Elon Musk suggests nuking Mars, is promptly accused of being a super villain

He's a billionaire business magnate with ambitions to help colonize mars who would ever imagine Elon Musk couldbe a super villain?

Stephen Colbert, naturally.

On Wednesday night, Musk was a guest on the second episode of CBS'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

The interview started off innocuously enough. When Colbert informed Musk thathis CEO-ship of Tesla Motors andSpaceX, as well as hischairmanship of SolarCity, had earned him the reputation of being a real life Tony Stark (a.k.a Iron Man)Musk mostly shrugged it off.

There were even a few laughs when Colbert showed this oddly suggestive video of a functional charger prototype for the Model S by Tesla Motors.

"Is that thing going to attack me in my sleep?" Colbert asks Musk.

"For the prototype, at least, I would recommend not dropping anything when you're near it," Musk replies, to the delight of the studio audience.

But things turned sinister when Colbert brought up Musk's plans for the red planet Mars.

For the most part, Musk appearedgenuinely undeterredby Mars' stark uninhabitability and suggested the "fixer upper of a planet" could be warmed,and renderedmore hospitable to humans, in two ways: the "slow way," which, like Earth,involves the release of greenhouse gasses, and the "fast way" which requires the detonation of thermonuclear bombs overthe planet's poles.

That's right. Musk suggested we consider, possibly, one day, nuking Mars.

"You're a super villain, that's what a super villain does," said Colbert. "Superman doesn't say we'll drop thermonuclear bombs, that's Lex Luthor, man."

Once again, Musk seemed mostly indifferent to the comparison.

But the seed was planted.

Of course, there's no reason toworry, right?