Front Burner - Front Burner Presents: The Making of Musk, Episode 2

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

Where did Elon Musk’s epic ambitions begin? In search of clues, the latest season of Understood: The Making of Musk returns to his sheltered youth in apartheid South Africa, a world engineered for white supremacy. In this second episode, host Jacob Silverman explores whether Musk’s authoritarian streak traces back to his Canadian grandfather. Before Joshua Haldeman brought his family to South Africa, he made waves as part of the radical 1930s Technocracy movement. And while the two men’s lives only overlapped for three years, we find echoes of Elon’s worldview in Haldeman’s pro-tech, anti-democratic ideology.You can find Understood wherever you get your podcasts, and here: https://link.mgln.ai/FBxMoM2

All right, what are we talking about? A new year means a fresh start. Okay, make a list for the year and take charge of your life in 2026. Look, I'm not talking about your to-do list. I'm talking about your watch list. Cross off Family Feud Canada, St. Pierre, and this hour has 22 minutes. There's no excuses. Dream big people. Enjoy all your favorite shows on CBC TV or stream anytime on CBC Gem. Mike drop. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. Back in October, we brought you the first episode of the making of Musk, all about Elon Musk's much lesser-known past, hosted by Jacob Silverman. Now we want to share the rest of the season with you over the next few days. In this second episode, Technocracy Inc., Jacob explores whether Musk's authoritarian street traces back to his Canadian grandfather. Before Joshua Haldeman brought his family to South Africa, he made waves as part of the radical 1930s technocracy movement. And while the two men's lives only overlapped for three years, we find echoes of Elon's worldview in Haldeman's pro-tech, anti-democratic ideology. Have a listen.

All I knew about Musk's connection to Saskatchewan at that point was that his mom had been born here in Regina. where I live, and that was about it. So imagine my surprise when I start Googling his grandpa's name, and it's everywhere. Jeff Leo is a senior investigative journalist for CBC, based in Regina. When he started looking into Elon Musk's roots, he thought the family's Canadian branch would be a footnote in a much larger story. Instead, he found a man, Elon Musk's grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, who didn't just pass through the history books, but seemed determined to leave his name splashed across their pages.

In a decade in our local newspaper, he showed up like more than 500 times. And it's like, Haldeman expresses his views about the grain commission. And Haldeman gets in a shouting match with a, group of women at the Regina Housewives Society. And I thought, okay, I did not know this. I did not know he was such a character. A farmer turned chiropractor turned politician. Oh, and an amateur pilot,

Haldeman was part globetrotting adventurer, part political agitator, and part mad visionary. When he wasn't making soapbox speeches, He was boxing, riding Broncos, or flying planes across continents, spending summers in the Kalahari Desert, searching for mythical lost city, with his growing family forced to ride shotgun. He did so much in his life,

had so many different chapters. And then there was his uncanny, Forrest Gump-like ability to pop up at the strangest intersections of Canadian politics, including a run-in with talk about, Tommy Douglas, a.k.a. the greatest Canadian, the father of universal health care. I mean, here's a guy who interacted with some of the most famous Canadians, fought elections against two Canadian prime ministers, led virtually every organization he ended up joining, and was just on a frenetic path to try to understand.

and the world, and try to have some control in it. Control. It's a word that comes up again and again with Haldeman. His life wasn't just adventure for adventure's sake. There was always a deeper drive to impose order and find certainty in a world that felt like it was spinning apart. And nowhere was that clearer than during the crisis that shaped him. The devastation of drought.

Starving cattle, their food buried beneath the dust, seek vainly for something to eat, often perishing of hunger by the wayside. Homes abandoned by hundreds as neither men nor beast can live in the stricken area. Dust piled up like snowdrifts in winter. In the 1930s, the dust bowl raged through Saskatchewan, displacing thousands of farmers and leaving thousands more, totally destitute. I mean, you see these photos of the time.

They were farming sand. It was a brutal time. Just as the region began to bounce back from World War I, the Great Depression hit. And then the dust came. The level of desperation was unbelievable. And people were searching for solutions and also sort of searching for explanations.

like what is going on here? The people have been failed by the ruling elites, and some were looking for answers. Fringed political movements took root up and down the continent. European-style right-wing fascism found followers in North America. In 1939, months before the world exploded into an all-consuming conflict, 20,000 people attended a Nazi rally at New York City's Madison Square Garden. organized by the German-American Bund.

If you ask what we are actively fighting for under our Charterdam, first a social just white gentile who ruled United States. But it wasn't just happening on the political right. Communism and left-wing worker movements found new adherence, making them immediate targets of government suspicion. Some politically nonconformist groups tried to break through the political divide between socialism and capitalism by mixing heterodox beliefs or claiming that they were above politics entirely. One of those groups was technocracy incorporated. So the basic idea of technocracy was that technology was moving forward at such a rapid pace.

that it was going to eventually eliminate most jobs. And so there was a belief that, you know, we needed a fundamental shift in the way society was organized. With society wracked by economic depression in the 1930s, and a simultaneous industrial and manufacturing revolution underway, Technocracy Inc. decided that democracy had become outmoded, unable to keep up. It was time for a profound reordering of government. One of the fundamental problems they saw with the way society was organized at the time

was that it was run by politicians who they saw as morons, who were essentially being driven around by the whims of the politicians. rather than being driven by science, study, research, expertise, and therefore we're making just continual bad decisions. So the solution was a government by experts, a government by scientists. A government who wouldn't be tossed around by the whims of the population. So essentially, a move away from democracy to technocracy. This all sounds eerily familiar and leaves me wondering.

When Musk today talks about how governments should run, is there a thread we can trace back through family lore to the ideas his grandfather championed? Do the two men show the same faith in technology, hierarchy, and the supremacy of individual will? The government is just like the DMV that got big. So when you say it like, let's have the, government do something, you should think, do you want the DMV to do it?

If a commercial company operated the way the federal government does, then it would immediately go bankrupt, it would be delisted, the officers would be arrested. If the people of Britain take charge and actually ensure that there's a government that represents their interests and not a government that represents foreign interests, then I think Britain has a great future. If the technology that's coming is used in the right way, we can have an incredibly exciting future, one which is, you know, sort of Star Trek made real. I'm Jacob Silverman, and this is understood, the making of Musk.

Episode 2, Technocracy, Inc. A Futurist Dream, Technocracy, Inc. The technocracy promised a world where scientists and engineers would run society like a perfectly tuned machine. Everyone would benefit, eliminating inequality. No elections, no political parties. It was an authoritarian blueprint that claimed to be grounded in logic and the ruthless pursuit of efficiency. There wouldn't even be money. It would be replaced with a kind of social credit system, based in part on one's energy consumption.

Oh, and there wouldn't be separate countries either. The North American continent plus Greenland would be united in a super state called the Technate. For Joshua Haldeman, technocracy represented a way to bring order to a collapsing world, to control the chaos that had upended his life. So he went all in. As with virtually every organization he joined,

he eventually became the leader of the Canadian branch of Technocracy Inc. For its followers, technocracy promised salvation, but Canada's elected leaders saw something else. Sedition. Our first concern is with the defense of Canada. To be helpful to others, we must ourselves be strong, secure, and united.

In September 1939, as Hitler unleashed total war on Europe, the Canadian government joined the British in declaring war on Germany. From that moment, Canada was on high alert for subversive organizations that might destabilize the Allied cause. Technocracy Inc. was identified as a threat. Our prime minister at the time, William Lyme McKenzie King, in a speech in the House of Commons, said that one of the first of the United States, said that one of the United States, of its objectives is to overthrow the government and constitution of this country by force. Prime Minister Mackenzie King called for the organization to be banned. Joshua Haldeman, never one to shy away from confrontation, wasn't interested in complying. He fought back immediately. He posted an ad. And he said, like, the Canadian government's making a political

blunder a mistake. This is a dumb move to go after technocracy because we're really patriots. And then shortly after that, he was arrested. Haldeman didn't end up doing any prison time, but the arrest and the crackdown on prescribed political groups helped end his role in technocracy. It also led to him giving up on Canada entirely. He would spend the next decade looking for a place that matched his vision, a society that didn't just tolerate his politics, but embodied them. And like so much in Joshua Haldeman's life, the path to his new forever home was circuitous and surprising, with a colorful cast of characters pointing the way.

It's 1936. The dust has ravaged Saskatchewan for five years. Haldeman, then still a leader in Technocracy, Inc., is dissatisfied with the path his country is on. So he goes looking for answers, and the first port of call for any self-proclaimed technocrat a medium naturally she offers him a sort of prophecy a new life would open for Haldeman after 14 years living and working in Regina Canada

and then at the end of that time he would move to a quote faraway place a city in a faraway place like most psychic predictions its vagueness describes a lot of different possibilities But Haldeman, a man with apparent regard for both science and spirituality, carried it with him. Fourteen years later, a decade after he'd broken with technocracy and is once again in the political wilderness, Haldeman meets an Anglican minister from South Africa, and the dots begin to connect. He became convinced that it was South Africa, was that far away place.

And specifically, the thing about South Africa that really attracted him was a prophecy that that Anglican minister made, and I'll read the prophecy. South Africa will become the leader of white civilization in the world. That sounded good to Haldeman. He moved his family across the ocean to Pretoria, the administrative capital of a newly entrenched apartheid regime. For him, it wasn't just a new country. It was a model for the order and hierarchy he believed the world needed.

Joshua Haldeman died in a plane crash in 1974 when Elon Musk was three years old. Haldeman, a seasoned pilot, flew into the the power lines on his descent into Brits Airfield outside Pretoria. He was accompanied by his son-in-law, Peter Ray. This fatal crash and their deaths were a painful tragedy for the family. But it wasn't such an unlikely end for Joshua Haldeman, who was an incorrigible risk-taker and adventurer. His life sounded like a series of quests from one of the role-playing games his grandson

would enjoy decades later. In addition to flying, he jumped trains, searched for a lost desert city, threw himself into right-wing politics, and moved his family across the world to help build a country based on that extreme political vision. And while Elon wouldn't remember his grandfather, these myths loomed large.

Winifred, his wife, was there. to narrate and tell the stories and all the adventures from his life. Winifred, or Grandma Wynne, as she was known, was a larger-than-life character, too, a former dancer, sharpshooter, and companion to Joshua. She passed away in 2012, and her stories resonated with Musk. In commenting on his grandfather, he's said, you know, he thinks he shares some of his spirit of adventure and love of risk. The grandson seems modeled on the great man of family lore.

There are a lot of striking similarities. You know, both men had a love of aviation. I have a design for a plane. You do? Yes. A better design? I mean, probably, I think it is. They both seem to end up leading almost every organization they joined.

Do you work on all of them in a single day? No. No. But I do have a long work day. I work a lot. Both men very much wore their politics on their sleeve and were not afraid to get in a dust up. If somebody's going to try to blackmail me with that, Advertising? Blackmail me with money?

Go fuck yourself. But go f*** yourself. Is that clear? As Elon Musk turned his attention to right-wing politics in recent years, journalists and historians have pointed to his grandfather's story, looking for echoes of the anti-woke crusader we see today.

And they've found them. In the characters of the two men, certainly. But also in technologists. whose ideas seem to have trickled into the silicon substrate of tech politics. Nearly a century later, those same ideas, societies led by technologists, not politicians, would find new fertile ground. Not in Saskatchewan, not in Pretoria, but in Silicon Valley, the place Musk would land to stake his own claim to power. Take us back to when you're really starting with all of this. Well, that was the summer of 95.

I had no money whatsoever. I was working, doing research in Silicon Valley on a completely different subject and trying to start this company at the same time. That's Musk reflecting on his arrival in Silicon Valley. the place he had dreamed of when he left South Africa. It had been a long, circuitous route to get there. After he left Pretoria in 1989, he made his way to Saskatchewan,

the land of his grandfather, where he still had family. He enrolled at Queen's University in Ontario before successfully transferring to the University of Pennsylvania. Now firmly on U.S. soil, the Palo Alto dream was gone. closer than ever. After he graduated from Penn, Musk enrolled in a PhD program at Stanford,

the academic engine of Silicon Valley. But he never fully matriculated, never even sat down for a class. Instead, in the great tech industry tradition, Musk dropped out and joined a startup. The company was a web-based directory called zip2.com. and it would bring Musk his first great fortune. Zip2 was designed to help newspapers build online city guides,

a kind of yellow pages meets Google Maps. From the very beginning, Musk worked hard to cast it as a major innovation. Elon was always very interested in media attention. I remember him wanting to always be the front person for Zip 2 and be on every interview, you know, just because, is famous as possible. This is Derek Proudian, a seasoned investor, who back in 1996 was funding various startups,

looking for the next big thing. From the moment that Proudian met Musk, he was struck by the young South African entrepreneur's confidence. This kid's got a kind of reality distortion field that goes around him. And after you talk to him for an hour, you're kind of convinced that up is down and left his right and whatever he wants to convince you of, It's very persuasive.

He was an easy person to buy into, but less easy to manage. And so he would come into these meetings with executives who had, you know, 20 plus years of experience in their functionary, and he'd tell them that they were full of shit and that, you know, he knew better. Considering Musk's family folklore and his elite education, it's perhaps not surprising he landed in a place that believed technologists were kings and that the smartest person in the room should be in charge, even if they had no experience.

Because that person, in Musk's mind, was always him. He was 26 years old with no track record, but on the Silicon Valley score sheet, his intensity and devotion marked him as a potentially great entrepreneur. You know, Elon would routinely sleep in the office and he would park his car in a local lot, and, you know, he just, accumulated, you know, dozens and dozens of tickets that he never paid.

The sort of charismatic, single-minded leader who would sleep in the office, a Musk hallmark from Tesla to Doge, or tackle boardroom naysayers head on. It seems from the very beginning, Musk had a clear idea of how things should run. He did not want to collaborate. He wanted control. At Zip 2, that instinct created tension. But it also gave him a model for how to lead. Act with certainty, silence dissent, and keep decision-making at the top.

It would become a defining pattern, one that some recognized instantly. A lot of corporates in Africa was organized around this idea of Baskap, which is an Afrikaans term which means bosshood or bossism. And what that meant is that you were the big boss in charge. You were the big man and figure to whom everyone should be deference and obsequious to. Boss cop, the big boss, the unquestioned authority. This is Will Shoki again, the South African journalist we heard from last episode, who sees a connection between this management style and the worldview Musk was

raised in. It's an attitude he carried with him into every company he built. You see that very plainly in Musk, in the ways in which he treats the organizations that he's involved in as his own personal fiefdom, and so feels as if he has unfettered executive power that cannot be challenged and cannot be questioned. And as we've seen from Musk's many public blowups, boardroom dramas, and his sundered relationship with Trump, the world's richest man doesn't take well to being challenged. It translates, one, his commitment to really being the boss and two, feeling very intensely any threats into that power, whether it's from affirmative action programs that diversify the color and identities of skilled workers, or whether it's from

organized working class, members of unions who are fighting for for better pay and better wages. His fears crackdown on any kind of union organizing in his organizations shows this hostility to democracy and to participation. It seems from his very first venture, the myth was already forming. Elon the visionary, Elon the founder, Elon the singular mind, a story that would grow more powerful with each new startup, even when it wasn't quite true. But the myth would build. Elon's next big move would take his ambitions to the stars.

And in keeping with so many of his future ventures, it would start. Start with a crash. The PWH is back for the third season of heart-stopping women's hockey. And this season, there are two new teams looking to make their mark on the ice, the Seattle Torrent and Vancouver Golden Eyes. When the world's best women's hockey players face off, anything can happen. Will the Minnesota Frost achieve a three-peat? Will a new team take home the trophy?

There's only one way to find out. Watch the PWH for free on CBCJ. It's March 2000, and the California sun is setting over Palo Alto's Sand Hill Road, where many blue-chip venture capital firms have offices. A silver McLaren F1, the fastest production car in the world, winds through the quiet streets. Elon Musk, 28 years old, sits behind the wheel of the one indulgence he allowed himself with his zip-to windfall. $22 million, U.S. dollars, if you're wondering. He used the rest to launch a payment startup called X.com.

And in the passenger seat is a man who might be the answer to his next big payday. Peter Thiel The two men are in the midst of negotiating a merger between X.com and Confinity their respective internet banking startups. Musk is driving them to an investor meeting

which could help get this thing over the finish line. Musk and Teal were both supremely ambitious. Their personalities didn't always gel. Following them over the years, Teal always appeared to me as reserved, cold,

A congenital contrarian with a superiority complex. Musk was far more buoyant, dramatic, a troll with a superiority complex. Their relationship was frosty at times, and would later be derailed, at least temporarily, over a boardroom coup. But for now, they've decided that it might be better to join forces than remain rivals. And what better way to seal the deal than with a drive in a 620,000? horsepower car that Musk barely knew how to handle on Northern California's winding roads. Egging on his colleague a bit, Teal prods Musk to open up the throttle on the million-dollar supercar. What can this thing do? Teal asks. Musk slams the accelerator. The McLaren lurches

forward like a rocket. The speedometer needle dances higher and higher. But here's the thing about having 627 horsepower at your disposal. Sometimes you get more than you bargained for. The car spins out on the iconic Silicon Valley roadway. It hits an embankment and goes airborne, making a full 360-degree horizontal turn through the air. Musk's McLaren crashes to the ground. Incredibly, both men make it out. with only a few scratches.

The car, one of only 106 ever made, is a total loss. It's also uninsured. But Musk and Teal still have an important meeting to get to. So they stick out their thumbs and hitchhike over to Sequoia Capital, the most storied VC firm in tech. Having cheated death,

it's time to close that deal. This is the kind of, of story that fits neatly into both family lore and Silicon Valley legend. The risk taker who courts chaos and walks away unscathed. Just another sign his success was inevitable. Which in this case it was. In March 2000, the merger was finally complete. The new firm would soon be known as PayPal, and it became a giant.

Over the years, Musk has positioned his business. himself as a co-founder of PayPal. In reality, the company was built on the combined work of both camps, and Musk's tenure as CEO was brief. He was even replaced while away on his honeymoon. But what mattered was what PayPal gave him, money and a network. It made him rich enough to start dreaming on a different scale, and it tied him to a circle of entrepreneurs who would go on to shape the future of Silicon Valley.

PayPal collected a whole bunch of people who were young and intense and were entrepreneurial themselves. And then all of a sudden, it was bought by eBay. So a bunch of these folks are like, okay, well, what do I do next? This is Reid Hoffman, who after working at PayPal founded LinkedIn, speaking in 2014 to Bloomberg. YouTube, Reddit, SpaceX, Palantir, Yelp, Affirm. these multi-billion-dollar companies were all founded by PayPal alumni. The company became a pipeline churning out new tech elites and massively valuable startups. Others would join influential venture capital and finance firms, or found their own.

It also created a powerful sustaining network that backed largely conservative politicians and causes. Reed Hoffman is a rare Democrat among them. It's a network that would be essential in helping elect Donald Trump president twice. We all have still really tight network. And so we're all calling each other going, hey, I'm thinking about doing this. What do you think? Who do you call for what? So, for example, macroeconomic, financial, bold models, I'll call Peter.

For a willingness to just think super big with risk is not a variable, Elon. that close-knit web of phone calls and favor trading is the stuff of silicon valley myth founders and investors debating business ideas pooling capital and backing each other's plays across decades and it earned them a nickname the paypal mafia a living network bound together by shared history shared wealth and often shared politics and if you trade trace those connections far enough, some of them lead back to the same place, half a world away, South Africa. You know, it's very hard to concretely speculate about how it happened that so many white South Africans found themselves working for the same startup and have since orbited around the same political and economic networks. That is journalist Will Shoki again.

In addition to Musk, three key figures in the PayPal Mafia have ties to southern Africa. First and foremost, there's Peter Thiel, Musk's Joyride Buddy. The son of German evangelical Christians, Teal's early life was spent in South Africa and what is now called Namibia, which was part of the South African border wars we learned about in episode one. Today, he may be best known for his work as a venture capitalist, and for his company Palantir, which plays a shadowy role in how governments collect and manage data, especially for surveillance. Unlike Musk, Teal has always been an openly political animal, describing himself as a libertarian since his undergraduate days at Stanford. According to biographer Max Chafkin,

when Teal was at Stanford in the late 80s, he spoke approvingly of apartheid. During his time there, he also founded the Stanford Review, a conservative newspaper that would become a launching pad for numerous like-minded venture capitalists and startup founders, many of whom went to work for Teal. Another member of the PayPal Mafia was its C.O., the Cape Town-born David Sachs, who later became a successful tech CEO and venture capital. After helping wrangle other tech conservatives to back Donald Trump during the 2024 election, Sachs is now the president's crypto and AI czar.

Then there's Roloff Boutha, who is PayPal's CFO. Bootha is the grandson of Pick Boutha, a key player in apartheid South African politics. Now Roloff Buta is a partner at Sequoia, the most important venture capital firm in the valley, and the one that Teal and Musk were on their way to in 2000 when Musk crashed his supercar. So is it a coincidence that so many of these people have this connection to apartheid era South Africa? It's a very subtle thread, but the thread is there. It starts with some of the economic ideas behind both places.

The apartheid regime had long justified itself as a bastion of free enterprise against communism and libertarian tech culture provided a new narrative for some of the same pro-business, anti-galitarian impulses, to thrive. Apartheid South Africa

sold itself as a capitalist frontier, the place where business could thrive without interference, where the right people could build empires without regulations or workers' rights getting in the way. Silicon Valley in the 2000s? It was selling a pretty similar dream, albeit with much better marketing.

They did kind of ride this wave of a kind of hyper-capitalist, anti-regulation, move fast and break things culture, that in a sense is ideologically convenient for those who have already had a head start, i.e. in a parted. I think it just felt almost natural for them that Silicon Valley would be the next frontier in living out, this upbringing that had taught them to see the world in a specific way. Sounds like they'd found a culture fit. So we have this picture emerging,

a group of white entrepreneurs from colonial Africa who found their perfect playground in Silicon Valley's male-driven, move fast and break things culture. And at the center of it all is Musk, armed with what Will calls bossism, this deeply ingrained belief that he's the unquestioned authority,

in any room he enters. Like his grandfather, he also believes that engineers should be in charge of society. After the sale of PayPal helped spawn the PayPal Mafia, Musk was no longer just another startup founder.

He had the money and the self-belief that he can engineer his way out of any problem. He exhibited the kind of evangelical faith and technology that was essential for any entrepreneur looking to make it in the valley. As his star rose, that faith hardened into something more severe,

something like zealotry. According to Musk's evolving worldview, there was nothing top engineers couldn't do. And he was hardly the only one thinking this way. Did it seem like a big deal? Yeah, I mean, it was a really big deal among Silicon Valley type, sort of the accelerationist crowd, as they call themselves. And I, it's just so interesting.

This is Adrienne LaFrance, the executive editor of The Atlantic Magazine. She's telling me about this moment back in 2023, when a 5,000-word manifesto started lighting up text circles. It was written by a Silicon Valley pioneer, the co-inventor of the web browser, a kingmaker investor, and political power player. Mark Andreessen is one of the most influential figures in tech, and he's someone who has been sort of interested in being kind of a public intellectual, for lack of a better term, for many, many years. In his techno-optimist manifesto, Andresen laid out a totalizing vision. Technology is always the answer. Stop the techno-sceptic hand-wringing, pursue unfettered innovation, and let technologists and entrepreneurs. and venture capitalists lead the way.

Humanity, he promised, would benefit. A lot of the language of this ideological movement is couched in sort of like building a better world, a world free from diseases, more leisure time, you know. There's something compelling about that, but it's also simplistic. Technology is amazing. I love technology. It's great. I think where this movement becomes alarming

is when it bleeds into authoritarianism and oligarchy. As Adrian implies, the blind celebration of builders masks a political transformation happening, one where billionaire moguls like Mark Andreessen and Elon Musk amass great power. They, in a handful of peers, decide how technologies are built, deployed, and who profits. It's a very reductionist world. view that sort of tech is always good. If you can build it, you should. And anyone who questions

you is the enemy. It's very antagonistic to skeptics, to anyone who would ask questions. Maybe that's why Andresen has blocked me in so many other journalists on X. And there's something else troubling. One thing that really jumps out at me is it really has a lot of sort of echoes of the early futurist movement of the 1930s. Futurism was an Italian movement that glorified speed, machines, and violence, ideas that later fed directly into Mussolini's fascism. And sometimes these echoes are more explicit than others. There is one section of Andresen's manifesto that directly quotes with one word swapped out from the manifesto of futurism, which was, you know, an early pre-fascist document. Beauty exists only in struggle.

There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown to force them to bow before man. Andresen had simply changed the word poetry to technology. Covering the tech right for the last few years, I've realized that some of them, like Mark Andresen, will come right out and say what they think. they'll quote a proto-fascist text

or they'll share some pretty eye-raising comments by internet Nazis you know the guys with pseudonymous X accounts with Greek statue avatars and a creepy reverence for a fictionalized American past with many of today's tech billionaires the truth is in their social media posts podcast interviews and manifestos

from their own words and gestures You can recognize a will to power and an impatience with democracy that has made them eager to break the existing political order. Elon Musk is much the same, issuing bold middle-of-the-night statements about the decline of Western civilization. But Musk also has the Internet trolls' capacity for brazen provocation,

followed by denial and misdirection. No, you didn't see what you just saw. When on inauguration day, a grateful Musk gave what looked like two Nazi salutes to a crowd of fans. Many political observers described it as just that. However, Musk and his defenders summoned a range of excuses about how the supposed Roman salute was a benign, heartfelt gesture. With many arguing that Musk was just trying to do a hand gesture for my heart goes out to you, but it just... No, no, it was an international salute. that we've had for

maybe the last 10,000 years This salute truthorism is outrageous. So do it right now on TV. No people, you didn't see what you just saw. The popular term for this kind of thing, especially when done by the richest person in the world, is gaslighting.

What meaning does democracy actually have? If the people cannot vote and have there will be decided by their elected representatives, then we don't live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy. This is Musk speaking from the Oval Office in February 2025. He's standing next to Trump with his son X at his feet,

pitching Doge as a savior of democracy in America. And Musk seems sincere, warning that an unelected bureaucracy is styming the democratic will of the people. But at the same time, time, here is an unelected billionaire in the Oval Office telling us what democracy means. And it seems to mean replacing federal employees with 19-year-old coders in AI software, a technocracy, in other words, but maybe not one that would have impressed his grandfather. Technocracy Inc. imagined a highly centralized state run by engineers and

scientists, not a libertarian free-for-all dominated by billionaires. Musk and Andresen's vision is rooted in a very different creed, one that puts power in the hands of a small elite, but keeps the state itself as thin as possible. With Musk and Andresen, an elite tech political class has seized enormous influence for itself, and it only wants more. I've been thinking about this new class of power brokers a lot in recent years as I wrote a book about the tech right and the 2024 election. It was the same context that inspired Adrian to write a piece titled

The Rise of Techno-Athoritarianism. I felt that people needed to understand the outsized political influence that these many tech leaders are having, not just political influence, sort of on all of our lives. In particular, a small group of tech leaders really see themselves as the ones who should be making decisions on behalf of a population that didn't elect them, and that alarmed me. Adrian wrote her article before the election, but its contours were coming into view. And the authoritarian posture, she described, only became more visible and more influential as Musk put more than $200 million toward electing Donald Trump, while his colleagues like Mark

Andreessen contributed millions more. Don't get me wrong, Silicon Valley has given a lot of donations to Democrats over the years. But this was something different, not just donations, but direct involvement, advice, even staffing, an unprecedented shift. And it seemed these men had found another culture fit, a reactionary politics that gave them common cause with Trump's MAGA movement. There is a sort of permanent sense of being the underdog despite being the most powerful people in the world. And I think some of this has to do with the culture of Silicon Valley and how it's evolved, you know, from the era in which it was just like, you know, optimistic nerds working on cool things in their garages to this point at which the power has so consolidated

and is so in the hands of a few. The optimism of the garage tinkerer had curdled into grievance, paranoia, and a hunger for power. It had moved beyond boardrooms and corporate back channels to the most public stage. Silicon Valley Titans

traded their flip-flops and hoodies for tailored suits, standing together at Trump's second inauguration. A government flanked not by elected representatives, but by self-anointed technocrats, and Musk at its heart. But for all that power, Musk's own story

and his eventual break with President Trump shows how fragile his sense of control can be. Musk's highly-leverage empire is sustained by his ego and showmanship, by his ability to constantly raise money and shuffle around assets. It's massive but fragile. And nowhere is that fragility more exposed than inside his own family.

Next time, Ununderstood, the making of Musk. The reason it's called dead naming is because your son is dead. So my son Xavier is dead. Killed by the woke wine virus. I was literally like, hell fucking no. I am not about to let this bitch come for me and have that just slide. So I had my little thread's response, and it went mega coconuts viral. The podcast contacted Elon Musk through his family office.

He did not respond to our request for comment. Understood the Making of Musk is a chalk and blade production for CBC. It is written and produced by Jason Phipps, M. Wally, Eva Chrysiac, and me, Jacob Silverman. This episode features clips from British Pathet, First Look Media, CBS, S.G. Trader, Hindustan Times, CBC, Joe Rogan, Bill Maher, Khan Academy, CNBC, Bloomberg, NBC, Jordan Peterson, and Matt Bernstein. Matthew Blackman is our South African Story Consultant. Fabiola Carletti is our coordinating producer. Mixing and sound design by Julian Uzielli and Julia Whitman. Our story editor is Derek John.

Our executive producer is Nick McCabe Locos. You can follow Understood on whatever app you're using to listen to me now. And check out my previous season, The Naked Emmer. A deep dive into fallen Crypto King, Sam Bankman-Fried. That was the second episode of The Making of Musk. We'll be back tomorrow with episode three. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com.