hasn’t had the big Marvel-size, standalone success that it’s so used to. A lot of that is due to the turnover. The franchises’ biggest stars — Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson — have all passed the torch. I doubt they predicted that Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange would get shown up in his own movie by Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen). They probably wouldn’t have killed her off if that were the case. Similarly, the studio likely anticipated that Thor: Love and Thunder would do better than Ragnarok at the box office (it hasn’t).
Granted, Marvel and its parent company Disney are still the most powerful entertainment entities in the game. When we talk about their failures, it’s relative to the successes they’ve already established.
Without giving too much away, Wakanda Forever soars, and maybe even surpasses its predecessor. Angela Bassett might well be the first actor in a Marvel movie to get an Oscar nomination. Wright, controversy or no controversy, delivers as Shuri. And Wakanda is as glorious as ever, with Coogler introducing even more depth into its politics and global standing.
When it comes to Marvel’s Phase 4, the Black Panther franchise is the big gun in Marvel’s war chest. But the stakes aren’t merely emotional, or even about the quality of its predecessor —Wakanda Forever also carries the pressure to deliver a Marvel-size hit. Marvel needs to prove it’s still Marvel. There’s no other franchise the studio has that would be able to handle that great responsibility.
Climate change is pushing the power grid to the limit. Energy storage could help.
Blackouts are a devastating reality of our climate-changed world. An unprecedented winter storm in 2021 knocked out power for millions of Texans for days, killing hundreds, and this summer Californians managed to barely save their state’s power grid from the brink of collapse during a record-breaking heat wave.
Some blackouts are caused by storms destroying infrastructure like transmission lines and substations — just look at what’s happened in Puerto Rico after Hurricanes Maria and, more recently, Fiona.
But many blackouts can also be blamed on how the electric system works. Namely: The goal of the power grid is to deliver electricity to your home as soon as it’s been generated at a power plant. There isn’t a great pool of electricity waiting in reserve for when demand spikes. Experts say that needs to change.
“Electricity systems are real-time systems,” said Eric Fournier, research director at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. There’s little room for error.
In the past, there was an easy fix. If grid operators ever needed more power, they’d just burn more fossil fuels, in real time, to meet demand. But that makes climate change worse (electricity generation is responsible for 25 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions in the United States). It’s a vicious cycle: Climate change is what’s pushing our grids to the limit.
Switching to clean energy is the obvious solution. But while wind and solar power are efficient, they’re not always available: Solar power turns off at night, and wind turbines can’t generate power on a still day. With renewables, demand can still outpace supply.
We need a way to store renewable electricity. That sounds like … a battery. But batteries — at least the kind found in our cellphones and cars — aren’t necessarily the best solution. Lithium-ion batteries, which have become the de facto standard for rechargeable batteries and are used in everything from phones and laptops to electric cars, are expensive to produce and might be better suited for those portable applications than sitting static in storage racks.
“We need to think about solutions that go beyond conventional lithium-ion batteries,” said Dharik Mallapragada, a principal research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative and co-author of a recent study on the future of energy storage. Money is on everybody’s mind at COP27, the UN climate negotiations currently underway in Egypt, and the world needs affordable solutions that can work for wealthy and poor countries alike.
“No single technology is going to make this happen,” Mallapragada said. “We have to think about it as a jigsaw puzzle, where every piece plays its role in the system.”
The power grid is a massive machine. To make a battery for it, we have to think big — and weird. On this week’s episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s podcast about unanswered questions, we explore what the future batteries of the grid might look like, from the time-tested to the fantastical. There are many ways to bottle lightning.
A battery built into a mountain
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Akos Stiller/Bloomberg via Getty Images
On a very basic level, all batteries work by taking electricity, storing it as a different form of energy, and turning that energy back into electricity (or, to be extremely technical, electric energy) when it’s needed again.
Lithium-ion batteries are chemical batteries, which means they store electricity as chemical energy. They’re very efficient; they can generally release upward of 90 percent of the energy put into them.
But a battery doesn’t have to be based on chemical energy — there are all kinds of other energy types we can convert that electricity into. Take, for example, pumped hydro.
Pumped-storage hydropower, or pumped hydro, is the biggest kind of grid-storage battery currently in operation in the United States. It’s also the oldest; the first pumped hydro facility in the country opened in New Milford, Connecticut, in 1930.
The concept behind pumped hydro is pretty straightforward. Sometimes power plants — especially renewable power plants like wind — generate more electricity than we can use, and grid operators end up having to simply dump that energy in a process called “curtailment.”
But if those renewable power facilities were hooked up to pumped hydro, that excess energy could be used to pump water up a hill or mountain and fill a reservoir. That movement uphill raises the water’s potential energy; when the energy is needed, the water is released and sent through a hydroelectric turbine, turning the potential energy back into electricity.
Pumped hydro took off in the United States during the 1970s and ’80s when the country saw a boom in nuclear power. Nuclear plants were very good at constantly generating a steady amount of electricity around the clock, Mallapragada said, but there wasn’t an easy way to increase or decrease their output.
To be able to respond to fluctuating demand, grid operators built pumped-hydro stations to store the excess energy generated by nuclear power plants during times of low energy use; without pumped hydro, that energy could have gone to waste. (It’s a similar dilemma to the one faced by solar and wind power plants, and recently some pumped-hydro stations have seen their energy sources shift from nuclear energy to renewables.)
It’s a time-tested, efficient solution. So building more pumped-hydro plants could work well for the future of clean energy.
But pumped hydro isn’t perfect: It requires specific geographies (like mountains, but any terrain with an elevation difference would work), and building a pumped-hydro station often requires hollowing out rugged landscapes in order to install the pumps and other infrastructure that move water up to the reservoir.
That’s an energy-intensive, resource-hungry process. So while pumped hydro could work in some circumstances, especially when existing facilities are being transitioned to renewable energy, it’s only one part of Mallapragada’s jigsaw puzzle of energy storage solutions. One of those pieces, Mallapragada said, could even be taking the principles behind pumped hydro and applying them outside of mountains.
Don’t have a mountain? Build one.
Pumped hydro, at its core, uses the force of gravity to pull water downhill and transform potential energy into electricity.
But if there isn’t a mountain in sight to build the plant, engineers can essentially build a mountain of their own. This is called gravity storage: Instead of lifting and dropping water, these “batteries” would lift and lower solid blocks of some heavy material like concrete.
The most attention-getting version of this technology comes from a company called Energy Vault. A prototype built in Switzerland involved a multi-armed crane that uses renewable energy to pick up 35-ton concrete blocks, slowly building a concrete tower around itself and storing solar and wind power as potential energy. When energy is needed, the process is reversed: The cranes let the blocks drop, unspooling their cables and powering a motor that generates electricity.
More recent versions of Energy Vault’s storage solution look a bit more staid — the cranes have been replaced with warehouse-esque buildings full of 30-ton bricks riding elevators, which you can see in the video below — but the underlying concept remains the same, using excess renewable energy to power the mechanisms that lift the blocks and dropping them when renewables aren’t available.
The concept isn’t limited to building towers or bricks on elevators. Other companies are exploring using abandoned mine shafts as potential gravity storage sites that can help stabilize the grid during energy spikes.
Gravity storage sidesteps the mountain-sized hurdle getting in the way of new pumped-hydro stations, and experts say it should be just as efficient as pumped hydro. Yet it, too, isn’t perfect: Building gravity storage systems is also energy-intensive, and the costs might outweigh the benefits — especially if lithium-ion batteries continue to get cheaper.
Energy Vault says it’s working to get costs down, particularly in terms of raw materials: the company told WIRED’s Matt Reynolds that their new bricks can be made out of waste materials rather than concrete, reducing the energy load of setting up the system.
Giant thermoses can repurpose old fossil fuel technology
A key problem in the energy transition equation — and currently occupying the minds of the international negotiators at COP27 — is how to pay for it, especially in countries that installed fossil fuel power plants relatively recently.
Unlike the United States, which has an aging fossil fuel power plant fleet that is nearing (or, in some cases, well past) retirement age, countries like India and China are home to coal-power plants that have plenty of shelf life left.
That’s where thermal energy storage comes in. In a thermal storage system, renewable electricity coming from sources such as wind turbines or solar panels is used to heat up a material that’s particularly good at capturing heat, like a molten salt, and surrounding it with insulation to essentially make a giant thermos. That heat can then be released to create steam or hot air and drive a turbine, just like a coal or nuclear plant today.
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Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Mallapragada’s particularly excited about the potential for thermal storage because it can potentially be used in existing fossil fuel plants by swapping out, say, a coal burner for a thermal storage unit. This solves multiple problems: A large portion of the existing infrastructure can remain in place. Coal plants are already attached to the power grid, which saves on costs, and many of the existing jobs at those power plants will transfer over to a plant powered by stored thermal energy — which means a more equitable energy transition.
For developing countries, that could be a game-changer. But — and you might be noticing a theme here — thermal storage has some downsides too. Gravity storage and pumped hydro are very efficient; you can usually recover somewhere in the vicinity of 70 to 85 percent of the energy stored. Thermal storage is much less efficient, so it couldn’t be relied on alone. It’s just another piece slotting into the jigsaw, rather than the complete picture.
Rust can be our friend
Every solution discussed so far has been something other than a chemical battery. But even if lithium-ion might not be the best solution for the grid, there are still some chemical batteries worth considering. One of them even uses something that, unlike lithium, is ubiquitous: rust.
Rust is usually a nuisance. But a type of battery called an iron-air battery turns that idea on its head.
Unlike the rest of the solutions in this story, iron-air batteries are the most similar to what we traditionally think of as batteries: they rely on chemical reactions to store and release energy, just like lithium-ion batteries. But traditional batteries are usually a combination of two or more chemicals inside one battery casing. In iron-air batteries, one of the chemicals is iron — one of the most abundant metals on our planet.
The other chemical? The oxygen in the air around it.
Iron rusts. We all know this. But rusting is a chemical reaction, called oxidation, and just like the reaction in a lithium-ion battery it can be reversed. That is to say, we can charge up rusted iron.
It’s as if the electricity is being used to polish the iron: Charging the iron keeps the oxidation at bay, but the iron’s natural state is to want to rust. Letting the iron rust essentially pushes the electrons out of the metal, discharging the battery. When it’s time to charge the battery again, the process is reversed.
It all sounds a bit sci-fi, but the idea is quickly becoming a reality; a company called Form Energy recently signed a deal with a Georgia utility to build an iron-air battery that can store 100 hours’ worth of energy. Eventually, the company hopes to build farms of iron-air batteries, each the size of a side-by-side washer and dryer, that can scale in size according to the needs of a community.
Mallapragada cautions though, building rust batteries is “easier said than done.” It’s hard to find the sweet spot of a chemical combination that can charge and discharge without losing too much energy along the way.
Rusting iron isn’t the most efficient battery in the world — its 40 to 60 percent efficiency range pales in comparison to the ultra-efficient lithium’s 90-plus percent — but it’s much, much cheaper and easier to make. Lithium-ion batteries require all sorts of limited metals; iron is everywhere.
Putting the pieces together
Energy storage isn’t going to be simple, and there isn’t going to be any single solution that’s going to get us to a place where we can be free of fossil fuels. Some of the batteries mentioned here might not even work; many are still in early testing. But all of these solutions, put together with many more we didn’t touch on here, are still important steps in the right direction.
If they’re implemented across the country — mountain batteries in some places, perhaps thermal tanks or warehouses full of rusting iron in others — they would be the key to both stopping and living with climate change and its threats to the power grid. Even as extreme weather gets worse, stored energy could help us quite literally weather the storm.
“I’m quite optimistic that we can solve this problem, because we have all these solutions,” said Mallapragada. “The right answer will look very different for California than it would for the Northeast or other parts of the country or even other parts of the world. We have all the pieces. We just have to figure out how to make them work together.”