Factually! with Adam Conover - Elon Musk’s Dark Ideology, with Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian

Episode Date: June 3, 2026

Elon Musk sucks so bad, dude. We all know this already. Unfortunately, however, he remains one of the most consequential people on the planet. This means that understanding him, his philosophy, and his goals for the planet (and human species) is actually… kinda important. This week, Adam speaks with Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian, authors of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, about who Elon really is and the dark nature of the ideology he’s trying to inflict upon us. Find Ben and Quinn's book at factuallypod.com/books--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. Hello, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. We're thrilled to have you on the show with me again, especially because we're talking about Elon Musk again today. And, you know, he's often a topic of conversation on this show. And that's because, you know, he is a weird and kind of fascinating guy, whether it's paying people to play video games for him,

jumping into women's DMs to see if they're down to be inseminated by him, whether he's being a gutter racist on X, the platform that he purchased and then turned into a right-wing hate factory. I mean, we have endless proof that the richest man on the planet is also a blundering and pathetic loser. That is poetic, and it is a lot of fun to talk about

if you're a comedian. But, you know, we don't just talk about Elon for the clicks and for the laughs. The man is also for better or for worse, I would say mostly for worse, extremely consequential on the world that we live in. I mean, he helped bring Trump back into power.

He's supporting right-wing governments around the world. He made the first major EV company. And through the Doge initiative, I can't believe I even have to say the name of it, but that is what it was called. He took a chainsaw to the federal government, especially USAID, the destruction of which will guarantee millions of deaths globally.

The man is a monster. He is a stupid crazy monster, but he is also a very, powerful monster, and that means that we need to understand him. And by the way, the IPO for his company, SpaceX, which is the most successful of anything that he has done, is set to make him even richer. It is actually set to make him perhaps the world's first trillionaire. So we need to ask what is going on under the hood, even though he is a crazy maniac, something in there is working for him, right? Elon Musk on some level is not just a guy anymore. He is not just a guy anymore. He is not

just a man. He is an entire complex of ideas about business, technology, government, and media. In other words, he is a walking ideology. And let's talk about someone else who fits that definition. You know, Henry Ford was the most dominant industrialist a century ago. Through mass production, assembly lines, and high wages, he was able to help create the mass consumer society that we all take for granted and live within today. And that ideology taken together is called Fordism. So what we should ask is can we tell the same kind of story about muskism? What is the ideology of Elon Musk and what can analyzing it tell us about how our world today works? Well, to answer that question for us today, we have the authors of an incredible new book.

Their names are Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian. They are writers and historians. And their really thoughtful and fascinating new book is called Muskism, a guide for the perplexed. So if you are perplexed, I know you're going to love. this conversation. Before we get into it, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show and every single one of the interviews, we bring you week in and week out, head to patreon.com slash Adam Con, over five bucks a month, gets you every single one of our episodes ad-free. And by the way, we have added an entirely new weekly episode that you will get ad-free for that

five bucks a month. On Wednesdays, we continue to do these interviews. Every Friday, we now do a news roundup with a journalist scholar and or comedian talking about the news. of the week, helping you understand it a little bit and giving you a little bit of relief through laughter. So check that out every Friday. And now let's get to this interview with the authors of Muskism, a guide for the perplexed. Ben and Quinn, thank you guys so much for being on the show. Thanks so much for having us. Happy to be here. Let me just start by asking, maybe the answer is obvious, but why study Elon Musk? Why write about him at all? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, so maybe the most obvious answer,

answer is that he's the richest man on Earth, probably on track to become the first trillionaire when SpaceX goes public next month. But I think our interest in Musk was a little bit different. We kind of tried to step back from Musk the man and think about Musk more as a symptom or a kind of avatar of a particular stage of capitalism. So we're kind of interested in Musk more for what he can tell us about the particular moment in history that we're living through and less about you know, who he is at an individual level. We definitely both had the desire to just mute Musk from our lives and make him go away and just like suppress and repress every appearance that he had, like on our timeline or the newspapers.

But at some point, about a year ago, when we started on this book, a year and a bit ago, we were just like, no, this guy's too big to ignore. And there might be a more interesting way in. And if we get around like all the personality quirks and all of the theatrics and then ask like, what version of the world is he trying to make? Like, what would the world look like if he actually succeeded? So that ended up being kind of a more compelling intellectual puzzle for us than I think we would have thought at the outset.

Well, that's interesting. I feel like you guys are sort of showing both sides of a potential analysis of him because so often, you know, normie history were used to the sort of great man. of history, the Napoleon, the Alexander the Great, the Henry Ford, whatever. And, you know, my bias is to be like, oh, that's not really what's so important. That's a fun way to look at history, but it's personality driven. It's not idea-driven. It's not really historical.

So the first half of your answer makes sense to me. But also, Musk is so individually powerful as a human being in a way that other people are not. And he is weird. He is a weird man in ways that do manifest themselves in the ways that he affects the world. His personality quirks do affect us more than the personality quirks of most people. So, yeah, I mean, where do you start? Let's start with the capitalism piece of it first. What does he show us about capitalism in your analysis?

Well, I think Musk shows how certain trends of the past 40s. 50 years of capitalism, what social scientists typically think of as the neoliberal era, where there's a push toward deregulation, toward destroying organized labor, toward wealth inequality, financialization, kind of the world that we're living in. Musk is very much a creature of those trends. He comes out of them. He would not have his career without them. But I think he also shows us how those developments are mutating into something a bit different. And where we really drill down on this is the relationship with the state. We really insist that Musk can't be understood as a libertarian.

He doesn't want to shrink the state or escape the state. Rather, he wants to fuse with the state and create what we describe as state symbiosis. And that, I think, you know, is a broader trend. You can actually see this in Trump's experiments with state capitalism, taking a share of intel, in even developments under the Biden administration, or industrial policy. There's a new relationship between state and capital that's been emerging in recent years. And Musk is actually a unique vantage point from which to see that trend. I think it's also worth going back to your remark a minute ago about the Great Man theory of

history, right? Because, you know, in the sequence of people you mentioned Napoleon, Hitler, etc. You also mentioned Ford. And in fact, the way that people turned forward into Fordism was one of the inspirations that we had, which was like, you can't just get it all by just studying the man, Henry Ford. You also need to say, what kind of world outside the factory was necessary to get the workers,

you know, to the factory on time every morning, what kind of products were rolling off the assembly, like how were the workers going to be able to afford them, collective bargaining agreements, welfare state, degenerational operability. So from this one person, this one personality, you can build a system,

and then you can learn something when you pull out and look at the system. That's quite literally what we were trying to do with Musk, is add the ism and then de-senter the man. But your point is actually dead on, and we've thought about it a lot, which is that the amount of wealth has been concentrated in the figure of Elon Musk,

the disintermediation that he now has with investors, with his fans, the fact that he can wake up in the middle of the night and just post a meme and it moves the markets, meaning that you actually need to kind of revisit the Great Man theory of history. you need to come back to be like, oh man, maybe we have produced a world where individuals can actually have like structural consequences when they decide to like, you know, turn off Starlink connectivity in the battlefield or decide that this part of the contract with the Department of War is not acceptable for them. So it's a combination, I think, of seeing people at this manages figureheads of a system, but then also being like how much individual agency has actually returned because of all of these choices we've made over the last few decades that have been.

describe. Yeah, it's like when when Musk does, you know, ketamine and acid all night, is that actually affecting anything? Or is that is the ketamine use part of the system? Or is it creating the system? Or like both things can be true maybe. Or you can analyze them as both sides of the same coin. I want to dwell on the fusing with the state. Because when you say that, I mean, I'm not an expert in Russia to any degree. But what my understanding, when you hear about the, system there that, you know, you'll have an oligarch who's sort of in charge of a gigantic oil company and is also, you know, really embedded with Putin and like which one of them controls the other is sort of an active question. Like these, it becomes like, is the company an

part of the state or is it controlling the state? Is that the kind of relationship that, that you feel like we're approaching here? Yeah, it's a good question, Adam, because state capitalism is this word that this term that gets thrown around a lot. It can mean, a lot of different things. There's a lot of flavors of it. The Russian flavor is quite a bit different than the Chinese flavor, and that's both are quite a bit different than whatever Trump is doing. I think when we're thinking about Musk, and in particular this dynamic that we describe as state symbiosis, one of the core functions here is to expand the capacity of the state. So when you look, for instance, at SpaceX, which is really the centerpiece of Musk's empire,

It gets its start as a government contractor during the early years of the war on terror. And what it is promising to Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon is the ability to put satellites into orbit that will be required for fighting the global war on terror much more cheaply than has ever been done before. And in fact, they make good on that promise. Over the course of 20 years, SpaceX achieves a more than 90% reduction in the cost of putting mass into orbit. So I think we have to understand that the musk,

version is actually about increasing state sovereignty, you know, making it possible for states to do things that they couldn't have done before. But that increase of sovereignty, that increase of state capacity comes at an important cost, which is deepening reliance on Musk as a monopoly private provider. He essentially controls the U.S. orbital launch market and the Pentagon and then the intelligence services couldn't function without him. So that's the tradeoff that the U.S. is essentially made. What's really striking to me about that is, you know, I grew up learning about the space race.

This is like one of the main things you learn about in school is, you know, the United States government put a man on the moon, did this gigantic, civilizational level sort of project, right? And now we live in a world in which the government outsources that to a large corporation and the richest man in the world, right? And that strikes me as like a shift. in the way America is structured in a very visible way. Am I approaching anything right about that?

What does that say about how our civilization has changed or our system has changed? I mean, I think it's important to remember that, you know, Eisenhower left the office talking about the military industrial complex. And what he meant then was that, you know, the government, the military, the Pentagon was not doing everything in-house, right? I mean, they were building out this suite of the so-called primes, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, that were getting very, very rich on this continue arming of the United States, the conduct of proxy wars all over the globe and so on. But this moment that Ben points to at the beginning of the global war on terror ends up being really important because in a fantastic detail that Ben dug up in the course of writing the book, The day before 9-11, Donald Rumsfeld goes in front of the staff at the Pentagon and says,

we've fought the Cold War and won, but we have a new enemy. The enemy is a lot like the Soviet Union. It's bureaucratic, top-down, very rigid, and the enemy is us. So we need to import the spirit of Silicon Valley and the blooming tech sector into the Pentagon to make it more agile, nimble, cost-effective, productive, and so on. And the next day, 9-11 happens. Wow. Everything then gets rolled out in the format that we're now seeing where new military

tax providers like Anderil, like Palantir, which gets his foot in the door in the exact same way that SpaceX does, are now operating differently than those old primes. And there is new vulnerabilities. So I think you're right to see that as kind of a shift. Because instead of the old model where the Pentagon said, here's what we want and you do it on spec and then we kind of own the IP and the tech in-house. Now the Pentagon just says, this is what we want and get to that price point, however, you can do it. And then you basically own the IP and the licenses. And we will just, you know, accept it from you or pay it for it

from you, like on a rolling basis, which is how you get into these crazy situations that the Department of War is in now with Anthropic, where Anthropic says, we don't want to do that. And the Department of War has no choice in a way except to say, okay, then you're basically the enemy. We declare you a supply chain risk because that balance between state and private contractor is actually a very unstable one. And the question of who's in charge isn't as sort of settled as it is in some national context. It actually seems to be unclear sometimes who actually has the upper hand between the monopoly service provider coming from the Silicon Valley sector or the people writing the checks in D.C. That's obviously like a fraught terrain of conflict right now.

That's really fascinating. So the dynamic between Musk and Trump, where people are sort of always asking who's in charge, who's on top, who's controlling who is actually the case structurally as well between the government and the companies? Yeah, I mean, I think the Musk-Trump feud is a really powerful illustration of the phenomenon that Quinn is describing. So as many people will recall when Musk leaves the Doge initiative at the end of May 2025, he does so under the cloud of this dispute with Trump. And they trade barbs on social media. And at one point, Trump threatens to cancel SpaceX's contracts with the federal government, which of course would be a major blow to Musk, but would also be very complicated and difficult for Trump because they've reached a point

of dependency on SpaceX such that if they want to get their astronauts back from, on the International Space Station, they need SpaceX to do it. So it's one of these many moments in which the balance of power between public and private is being tested, is being renegotiated. When we talk about state symbiosis, it has that power dynamic as being constantly reproduced and renegotiated. And it's an open question, I think, unlike, for instance, in a country like China, where it's not an open question. You know, the public sector is. very much in command. Here, there's more of a terrain of a battle that has to be worked out. I think part of it is that I think partially because of the Cold War hangover, we're used to

thinking of things in terms of either the market is in charge or the government is in charge. There's public and there's private. But what's interesting about this present moment, let's say the mosque relationship to the U.S. government, is that there's a big intervening space, which is the financial markets that fund Musk's enterprises, and then also the big enterprises that are going to become also the end customers for things like SpaceX and XAI. So often people have the, let's say, kind of snap judgment, which is like if we don't like Musk, why don't we just nationalize Musk

or why don't we just cut the contracts, as Ben is saying? Then it's not only the question of what services he providing, It's the question is like, what ripple effects does that have throughout the larger economy? If it becomes clear that a government can just snap their fingers and kill, you know, a half trillion dollar company, then doesn't that lead to economic panic and basically like overnight collapse of confidence? And then more or less the end of American capitalism overnight. Like you can't actually target, assassinate specific CEOs and just take their wealth without, you know, really. cracking out the foundations of this whole kind of trust-based, very, very rickety structure that we call the American political economy. So I think that is the other thing that we're very insistent on in the

book, too. It's not just states and biosis who's in charge, but underneath that is the great supporting infrastructure of like the financial community, the global investor class, everyone's pensions funds, the sovereign wealth funds, the oil funds. Without any of that, none of this happens. So it sounds like you're describing Musk as making himself too big to fail in a way. The government becomes dependent on him. The government can't cut him out without roiling the financial markets. His companies are so big that everybody has invested in him. I mean, I saw some, I don't remember the statistic exactly, but that like when SpaceX goes public,

just everyone's retirement accounts will suddenly become part of SpaceX because the size of it in the S&P 500 will be so huge. that anyone who's in index funds, as I and so many other people are for our retirements, will suddenly be investors in him. And so it's true. Like, that does seem like almost the opposite of libertarianism, because libertarianism is, or at least in spirit, this sort of separateness, this everyone is an atomic actor who is sort of disconnected from everybody else, whereas in fact, you're talking about a system of extreme dependence,

where we're all dependent on him and he's enmeshed so deeply in the system. He is government and he is capitalism simultaneously in a way. Yeah, I think the SpaceX IPO is one that's a really important point to make. Adam and I just want to emphasize it for everyone. So as you mentioned, SpaceX is going public next month, and they have essentially persuaded the folks who run the NASDAQ 100 index fund to rewrite the rules of that index funds such that SpaceX can be included in the index. S&P 500 is considering a similar rule change.

And this would mean that all of those people around the world that track those very popular indices through their 401Ks, through their pension funds, automatically will have to buy large trenches of SpaceX stock. And this will drive up the valuation of the company. It will give Musk a lot more money. to play with, particularly to finance his AI ambitions. But importantly, it won't give those shareholders very much control over the direction of the company, the kind of classic idea of shareholder democracy or shareholder accountability that really reaches its apotheosis in the kind of mid-century

Fordist era, the notion that if you have a publicly traded company, there are certain checks and balances, not unlike parliamentary democracy, where the power of the CEO is somewhat diluted through the oversight of shareholders. But if you look at the so-called class structure of the shares that are being issued for SpaceX, like Google and Facebook, which did this in their IPOs, but in this case, in even more extreme form, voting power would. be concentrated with Musk. He will have the so-called supervoting shares, more than 80% of them. And the only way that he can be removed as CEO or as chairman of the board is through a majority vote of the shares that he, in fact, controls. So it's an extraordinary development because

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So put on bonobos, feel good, and get on with your day. Right now, head to bonobos.com slash factually and use code factually for 25% off your order. Once again, that's b-on-o-b-os.com. slash factually for 25% off and make sure you use my promo code factually so they know I sent you. You know, I never thought of the ownership structure of capitalism of, of, you know, IPOs and public ownership of companies. As being a form of democracy, I could really imagine it being sold that way in the middle of the last century, you know, like, oh, our democratic system extends to capitalism itself.

And in fact, as the owner of GM, you know, You, you know, as one of the many owners, you have a vote and what the company does, right? Like, that's the sort of newsreel version of it. And that's how it should be, right? If you own a couple shares, you own some of the company. Theoretically, you should have a share, you should have some influence over what it does. But this is the equivalent of like, oh, well, we have democratic control of the government. But what if the president had, you know, a hundred million votes all to himself that could vote,

however he wanted, right? This is basically what we're talking about, but on a capitalist level, which does sort of remind me of, I don't know, China or something like that. It's like not democracy as I understand it. It's also worth pointing out that it isn't just like a caricature fully to say that, you know, there was some form of shareholder democracy. In fact, it's a pretty common position in progressive circles to talk about working class shareholder democracy because most of the people who are holding shares in those companies are actually not individual retail investors, but they're big institutional investors. So it is those big index funds, Fidelity, Stade Street, BlackRock. And then it is big pension funds. So the California CalPERS and the California

public employees retirement fund is one of the major ones. And it actually was quite common in the last decade for people who are in trade unions or people who have ethical commitments to pressure the institutional investors that are holding their pension funds to make the companies do more ethically responsible things, right? Right. If I can break in during the writer's strike, we actually went and lobbied CalPERS to, you know, reevaluate its investments in the, in the companies in, you know, Disney and et cetera, because not just were they behaving unethically,

we were making the argument, hey, this is actually bad for their business, what they're trying to do. Sure. And so, like, that sort of advocacy is a real thing. Yeah, so that model of, like, quote-unquote, ethical capitalism, you know, I think probably as people on the left, we can have our quibbles with how far that could actually get you.

But actually, you know, the fact that public employees' pensions are a lot of the engines of the financial markets gives you, theoretically some kind of leverage, unless you figure out the hack of the kind that Silicon Valley now has, which is to shield themselves from accountability by creating the super voting shares. And another twist is to start relocating the place where your corporation is domiciled and registered from Delaware to Texas because a friend of ours who teaches corporate law said that she's had to basically rewrite her course because of Elon Musk. Because what has happened now with companies moving their headquarters to Texas, it means they

make themselves immune to many kinds of shareholder actions. And shareholder even attempts to sue the company are blocked or not allowed under Texas corporate courts, the same way they were under Delaware corporate courts. So there's a whole series of ways that he's trying to kind of insulate himself from any kind of recourse accountability from below. Yeah, you're reminding me of, you know, my grandfather used to purchase stocks individually as a retail investor. To the extent that when he died, it was like annoying to my mom to like figure out where the fuck his stocks were purchased. But he also, he had a lot of stock in AT&T. And I remember him like railing about like AT&T is doing this and I disagree.

And, you know, like he was like going to shareholder meetings and things and participating in this. And that is so far away from is any SpaceX investor going to be like, I can't believe what Elon is doing. You know what? I'm going to, I'm going to like use my voting shares. Like we're in a completely different universe now. Well, let's talk about Doge a little bit more. How do you view his actions in Doge in the context of him trying to sort of create this state symbiosis? Is he trying to destroy a bunch of the existing states?

so he can absorb even more of it into his persona? Or what was the purpose of that? Well, what's striking about the Doge episode is that it doesn't really work out that well for him. I mean, I think there was a lot of reporting on Doge at the time, a lot of very good reporting that we drew on in the book. And commentators, observers were trying to figure out, well, why would he do this? Why would he take on this additional labor and risk of actually entering into the government? I mean, historically, capitalists don't do things like that. They have representatives who are perfectly capable of getting their policy preferences implemented without them. I mean, it's not

traditionally seen as a particularly good use of your time to actually, you know, descend into the halls of power and get your own hands dirty. So what was he up to? And I think we can say definitively, particularly with the benefit of hindsight, that it hurt him in some quite direct ways. I mean, that he took a reputational hit, particularly among his core Tesla customers, you know, eco-conscious liberals were traditionally the major purchasers of Tesla. I think the Doge initiative really soured his reputation with them, as it did with European consumers, where he takes a hit in the European market shortly afterwards. So if you think about the kind of state symbiotic dynamic that we've been trying to describe in this book, Doge represents a

an interesting departure from that, where he's stepping over the bounds of symbiosis and approaching something that in ecology, we would think of as closer to parasitism. You know, in a symbiosis, you have two organisms that are existing in some kind of interaction of mutual benefit. But when one organism tries to take over, you actually enter into a different kind of ecological dynamic, one of parasitism. And, you know, it's a quite long and strange detour, but the way that we account for this is through trying to understand Musk's cyborg view of the world, is increasing investment in the notion that humanity is merging with technology to create a vast cybernetic superorganism. And that by entering into the state,

he can reprogram it, essentially, to align more closely with his preferred political outcomes. Yeah, so it seems like, you know, on its face, if you actually say, what was Doge, it was an attempt to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, obviously it's an abject failure, but if you say, you know, was it an attempt to, you know, dispose of what he saw as useless, wasteful parts of the government, and then integrate those parts that he thought were useful and necessary, and then make them, you know, legible to each other through the plugging in of, you know, database tools, logistics tools, many of those from Palantir, so that you can track down and remove those human bugs from the system that he imagines, you know, illegal immigrants

especially, to be, then it was kind of a success, right? So, you know, if you see it from the fiscal point of view, failure. But if you see it from the kind of cyborg conservative point of view, which is the way we see it, then it's like maybe sort of moving towards the place we are at now where the U.S. government more than ever is totally reliant on a few big tech firms to conduct its basic everyday business, let alone the business of war. you know, bringing up his, the, the Doge adventure and the effect that it had on Tesla brings me to like sort of a fundamental question I have about him because, you know, he's so powerful that it's easy to cast even his worst decisions as being somehow crafty

or part of a master plan. Whereas I do look at some of them and go like, he's just dumb about a lot of stuff, right? I mean, just to take the example of the cyber truck, which I don't know the details of this story, sure looks like he just, that was just like his idea for a cool car. And he was just wrong, right? And they just lost a bunch of money on it. Everybody hates it. The product is bad.

And that's their first new big product as a company in like the last decade. And so like this is like, you know, if Tesla was just like Apple and it was just run by even a Tim Cook's size executive, right? you'd just be like, oh, this guy's driving the company into the ground with this nonsense, right? Especially if he went off and had some adventure like this, like Doge and took his eye off the ball in the way that Elon did. But Elon has become so powerful that like, I don't know, we start to justify it in this way that like, oh, it's got to be part of some master plan or something. And I don't know, maybe that's a fair frame of analysis. It's like, how do you think about that kind of thing? When someone becomes so huge, it becomes easy to, like, sort of mythologize them when, like, on some level, he is just a fucking guy who's, like, good at maybe one or two things, such as amassing power for himself.

Maybe he's not a generational thinker, you know? Yeah, I mean, I think that our approach in the book was really not to kind of sanewash him or, like, backfill at all and say, like, he had a big plan all the way from. his childhood in South Africa. It's more than anything, I think, to say that he is a good capitalist. I mean, the proof is in the pudding there. So how has he surfed the waves of, you know, the emergence of new sites of consumer demand, new markets, new needs from the state side of things at different moments. Like, how has he managed to tap into moments of, like, interest in green investment or industrial policy, whether that's in China, EU, or the United States. When has he sniffed out new needs in the defense sector as we were talking about with SpaceX? And then now is how has he been

able to knit them all together with the SpaceX model, which already includes, don't forget, Starlink satellites, SpaceX rockets, XAI, the AI company, and X.com, the social media platform. in a way that he talks about is a kind of vertically integrated potential global communications monopoly. And I think that a lot of the problem that we skeptics of Musk and critics of Musk expect that on the left half

is we don't think like investors, let's put it simply that way, which is to say we see outrageous claims he makes and then we gesture at those and say, well, that looks like nonsense or that looks like a lie, or that looks like a deranged, you know. product of his of his drug use and we don't look at things the way that like the institutional

investors at the norwegian oil fund do which is just like i don't care about the sunglasses i don't care about the chainsaw what is he actually delivered in market terms and even if it is and it always is 5% of what he's promised that 5% has turned some of the biggest returns in like recent financial history right like if you actually just put your money on Elon is the sort of the way that they describe it is you don't lose. So there is something to be understood there, which is not open to the normal kind of analysis of like what we would bring to interpersonal relationships. Like, I have a friend who is constantly saying he's going to like, you know, walk 10 blocks on his hands and then he can't. So I think he's maybe a liar.

Investors don't care, right? It's like if he walked five feet, it'd be like, well, that's more than most people, like, let's put our money on him next time. So that incremental success that he's had with some things that are really true. I mean, Tesla was the model Y was the top selling car in the world for a few years. He has brought down the cost of putting mass at orbit by 90%. He's created a whole sector for low Earth orbit

internet satellites that didn't exist before. These are all things that he can point to legitimately. And an investor, even with their kind of most skeptical glasses on, I could be like, okay, well, that's better than the guy down. It's better than Zuckerberg, just setting money on

fire for like a 3D universe where nobody has legs, right? I mean, that's like when you start going down the list of like tech geniuses, you hit a pretty, you hit bottom pretty fast, right? So like his ability to blend the world of hardware and software, even though again, like wildly disproportionate with his actual achievements is nevertheless, like when we say he had to persuade the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 to change their rules, they were falling over themselves to change their rules, right? All of these public pension funds are lining up to get in on SpaceX stock. It's not like they need to be like cajoled into it. For the standard financial mind, there's, there is no better bet than Musk. And that actually ends up being the riddle, I think, that kept on

coming back for myself and Ben. It's just like, how does this make sense? How does someone who, by all traditional measures seems to act ever more erratic and ever less chain to reality, nevertheless continue to be serially rewarded by the financial system that we live inside of. So that it's explainable, I think. I think we do our level best to explain it. But it certainly doesn't help to explain it by starting with an idea of libertarianism. I mean, you gesture to this a minute ago where the libertarian idea of like, we're all sovereign individuals and if we want to make choices as we want to and like take our assets with us, then we should be able to.

Who doesn't help you understand Musk at all? Musk is thinking at the level of systems and the kind of projects that people are betting on when they bet on Musk are ones that would imply that you can sort of conscript the energy of like a whole society, in fact, a whole planet to be able to achieve them. So that just changes the way we should think about their politics. And one of our big points in the book is like the politics that these guys operating with is not just stuff they like pick up in their spare time. It's like downstream from the kind of ways that they're trying to make money. So if they're trying to make money in a way that requires every nation in the world to give them airspace so they can do lower their orbit satellite, then that's where you should try to understand their philosophy backwards from.

Not how much Ayn Rand did they read, right? not actually how much Robert Highland did they read. Those things are ornamental and can be interesting at the margins, but it really is about like how do they make their money? So do you feel Musk like when he talks about, you know, his really high flying, oh, humanity must be an interplanetary species like that kind of almost a cliche he's repeated that one so much. Is that really, is that also downstream of the desire to make money in your view?

Yeah, I mean, I think you have to read that kind of stuff operationally. You know, you have to think about what work does that type of language do? And one function it serves and has long served is internal to his companies. I mean, it's a way to motivate his employees. It's a way to motivate them to work very hard, very long hours. It's a way to foster their loyalty to the firm and to himself personally. But, you know, the primary audience for that type of rhetoric is external. when you have someone who is as rich as Musk, you have to ask the question, well, what are they good at?

You know, what is specific about this person that has enabled them to achieve this level of wealth? And it doesn't have to be in a hagiographic way. It doesn't have to be, you know, praising them for their unique genius, but just kind of practically speaking. And one of the things that surfaced as we researched this book is that from the beginning, from the 1990, where Musk gets his start as a dot-com entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, Musk is very good at securing investor confidence. He's very good at persuading people to put money into him and to his companies. And the way he does so is precisely with the kind of language that you're referring to, Adam.

We talk about this as financial fabulous. There's been quite a lot written about Musk as a reader of science fiction, is a fan of Asimov and Heinlein and others, but we actually frame Musk as a kind of science fiction narrator himself, someone who's deploying fantastical stories about the future, that nonetheless have a kernel of plausibility such that an investor looking at it says, well, maybe I'll give you the money so that you can help build that future. And as Quinn said before, you know,

if you put a bet on Musk, 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago, you would have made a very good return on your money. So, you know, when the kind of sober-minded investor class reads the prospectus for the SpaceX IPO, which is full of very fantastical stuff, you know, building a base on the moon, building a colony on Mars, extending the light cone of consciousness throughout the universe. I mean, this stuff reads actually like Asimah. I think our instinct, you know, people who are perhaps not sitting at the levers of control of global capitalism, our impulse might be to roll our eyes and say, this is ridiculous.

This guy's a clown. But this is, in fact, quite functional for him. It's something that has served him very well. And he can point to a reasonable track record of not fulfilling every promise necessarily, but doing very well by his investors. So, but if he's if he's making these promises, like the light, you know, the light cone of consciousness throughout, like that's not a, that's not a financial promise at all. Right.

And then he's, you know, I think about the, the keynote or demo he did like maybe a year and a half ago with the walking robots that were actually, you know, controlled by people in another building. and, you know, the cyber cab that he thinks we're all going to buy and then rent out to, like, drive people around the rest of the time, which I don't think is something that people are actually going to do. I don't think people are really going to buy like a $200,000 car and then let it let people, you know, get, do ride hailing in the back and like have sex and smoke cigarettes in my BMW.

I don't, I don't really think that that's plausible, right? But it's sort of this grand narrative of the future. but then he uses that narrative to get a bunch of cash, and then he does, in fact, get a return. Is there any pattern that you see in how he actually gets the return? Like, what does he actually deliver if so much of what he promises is clearly false or clearly fake? I mean, there's a couple of things that we talk about in the book, sort of phrases we use to help understand that.

One is electric autonomy. So if you look at in the 2008 moment when Obama comes into office, he came in, as we know, as the anti-war candidate against Hillary Clinton. And one of the arguments that he was making, which was quite interesting and almost completely forgotten, I would say, is that we would increase American national security, reduce foreign entanglements by reducing dependency on follow. fuels by rapidly electrifying the auto sector, doing a big push into renewables, and thus you would be able to secure electric autonomy, energy independence, but something gained

specifically through electrification and renewables. And that's where Musk gets his first big, you know, life-saving loan from the Department of Energy, nearly $500 million in 2009 as part of that push. Yeah. Because he was seen as like a poster child for someone who could sell like a consumer a desirable object that could help that transition. China, around the same time, you know, embarks on a similar mission. And if only a few years later, Musk is over there building a gigafactory in China to help them on their path to electric autonomy. Meanwhile, America has left the path because of the Shale revolution and fracking, meaning that America now has more oil than I can actually use and it becomes a net exporter. But there's something that,

that Musk has actually helped create as a market. The consumer EV basically didn't exist as a global market until Tesla came along. And it actually does allow for some degree of being unplugged from the ups and downs of the chaotic oil price cycle. Right. I mean, right now, those countries that stayed the path of electric autonomy are doing a lot better in the wake of the disruptions of the Strait of Hormuz than those who stayed booked onto fossil fuel. There's another idea that we propose in the book called Sovereignty as a Service, meaning that with things like rocketry and satellite connectivity, he's able to actually expand the ability of not just states to conduct,

especially battlefield connections, but also individuals. So the vision that I think has been most compelling that he's sold is this idea of being able to create a kind of Tesla dome of Musk products in which you have Starlink receiver on the roof of your house, solar panels on the roof, connected to a Tesla power wall in the garage, cyber truck in the front driveway, meaning that as whatever happens climate-wise, social unrest-wise, like you're kind of safe. You're autonomous. You have built out kind of a dome of individual sovereignty.

And that is a kind of a guiding light or a kind of north star for what actually Musk is selling. I think you could do worse than that. And there's certain ways that, like, the Mars colony is a perfect sort of emblem or totem of that. He's kind of bringing the Mars colony domed, like, back here to Earth and saying, like, you know, guard yourself, fortify yourself, and you can do so by staying in the Tesla ecosystem. And we haven't talked about it, but in the book, we make much of the experience of late apartheid South Africa and what we call the fortress futurism of that period in kind of giving him a prototype of that. You know, you fortify yourself, use high-tech, be on guard against enemies, both inside and without. And that's a way to be very modern. Being modern doesn't have to be, you know, globalization and frictionless trade and everyone can be part of it.

It can also be, you know, harden your borders and save yourself by buying the right products. Well, what confuses me so much about him is the first piece, the electric autonomy for states as being, you know, in the national interest, he was so aligned with the U.S. government during the sort of Obama years, right, on doing that. Like, he's, you know, part of the capitalist slash governmental green revolution. He's selling, you know, electric cars. He's popularizing electric cars. He's making electric cars cool. And then in the last election, he supports Donald Trump. And we can get to the reasons why, but he supports Donald Trump who, uh, destroy, so much of the effort of the government to electrify the country via the, you know, destroying

the Inflation Reduction Act. And then also turns the entire like part of the market that was interested in electrification against him personally. And I've heard commentators, you know, I was listening to an Ezra Klein episode a little while ago that was in the wake of the election. And he was like, one of the sad things about this is that like literally, you know, Musk has, by doing all of this, slowed the rate at which America is electrifying. Like, you know, we are, we're going to buy massively less electric cars now than we would have had, you know, Kamala Harris been elected. And, you know, Musk was obviously on the other side.

And so the effects on climate change are huge. And that was the thing that he was put, like, that was literally where he was like, I'm going to make my money doing this, right? So, I mean, what do you credit that to? Is it like, is that because of he has some other way to get money out of making that shift? Or was it just like he's so racist he wants Trump to win and he doesn't give a fuck? I think there's a few different ways to read. I mean, on the one hand, it's just a tactical decision, right?

I mean, if you think that the dangers of the continuation of Biden's policies are existentially risky for you. and your sector, which he did, and many of the people around him did, he's keenly aware that all of his profit-making structures require a friendly regulatory climate. And if you have an antitrust commissioner, and if you have angry socialists in charge who want to tax you, regulate, you, constrain development in your field, then, yeah, it's actually worth abandoning the electric sector of your empire to make common cause of the person who's going to give you full license to do. He gives up one big sector, but like the rest of the empire does better, so it's a net win for you. You're already bored of cars. You've been talking about Tesla

as an AI and robotics company already for a couple of years by the time of the election. You know that BYD is on a pace to outsell you globally. In fact, they already have. You know that CATL, the lithium ion battery company from China that basically got its start plugging into Tesla bodies has now outpaced you globally. So Tesla's never going to catch them. Where do you still have the chance of winning the race for the future defining technology? You think it's an LLM's AI. So you lock arms to the person who's going to basically give you a cart launch to do whatever kind of a rollout you want there. And also in the back of your head, you know that things are cyclical. I mean, look at his messaging these days. He's talking a lot more about soul.

He's talking a lot more about renewables. He's looking forward now to the time after Trump when he can maybe recuperate his reputation and become Mr. Electric Autonomy. Again, he's just sold the right to do megapack microgrids in the UK just in the last few weeks. So those things, you know, they get moved around in the burners. They get pushed into the back

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And in fact, you know, by the early 2020s, he's on Twitter posting so-called white genocide theories, the idea that Black-led South African government is pursuing policies. ethnic cleansing against white residents. So in a way, it does come full circle, but our emphasis is a bit different. We really look at the political economy of apartheid South Africa and observe that at a time when the world was bifurcated into an American-led block that was defined by capitalist globalization and a Soviet-led block, remember this is 1980s, a Soviet-led block that was defined by kind of command economies, South Africa offered a third way of sorts, where it was attempting to, you know, it was certainly a very capitalist. It was it was stridently anti-communist as a regime. It was sourcing things from global markets, but it was also attempting to achieve

a degree of technological and economic self-sufficiency. So they were obtaining licenses from Ford to build cars within the borders of the country for sale domestically. They were bringing in IBM mainframes from the United States to help implement the apartheid regime because it was in fact a kind of high-tech regime, a reactionary technocracy, if you like. And when you look at these efforts to essentially insulate themselves from the threat of economic and technological disruption by building up their own. capacities and, you know, removing their reliance on world markets, you can find quite a bit of resonance between that and Musk as an industrialist. If you know anything about Musk as an industrialist,

it's that he has a very strong preference for vertical integration. So both at SpaceX and Tesla in the 2000s, when the rest of the world is distributing production globally along supply chains, moving to countries with the lowest labor cost. If you think about something like the iPhone and how it's built really all over the world, Musk does the total opposite. He says, how do we build as much of these cars and rockets in-house as possible? And that puts him in a really unique position because once you get to the trade war between the U.S. and China and of the mid-2010s, the supply chain shocks of the pandemic, the Russian, invasion of Ukraine and now the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, it actually puts Musk in a good position

because he's attuned to the politics of the de-globalizing world years before the world actually begins to de-globalize. But I think that the other thing we really want to emphasize, and maybe it's the biggest contribution of the book, I would say, is that you kind of need to enter this cyborg-sybrenetic mindset that Musk adopts to understand anything of how he actually makes his money or conducts himself. So the political economy has been, describes it in South Africa as it is essential for understanding his production model later. But what else happens if he's in South Africa? I mean, he acquires his first programmable personal computer, the Commodore, and gets obsessed

with it locked in. This idea that you can control this to find space with a set of orders commands and things will happen the way you program them is then, of course, linked out when he gets a modem and connects to university computers in Oxford. When he goes to Silicon Valley in the late 90s, he starts talking about the internet as the superset of all media. He said everything is going to get folded in here, radio, TV, banking, business, government, everything's going to happen through the internet. And at the time, people are like, okay, buddy, like maybe, but maybe not. And of course, he ends up basically being right. And the fact that he was proven right has given him this, this sometimes kind of twisted way of seeing all politics in human life through the lens

of the computer out. So he doesn't think of politics as things people like come to in their everyday life or like in their family or the workplace. It's like, what memes did you get exposed to? Right. And he doesn't think about the government as being something that, you know, comes together through, like, the collective, through active self-determination, like ratified through regular elections, he thinks that the government, as he called to Ted Cruz, is a bunch of dumb computers. So everything is computer. Politics is computer. Society is computer. So how do you run the world? Well, you run the computers. And he, you know, whether with some delay or not, has come to see, you know, something like x.com is very essential for that function.

If you read the SpaceX IPO filing, it's really interesting because he says, what's my advantage? Why am I going to get ahead of chat GPT and Cod, even though I'm way behind them, tied to Gemini for fourth place, third place? I have X.com. And that's where the memes circulate. And that's where truth is created. Grock can aggregate those posts and turn them into the new objectivity.

and then I can then train my LLM on that new objectivity and then blasted around the world through uplinks and downlinks and satellites. And if you can tell that kind of a story with any kind of plausibility, then an investor is going to look at that and be like, well, damn. You just explain to me how you can do like a planetary echo chamber that is hermetically sealed in which your own ability to have the oversight is absolute. like you've turned the COVID R-64 into the whole planet. And that, if given support by the financial press and the financial class, which it has been,

just does a number on your brain, right? Like, it would have to because you're being told like that specific, even adolescent arrangement that you've cultivated since your time in the Pretoria suburbs is actually the future of humanity. But on some level, that's just not true, right? Like the world is not actually computer. Right. People are.

Absolutely not. Yeah, no, absolutely not. Yeah. So how does that worldview, you know, people, the world is made of people, people get their political opinions, you know, moving throughout the world. People have to piss and shit. Like, you know, computers are involved in the way the world works. But, you know, we're not actually in some gigantic cybernetic system whose behaviors are predictable.

You know, Harry Seldon from the foundation novels is not real. like there is a lot of untruth to this. And so how does one then, you know, amass so much power when one has a worldview that is on some level divorced from reality? That to me is part of the paradox here. So, I mean, one of the lesser known things that Milton Friedman is famous foreign economics is that, you know, the basis of the inputs for a model actually don't matter. What matters is the predictive capacity of the model. So the truth of something is produced by its predictive ability. Given that, you have to accept that, you know, the way that the political economy of the United States has worked for the last 25 years is by taking as truth what I just said.

If you take as truth what I just said, that the world is a computer, it's becoming ever more and more computer. and the way that you can make money in the future is by putting all your money on this one-way bat, but the world is becoming more of a computer, then you, again, predictively speaking, would have become fabulously wealthy, right? Like, if you started investing with that strategy 25 years ago and just stuck with that. So that's the disconnect. Like, I think we've, you know, circa 2008, I recently rewatch, I recently watched the big short. and that we were used to thinking about that with finance, right?

Like, finance is not real. Finance is something that produces value out of nothing, and it's propelled forward by its momentum, and all that needs to happen is, like, you know, people to stop believing, and the bottom will follow, which indeed is true. But we're in that relationship to digital capitalism now, right? And it has more of a substance to it, arguably,

in some ways than financial capitalism did, in that new markets are being created that aren't just derivative markets. They don't have creative accounting techniques. Like they are, you know, whether it's ride healing or Waymos or whatever it is. Like new things actually come into the world. They are not the sum total of human existence, as you say. And part of the reason that the way that we read Doge is like evidence that the world is not computer. Right.

Right. He could not actually like completely research. shape the federal government just by twiddling around in databases as he thought. The government is not actually a big database that you can rewrite with AI. Yeah, and more broadly, I mean, a lot of his political efforts have not really paid dividends. I mean, if you look at his relationship with the European far right, these were relationships he really cultivated on X with the AFD in Germany with Nigel Farage in the UK with a number of other groups. And they haven't gone. particularly well. I mean, he's now in a place where figures like Fraj are trying to distance

themselves from Musk. And one of the reasons I think is exactly what you're saying, Adam, which is this idea of meme politics, the notion that you can reprogram people by uploading different memes into their brains is actually not how it's not true. That's not true, right? I mean, it's actually not how people acquire their politics and their ideological frames. And, you know, what's interesting about the approaching midterm election is the extent to which it's perhaps the first major referendum on this project of making the world into a computer. I mean, what could be a better apotheosis of that project than the AI boom and the effort to build a data center in everyone's backyard, which is provoking this massive wave of resistance, particularly in rural

counties, places that voted very heavily for Trump where people are packing town halls talking about how they don't want these data centers built because they're an eyesore, they bring environmental issues, they drive up their electricity bills. And the promise here, what is actually being heralded is that them and their kids and their grandkids will be put out of work forever. And that's a very difficult thing to sell, right? I mean, if you can't upload new memes to these people's brains and make them love AI despite the fact that it threatens to destroy their communities and the social fabric, then how do you manage the problem of popular discontent? Yeah, I mean, it's like a forgetting that, you know, as much time as even the biggest X user spends on X, right, there comes a moment where they put the phone down and they go for a walk, you know, like they do in fact live in physical.

reality and their decision making might be affected by what happens in their physical reality to some degree. And it seems like a large amount of society has forgotten this. I also just want to return to, you know, a piece of an earlier question that I didn't quite hear an answer to yet, which is about the racism. I mean, you guys say, again, so much of this, you should analyze his behavior as downstream of the desire to make money. But, you know, and I often think, what drives people other than, you know, the desire for wealth and prosperity? A lot of the time, it is prejudice and racism, which is a, you know, to some degree lives within the human heart, right, and is an urge that is separate from all others.

And he seems to have that urge very strongly based on just read his ex postings. He's just posting just racism. He's just posting racism. He's just like, oh, look at people of color commit murders. Just shit like that, right? Where does that come from and does that have any explanatory power for any of his behavior? Or how do you analyze it? I mean, I think there's two ways of looking at it.

One is as an expression of what he definitely has, which is like a very hierarchical understanding of human beings, right? So it's not just even that there are superior humans and lesser humans. But as we describe in the book, a disturbingly common motif for him is that there are humans and then there are non-humans, right? There are people he variously describes as bots, NPCs, vampires that are not even worthy of the category of human. And the project of government, if you're not able to change things by uploading new memes, is often by locating those human bugs in the system and removing them from society. So hence his fixation on the idea of deportation or more recently he's adopted the term of remigration, which is very inflammatory. term, obviously. A total question mark

about what that actually means in practice, but it does sound like some version of ethnic cleansing given his... Yeah. I mean, it is ethnic cleansing, especially dependent, given his willingness to use these kind of blanket racial categories to

organize the world. So that's part of it for sure. But the second part that I would emphasize is goes back to something Ben said a minute ago about like looking at things operationally. So what does fabulous do for him? We talked about that

vis-a-a-eat the investment community. What does racism do for him politically? It actually does quite a bit. One thing it does is it produces a kind of lingua franca with these political partners abroad who he thinks are going to be the future leaders of their countries. I think we can

safely say that. He assumes that European legacy parties are toast. They're doomed for the dust bit of history. So he's placing a bet on the next wave of far-right parties for being the next regime. So there, if they talk about remigration, if they post memes about Pakistani rape gangs in the north of England, who have you, just whatever slop comes through like the gutter racist, filter that day. Then he's like, oh, that's the way we talk.

He's my people. So repose, repose, repost, repose, ask questions about say interesting, say concerning. And at some point, the question is like, how much, you? mental bandwidth is he even giving any of this stuff, right? It seems to be that he's just using it memetically as a way to kind of create a community of semiotic kind of repetition. And furthermore, in the United States itself, one of our arguments is that he substitutes for the lack of a real good social contract, for the lack of something like Ford offered, you know, like a living wage, collective bargaining agreements, something like the wealth.

welfare stay, he substitutes for that negatively by saying, like, well, here's something you can all collectively hate with me. And we all hate immigrants. We all hate non-white people. He produces racism as like a form of social cohesion, I think in his brain, as a kind of Erzatz form of other forms of, you know, positive ways of creating communities. So I think that's how it works for him. I think the question of like what's in his heart, we can speculate, but I think more important in a way is like, how does this fit into his way of managing the inevitable social unrest that comes about for disruptive technologies, through galloping inequality, through, you know, the reactionary politics of the people he promotes? And there, racism becomes kind of like part of the glue,

for sure. Yeah, I think it's also just worth pointing out that historically capitalists have deployed racism as a way to devalue the labor and lives of particular groups of people so that they can be more easily exploited and dominated. Ruth Wilson Gilmore has a famous quote along these lines where she says that capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it. And in fact, when you look at Musk's own business empire, it's worth pointing out that the factory in Fremont, California, in the East Bay is a place that has seen working conditions that have been very, very challenging for workers, but have also featured a climate of racist abuse. This has actually been documented by federal authorities.

So this is another resonance with apartheid South Africa, because one of the reasons that the apartheid regime deployed racism and formalized it into the system of apartheid was precisely to exploit the black working class of the country. The scholar Stephen Gelb talks about this as racial boredism, where you have the techniques and technologies of mass production paired with a white supremacist regime such that you can exploit labor more cheaply than you could otherwise. So I think it's important to emphasize that there's also a materialist or economicistic dimension to racism here operating as well.

Yeah. So there is a way in which it comes back to money at the end of the day. And I don't know. Maybe I've always thought of racism as, again, being almost like a disability or a way of seeing the world falsely because, you know, people are not actually in a hierarchy. It is in fact untrue. And by believing in it, you know, I think racists often make the incorrect assumption that everyone else is as racist as they are. It's something that we see the right politically, apart from Musk, I think making that mistake currently. If you look at a lot of the Trump administration's actions, they're maybe not realizing how much

they're alienating people. But maybe that's my Pollyanna-ish worldview. And I'm wrong about that. And there's an efficacy that these sort of beliefs have that I'm not. aware of. That's interesting and a little disheartening to consider. I mean, it's another one of the places where, you know, like spending excessive amounts of time in like the Muskverse can have some kind of moments of insight or enlightenment. I think that me and Ben feel like we had those in the course of things. And one of those is sort of

answers to what you're pointing out, which is like, say, his immersion in social media, right? Which if you read the mainstream reportage was like, Musk is losing it, it's posting way too much. Like, how can he see to any of his companies? Like, he's obviously just gotten addicted to Twitter. And that can be true, but also that he was using the attention economy of social media as a space of kind of trial and error for new forms of messaging and, you know, packaging of himself as like a player and an actor. So he was, yes, wasting time, but he was also figuring out how to become like a human meme stock that did make him the richest person in the world across 2020, figured out how to make Tesla a meme stock that became, made it the most valuable auto company

in the world in the course of 2020. And he figured out ways to assemble like coalitions that somehow worked for him that looked a lot different than the coalitions he had assembled in the Obama era, partially because he had this totally immediate relationship to people in which he could see, well, oh, what's landing? Like, what's getting residents? What's getting retweets? What's getting likes, what's earning me more followers. And through that form of trial and error, he definitely just figured out what many people who are, you know, unscrupulous and striving, figured out an X, which is like posting inflammatory racism is a way to get a lot of attention on that platform. And it was a way to get negative attention in the more woke era. And it's a way to get positive

attention in the anti-woke musk era and that itself is a kind of revenue strategy as well i mean it's literally a revenue strategy for people who now have you know the paid blue check verification because if they post especially chunky piece of racism and it gets tons of retweets they literally get a check at the end of the months i think that musk has figured out a version of that too that this kind of politics is like in its repellence to us and many of us is nonetheless something which curiously has no effect on his bottom line and in some ways seems to even boost his bottom line. And that coexistence is again one of those things. You're just like, how does this work? Like how can someone do extreme right-wing memes? And then the people who manage like the California

public employees pension funds still wake up and look at it and say like, okay, putting everyone's money on this guy. Right? Like, how? How does that work? Like, there must be some material explanation there beyond the fact that, like, the institutional asset manager are, like, secretly racist and agree with him or something, right? Like, there's something that the structural defendants we talked about at the top, becoming too vague to fail, has now allowed him the kind of liberty to play at the edges with new forms of creating these symbolic coalitions.

Yeah, I guess I'm grappling, listening to your analysis, which is really useful. and, you know, sparking a lot of new thoughts for me. But what I'm grappling with is, you know, his flaws are so on the surface, right? Like, he is addicted to Twitter, right? Or you can, you know, he'll do the thing where, oh, he rewrites Grock because not enough people were seeing his posts or whatever. And he's got a fragile ego, right? Like, like, you see these character flaws in him that are so obvious that in other people,

like, these are character flaws I see in people in my life. And it gets in their way, right? and yet with him, we look at those character flaws and we go, oh, well, this is actually helping him in some way, which seems like, oh, are we rewriting history around the great man in order to say, oh, well, all that stuff redounds to his benefit? But also, I mean, he is the richest man on earth, right? So is that true in some way? But then I go, well, why aren't all of my flaws redounding to my benefit? You know, like, I have plenty of, he's just a fucking man at the end of the day, right? with as many things fucked up about him as anybody else.

So what about him creates this charmed situation where everything that sucks about him actually turns out to make him even wealthier? Well, I think a lot of things don't work. And we haven't dwelt on many of his failures or limitations thus far in this conversation, but the boring company comes to mind. That's something we spend a lot of time on in the book.

But, you know, there are major misfires. And I think, you know, it's tricky writing about Musk in such a way because you don't want to write in a hagiographic mode. You don't want to make it appear as if he has a master plan and has figured everything out and things that look like failures are in fact successes. But as you pointed out, he does continue to get richer and more powerful and more systemically important to the global economy. one way, perhaps, of attempting to square that circle is by thinking about Musk primarily as an

improviser, as someone who moves by intuition and feel, not unlike Trump, actually, right? I think at this point, we have to admit that Trump is a political genius of a sort, that he's innovated a new kind of political style that has completely taken over the Republican Party and will outlive him long after he departs the scene. It's not to say that he is a premeditated figure, a systematic thinker, someone who can even hold a coherent thought in his head, but he's clearly tapped into something, just kind of in his finger feel, that no one else was able to do. And I think Musk, you can actually understand him in an analogous way. It doesn't require us to attribute some enormous intellectual value to him to identify him as someone who, you know,

even at a subconscious level, has managed to maneuver himself to take advantage of these successive waves of political economic opportunity to maximum advantage. That would be a great place to end because I think that's a really like thorough analysis, but there's just one more weird thing about him that I have to ask you about now that we've done all the other ones, which is his love life. because the fact that the man has, the fact that the man has like a, a harem basically or a bunch of multiple partners

who are subservient to him in some way who he seems to have some kind of like quasi-ugenics breeding program with is, is so weird and so little remarked upon as a weird. Like if Tim Cook had anything similar, it would be all anybody talked about, right? it would be like the number one thing you knew about Tim Cook. But like, you know, once every couple years,

there'll be an article in the New York Times where it's like, oh, that's kind of interesting some of Musk's, you know, former girlfriends have filed a law or whatever it is. You know, like it's not, it seems to be weirdly small in our list of things we talk about with him. What, how, if anything, do you analyze that? Where does it come from? and why does it seem to bother people so little or come up so little when people talk about him?

I mean, partially just because there's so much going on with him, right, that it's hard to give equal attention to everything. But, you know, he's part of a larger phenomenon. There are, you know, Pavlov, the founder of Telegram, Jeffrey Epstein, of course, had a similar kind of effort going. There was a great Wall Street Journal piece about a Chinese tech guy who's like dwarfed the the reproductivity of musk with a number of children that he's produced. But I think that for us, and we're trying to figure out where it fits in muskism, is it's actually an interesting place where his kind of bona fides as a member of the far right, I think, are called it to question, to be honest, because he echoes these phrases about the need to keep up the birth raid and the fall of white

birth rate and blah, blah, and very typical racist terms. And yet he makes no proposals for actually bringing up the birth rate, right? There's not even the kind of J.D. Vance level idea of allowing it to make it more possible for women to, there's not even sexist solutions to it, or anything like, you know, government subsidies or parental leave or universal daycare, any of the things that places like Denmark have rolled out to try to keep up the birth rate. Instead, his version of pronatalism is like literally just his own offspring. Right.

So his version of catering to the needs of the collective or the society is like constrained to a satirical level, as you say, to like his family office manager just like seeing to his various children and like baby mothers and like making sure they have enough for the kid in some cases, not even in all cases. So it seems like the kind of endpoint of the total abdication of the capitalist for any kind of social care or any kind of attention to the stewardship of the whole at a biopolitical level, right? You know, what is more reflective of the belief that we're all just computers and meme creators, then you don't even seem to give a second thought to the idea of keeping the actual bodies alive that might be carrying around those phones and memes.

It doesn't seem to figure into his vision of how politics should work, except for himself. But for himself, then, of course, the master code needs to be handed down from one generation to the next. But even there, interestingly, there's no discussion of succession, right? like there's there's very briefly a discussion this came out in the in the chat the open AI trial very briefly discussion that his control of open AI when he was making a bid to run it would pass down to one of his children but I think in all of what I've read that's the only mention of the actual operation of the businesses being part of his family lineage it really is just the genetic payload okay well let's

Let's wrap it up with this. You know, I think a lot of people who listen to this show think of Elon and his various ideologies, capitalist, racist, or otherwise as being things that we should struggle against to some degree, that we want less of in the world that, you know, I think there's a desire to see him defeated in some way, which is, you know, maybe we're not going to get there. but you guys seem to have a really more thorough analysis of him than anyone else I've talked to. So have you discovered a weakness? Is there an Achilles heel?

Is there any advice you would give to folks who see themselves in any sort of movement as opposed to him in any way of an approach that comes to mind? Or is there any seeds of an ending contained within his, you know, method? Well, Musk really sees the future of his empire as completely wrapped up in artificial intelligence. That that's really the biggest bet he wants to make. And as we discussed earlier, AI is actually becoming a major political liability for the industry. It's going to become very, very toxic, in fact, and how they maneuver with the approaching midterm elections, where I think there's going to be a lot of energy that. that's arising from the opposition to data centers, I think that's a massive political opportunity

for progressives. I mean, it includes Musk, but it also extends beyond Musk. One of Musk's obsessions is with what he calls the woke mind virus, with the notion that network technologies and social media in particular have enabled progressives to propagate their messaging, to find one another, to coordinate protest actions. And I think we actually have to accept that that's true, that we wouldn't have gotten Occupy, we wouldn't have gotten the Bernie campaigns, we wouldn't have gotten the social mobilizations of the last decade and a half without technology. We wouldn't have had the Minneapolis anti-ice organizing without signal groups and WhatsApp groups. So to my mind, the real opportunity is finding the technology that

we can use for our purposes to find one another, to build community, to do political education and so forth, but with an eye toward organizing against another technology, AI, because regardless of our varying and I'm sure quite diverse opinions on how we might build a better AI or what that might even mean, I think in the short term, the political opportunity is very clear that people hate AI and that they see it as not just something that's driving up their cost of living, the worsening the affordability crisis, but as embodying a tech overward class that wants them to disappear, that wants to designate them as surplus. So I think there's tremendous populist energy that can be harvested here for the left

in the near term. I think also, you know, on its own terms, Musk's empire is actually pretty rickety, right? I mean, this is one of the useful things about reading, for example, the SpaceX. IPO filing, which is freely available, he says, you know, not only are we subject to changing laws and regulations worldwide that can always stand in the way of our goals, but a lot of the technologies that the valuation that company is based on are either untested or don't exist at all, right? So the orbital AI, which is, you know, data centers in space, the 100% don't exist yet. There's no working prototype. There's tons of reasons to think they won't work at all.

And yet, if they, honestly, if they don't work at all, then a lot of the SpaceX valuation is called into question. Because a lot is riding on this belief that he can break the energy bottleneck that has plagued, you know, hyper-scaling by getting free energy from the sun and free cooling from outer space. It's not clear that'll work at all. This sounds like a truly science fictional. It sounds like a space elevator or some other, you know, I mean, no one's done an industrial project. in space at all ever, right? No, although that is also, if you read the SpaceX filing, one of the things that they say

they're going to do is, you know, in space manufacturing. But interestingly, it's not just SpaceX, right? I mean, Google's it on and Amazon's it on, even Chinese startups are saying we might be able to do orbital AI data centers. It doesn't mean they'll be able to. But I think, you know, so there's two ways I see. One is letting

Musk's empire kind of self-destruct because it might. It's not clear that these engineering moonshots are all going to pay off. And if Assyrians of them don't, then the money burning parts of his empire, namely X-A-I, are going to eventually catch up to him, probably. But if you're elsewhere in the world, we've spent a lot of time in Europe talking about this book because it came out in a few different European countries, then they're just proactively locking him out of their infrastructure

as we speak. So they are building alternatives to Starlink, the UTALSAT, is the one that they're trying to create as a replacement. There is all kinds of new regulation and fines being levied against X for turning itself into a CSAM generator earlier this year for running rough shot over content moderation. So they're not just talking about it or fantasizing about it. They're just going ahead and doing it. They're figuring how to get Musk out of their ecosystem. And it's actually quite inspiring, I think. And it shows that it's not impossible. It's just a question of political well, really. Yeah. And, you know, maybe it's a, matter of taking the opposite of his frame of analysis.

Like I feel like in my, I've been turning away from computer brain from everything as computer, right, to like thinking about people as political actors in a social system. We're all social animals. We have. We do a lot. There's a lot in the world that is not digital. And, you know, maybe taking that frame is a way to fight back in a more general way. It's been amazing talking to both of you, Ben and Quinn.

The book is called Muskism. People can, of course, get a copy at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. Where else can people find you on the internet or get a copy of the book? I think we're both on Blue Sky and, you know, regularly doing things. You know, we're the types for sure. Is this funny? If you're like, well, we're on X, you know, that would be funny. I mean, maybe you are, but it would also be ironic.

Yeah. But then, you know, wherever you buy books, your independent bookstore, you should be able to track this down. Otherwise, bookshop.org is always great. And that's what our bookshop is through. Thanks. By the way, that is the platform that we use.

Ben and Quinn, thank you so much for being on the show. It's been really wonderful having you. Thanks, Adam. No problem. Well, thank you once again to Ben and Quinn for coming on the show. Again, you can pick up a copy of their book at factuallypod.com slash books. Just a reminder, buying a book there supports not just this show, but your local bookstore as well.

If you would like to support the show directly, that URL, patreon.com, slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad-free. For 15 bucks a month, I will shout out your name at the end of the podcast and put it in the credits of every single one of my video monologues. This week I want to thank Michael Lurer, Darren K. Matthew Rimer,

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