5. Moonraker: The billionaire has left the planet
Image: TMDBRewatch Moonraker (1979) after the rise of Elon Musk, and Hugo Drax starts looking less like an outlandish invention and more like a recognisable type: an immensely wealthy aerospace industrialist with his own spacecraft and a personal vision for humanity's future beyond Earth.
The parallels extend to the business. Drax manufactures space shuttles for the US government while pursuing a much larger private ambition. SpaceX has developed spacecraft under NASA partnerships, and its Crew Dragon carried NASA astronauts into orbit in 2020. Musk has also spent years presenting extraterrestrial settlement as a project with consequences for the future of civilisation.
The essential difference is their purpose. Drax plans to murder humanity and repopulate Earth with his chosen survivors. Musk's stated ambition is to expand human life beyond Earth. The comparison concerns private power, space hardware and species-scale ambition—not shared murderous intentions.
What Moonraker captured was the spectacle of a businessman treating humanity's next chapter as a project he could personally organise. Once, that was enough to establish a Bond villain. Today, it also sounds like the opening of a space-industry presentation. Drax's story · NASA's SpaceX mission · Musk's multiplanetary ambitions
