From the cover of Lifestyles Magazine/Meaningful Influence to a Trillion dollars in two decades: Elon Musk’s night of two milestones, a Starship launch and his mother’s new book

In 2006, Elon Musk was not yet a household name. He was 35, a PayPal millionaire with a soft South African accent and a habit of saying out loud the things most people only let themselves think at two in the morning.

He had put nearly his entire fortune into three companies that plenty of serious, well-dressed people fully expected to fail. SpaceX had yet to reach orbit, and its rockets had a way of ending up in the Pacific. Tesla was a small startup trying to convince the world that an electric car could be beautiful and fast rather than a punchline. SolarCity, started with his cousins, was barely out of the garage.

That year, Vanessa Valkin, editor of Lifestyles Magazine/Meaningful Influence, put him on our cover.

It was an unusual choice for us.

Lifestyles Magazine/Meaningful Influence has always been about philanthropy and about people whose work leaves a lasting mark on humanity. Musk had no foundation to speak of and no famous gifts to his name.

What he had was a mission so big it made people shift in their seats: to make humanity a species that lives on more than one planet, and to move civilization off fossil fuels while there was still time to matter.

Vanessa saw in him what the magazine has always looked for, someone who measures success by what it will mean for people not yet born.

The cover was a bet on that vision, placed at a moment when plenty of others were betting heavily the other way.

Twenty years later, the story has outgrown anything a single cover could hold.

In June, when SpaceX began trading publicly, Musk’s fortune passed one trillion dollars, making him the first trillionaire in history.

The number almost refuses to be pictured. It is a 1 followed by twelve zeros.

One trillion seconds adds up to roughly 31,700 years, a span that reaches back past the pyramids, past the first farms, past the first person who ever scratched a word into clay.

The company that once scraped together the money for one more launch now flies more often than the rest of the world combined.

The man once waved off as a dreamer has become one of the most influential, and most fiercely argued-about, people alive.

This week gave the story a symmetry no novelist would dare invent.

From Starbase, on the flat, wind-swept Gulf Coast edge of South Texas, SpaceX sent Starship into the night.

It is the largest rocket ever built, the stainless-steel giant Musk has always said would one day carry the people and materials for a city on Mars.

This flight was a genuine step toward that dream: Starship’s first planned trip to orbit, carrying a load of next-generation satellites, and a sign that the machine meant to build a settlement on another world is becoming a working spacecraft rather than a spectacular experiment.

At Boca Chica, the engines turned the dark sky the color of sunrise, the ground trembled, and the crowds lining the beach roared.

For anyone who had followed Musk through the years when a single failed launch could have ended everything, it felt like watching a long-made promise finally begin to be kept.

That same evening, far from the launch pad and its thunder, Lifestyles Magazine/Meaningful Influence was in a warmer, gentler room: the book launch for Maye Musk, Elon’s mother.

At 78, Maye is a working model, a registered dietitian, a best-selling author and, by her own delighted admission, the proudest mother in any room she enters.

Her silver hair and easy laugh drew guests to her like a magnet.

Her new book, “Timeless: The Art of Reinvention and Resilience at Any Age,” published by HarperCollins, follows her earlier memoir, “A Woman Makes a Plan.” It is a book about starting over, again and again, and refusing to let age, setbacks or anyone else’s expectations write the next chapter for you.

Anyone who knows Maye’s story knows resilience is not a slogan for her. She raised three children largely on her own, crossed continents, and rebuilt her career and her finances more than once, sometimes from almost nothing. She has said her children learned to work hard simply by watching her do it. In “Timeless,” she writes about Elon, Kimbal and Tosca with the tenderness of a mother who remembers life before the rockets and the headlines, when her eldest was a bookish boy who read the encyclopedia cover to cover for fun and could not be pried away from it at dinner.

As Maye Musk’s friends lined up for signed copies, it was impossible not to feel how the two events belonged together.

Hundreds of miles away, a towering silver rocket was climbing into the dark.

In the room, the woman who taught her son that a plan and sheer stubbornness can take you almost anywhere was signing books about how it is never too late to begin again.

One milestone spoke to the future of the species. The other spoke to the kind of character that makes such a future imaginable in the first place.

For Lifestyles Magazine/Meaningful Influence, the night felt like a homecoming.

Twenty years ago, we featured a young man with an improbable plan because we believed his work, if it succeeded, would matter to humanity.

Some of that plan has come true in ways that once sounded like science fiction.

Much of it still lies ahead, and the hardest questions may be the ones still unanswered: whether his wealth and his rockets will ultimately serve the many, and what kind of legacy the world’s first trillionaire will choose to leave behind.

Two decades after that cover, we witnessed two milestones in a single night, one blazing across the Texas sky and one unfolding quietly among books, friends and a mother’s pride.

The next chapter promises to be remarkable, and we will be watching closely.