Ideas - You might hate Elon Musk, but we ‘empowered him’

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

It’s been a few months into Donald Trump’s second presidency, with the wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, overseeing government operations. The U.S. has been a platform for him, a source of money, resources and leverage, says historian and author Quinn Slobodian who has studied Musk's global history. “Musk is the symptom of a society which empowered him." Slobodian says when we wanted technical solutions to social problems, Musk responded. He may not be what we wanted, “but as the saying goes, he’s the one we deserve.”

When a body is discovered 10 miles out to sea, it sparks a mind-blowing police investigation. There's a man living in this address in the name of a deceased. He's one of the most wanted men in the world. This isn't really happening. Officers are finding large sums of money. It's a tale of murder, skullduggery and international intrigue. So who really is he? I'm Sam Mullins and this is Sea of Lies from CBC's Uncovered, available now.

This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. I have a hat. Make all well fiction again. Elon Musk speaking shortly before the US presidential election in 2024. Yeah, I mean, it's just totally, totally nuts. Musk is telling podcast host Joe Rogan that democracy in America is on thin ice because of the authoritarian plans of the Democratic Party.

I've not been politically active until this election. And the reason I've been politically active this election is because I think if we don't, if we don't elect Trump, I think we will lose democracy in this country. It's safe to say that virtually all scholars of democracy would dispute Elon Musk's claim. The historian, Quince LeBoudien, once wanted to ignore Musk altogether. Surely all scholars of democracy would dispute Elon Musk's claim. The historian Quinn Slebotian once wanted to ignore Musk altogether. I think I actually did try to quite literally mute him out of my social media ecosystem. Slebotian is a Canadian living and working in the U.S.

He teaches international history at Boston University. His books tell a story of economics and politics interacting and how ideas come to dominate. He's written about globalism and what he calls crack-up capitalism, the activities of the world's richest people when they feel constrained by the rules of democracy and how they try to escape those constraints.

Quinn Slobodian eventually found it impossible to ignore Elon Musk. He was no longer mutable. I decided it was going to have to be necessary to try to do this difficult thing, which is how to write the intellectual history of someone who wasn't really an intellectual. someone who wasn't really an intellectual. Prospect magazine named Quince LeBaudien among its 25 top thinkers in the world for 2024. McGill University invited him to be their keynote speaker at a workshop called Infiltrators, the mainstreaming of the far right in the Americas. That's where he delivered his talk, A Global History of Elon Musk, which you'll be hearing

on this episode. Shortly after giving his lecture, Quinn Slobodian told me about his wish to fit Elon Musk into a broader storyline. Well, I think there is a kind of fog of war effect right now in the United States where the changes are coming so hard and fast day to day that people swing wildly between there being a grand plan or it being just an uncontrolled chaotic mixture of half thought out strategies. And I'm trying to find the middle ground, I think.

I think there are historical analogies, there is some content to what they're up to. And as is always the case with a successful political movement, it's not just one thing. It's the combination of a bunch of people seeking different outcomes and, you know, provisionally deciding to cooperate to get to those. And as for Elon Musk in particular? He's an interesting figure because it's hard to think of, since Kissinger maybe, someone who was very much socialized and raised outside of the United States and yet now has taken on this extremely high level role within national politics.

Normally, I think people try to make sense of the Trump project in terms of some kind of hyper patriotism or muscular nationalism that's suggested in the phrase, make America great again. But Musk, I don't think has those kind of patriotic affiliations with the United States at all. It's almost masquerade when you see him try to do America with his cowboy boots and cowboy hat. So the question then becomes, what's he up to? Why is he play-acting patriotism?

My morality was informed by America. I read comic books, you know, I played Dungeons and Dragons. I watched American TV shows. It seemed like America cared about being the good guys, you know, about doing the right thing. Quince LeBoudien believes he may have an answer to what Elon is up to. Looking at his career, you can see that the U.S. for him is just a platform. It's a particularly

effective source of revenue, resources, leverage for him to get to his master goal, which by his own statement over the years has always been making humans a multi-planetary civilization. So the United States is always just a launch pad or the first step along a larger project, which actually exceeds planet Earth. And that's so comical and

outrageous that I think sometimes it can be hard to take seriously but once you do a lot of his actions start to make a lot more sense. We join the audience now at the McGill Faculty Club in Montreal where Professor Slobodin begins his global history of Elon Musk. Thank you so much to everybody for coming. Thank you especially if you're standing up, because this is going to be long. If you get tired and want to walk away, I will not be offended. Over the last couple of months, we've been watching something extraordinary.

The assault by the richest man in the world on the operations of the government of the richest country in the world. Remarkably this man has been invited to do so by the head of state himself. Even more remarkably, nobody, including those involved, seem to have a clear idea of what the end goal of this project of destruction, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, or in its acronym derived from a joke cryptocurrency, DOGE, actually is. Is this a project of Gleichschaltung

with the teenage programmers as a kind of Tesla Jugend? Are they online red guards staging a great GitHub cultural revolution, storming the headquarters? Or is it more like the last days of the Soviet Union, private looting of public goods? To make sense of Doge and the first months of the second Trump presidency, and to make sense of what MAGA is doing to America, I suggest that we need nothing less than a global history of one of the protagonists, a global history of Elon Musk. We need to understand how this man, born in late apartheid South Africa and incubated in Silicon Valley,

anointed as the midwife of a decarbonized future, became a grinning wielder of chainsaws, slurring his speech in dark sunglasses, crying, I am become meme. In 1944, the Hungarian economist, Karl Polanyi, published his masterwork, The Great Transformation. In it, he described the world market as a gargantuan automaton. Globalization was creating a massive mechanized system spanning oceans and continents.

People were being uprooted and recruited into vast industrial armies. Resources were extracted, transported, and reshaped across great distances. Elsewhere, Polanyi used a metaphor from his own Jewish tradition to describe the phenomenon. The world market, he said, was a golem, a mythological creature made from clay, put into motion through mystical means. It was not a comforting comparison. Golems run amok from their makers.

By the middle of the 20th century, Polanyi feared that the golem of the world market was doing the same. Humanity is a golem which stares with horror at its own frozen mask, he wrote despairingly, the tortured soul at the terrible machine. In our own era, it is still easy to see global capitalism this way as a kind of planetary cyborg which now not only eludes our control but threatens our very survival through climate breakdown and still looming threats of thermonuclear war. But the Golem has evolved.

To the industrial products of Polanyi's world, the automobiles, steel girders, steamships, and trains, we have added data centers, drones, fiber optic cables, and satellites. At the time, Polanyi wrote, the 2,500 vacuum tubes of the world's first computer, the Colossus, were humming in London's Bletchley Park. Now we carry around phones one billion times more powerful in our pockets.

What face can we put on the gargantuan automaton of our day? With its combination of the virtual and the material, the on and the offline, the hyper speed and the large and the lumbering. No person embodies the third decade of the 21st century more than the 53 year old centibillionaire Elon Musk. Like Polanyi's Golem, Musk may have been put into motion by shareholders, customers, and governments, but he now no longer seems to be under anyone's control but his own. At the head of six different companies, Musk oversees an empire that spans brain implants,

humanoid robots, earth tunnellers, and starships designed as prototypes for multi-planetary colonization. His 7,000 satellites orbit the earth continually. He mainstreamed the consumer electric vehicle and built factories on three continents, including the third and the fifth largest factories in the world. In 1651, Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan, with a frontispiece depicting a sovereign whose body was literally composed of his kingdom subjects. We can imagine a similar image today featuring Musk, a torso of Tesla's, a SpaceX rocket in one hand, a neural link at the temple, eyes glued to his X feed posting for his more than

220 million followers. In fact, you don't need to imagine it. You can generate the image in 15 seconds using Musk's own AI app, Brock. You could even post the picture on X and hope for engagement from the man himself, perhaps in one of his trademark laconic quote tweets. Wow. No doubt Musk would enjoy seeing himself pictured as a king. It is, after all, how he sees himself. When I say this, I mean it literally. In 2021, Musk changed his official title at Tesla from CEO to Technoking. It was the harbinger of a larger shift. From being a liberal leaning centrist, Musk started voicing increasingly right-wing views

during the pandemic. He denounced COVID restrictions as fascist, invade against the woke mind virus and began boosting conspiracy theories from far-right social media accounts. Part of this shift to the right was simple self-interest. Musk hated cumbersome COVID regulations in his factories and was enraged by the pro-union policies and regulatory push around antitrust and consumer protection under the Biden administration. He also hated being snubbed in August 2021 when Biden invited EV manufacturers to the White House. In turn, he had much to gain from a Trump presidency that could help him neutralize the pesky federal agencies that endangered his

glitchy brain implants, his crash-prone autonomous vehicles, his energy-sucking scaling of AI research, his tyrannical workplaces, and his expansion of X into an everything app that handles payments like a bank. Backing Trump also meant more business. Musk's companies have eaten well at the government trough, receiving at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits over the years. SpaceX is the de facto operator of the NASA space program. Nearly half of Tesla's profits in 2024 came from selling carbon credits in a state-backed

regulatory scheme to higher-emitting competitors. Bear-hugging Trump could also protect Musk's China trade, where his Shanghai Gigafactory was set up to produce one million cars a year. Leverage over Trump's trade policy could be essential in keeping that line of revenue flowing. Still, Musk's alliance with Trump didn't look like old-fashioned state capture.

Billionaires get cozy with politicians to secure federal contracts and tax breaks all the time. There's no precedent for the role of Musk as co-president, setting and enacting policies at the highest levels, delivering press conferences in the Oval Office, and meeting heads of state in the style of a peer. Musk is fusing the playbook of CEO and coup d'etat, asset stripper and coder. He's playing techno king. He wants the power to personally determine how the federal government functions. He wants to decide which workers to fire, which programs to kill,

whose social security payments to terminate. Lawmakers voicing criticism have received cease and desist letters from the Department of Justice. The techno king, in short, aspires to a power as absolute as Hobbes' Leviathan, but his methods are modern. When Musk's doge underlings infiltrate a government agency, their first step is to locate its computer systems and seize control of the relevant data and code. Sovereignty is the end, technology is the means. So what in the world is happening here? So what in the world is happening here? It helps by starting with the obvious. The clearest precedent for what is happening in Washington is what happened in Twitter's headquarters on Market Street in San Francisco two and a half years ago. When Musk was compelled to turn what had likely been a late night gag into a large and cumbersome business acquisition,

he walked into the lobby of the social media company carrying a sink, a dad joke about how they ought to quote, let that sink in. Multiple books have now been written about what followed and all of them have some version of the iconic Twitter logo on their cover with Xs on its eyes, upside down, tangled up in wires. The short version is that Musk laid off most of the platform's employees, leading to predictions of its imminent collapse. He scaled back content moderation in a way that boosted hate speech, monetized the algorithm into a pay-to-play model, opened the floodgates to porn bots, and generally frightened away a large number

of crucial advertisers. And yet the scroll never stopped. Twitter didn't go dark. The Twitter deal, bad business on paper, contaminated a site of public conversation and gave Musk a megaphone for his own political positions ahead of the election. Though the company's value sharply declined, it also added to his mercenary mystique

and padded his status in a class of venture capitalists and tech founders who had grown impatient with their restive workers, with their complaints about racism and sexism in the workplace, and their pesky unwillingness to work on contracts for the Pentagon and the Department of Defense. Musk had always been a hard boss, and now he looked even harder. He had managed at least half a dozen businesses under the principle that you can keep services running, even as, to use his favorite word, you delete many of the humans involved. Of course, versions of this practice known as

rightsizing have been standard in American capitalism for some time. It involves acquiring a business, stripping it, and selling all its valuable parts, including real estate and intellectual property, so that it runs at minimum capacity. The 1980s when Donald Trump made his name was the high point of corporate mergers, leveraged buyouts, and hostile takeovers.

Private equity took off at this time, too. When Trump was mulling a first run for president in 1987, he told Larry King, quote, if the US were a corporation, it would be bankrupt. If a company or a country ever ran the way the United States is running, he said, forget it. Trump knew of which he spoke. He went bankrupt six times, including spectacularly

with the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. The first Trump cabinet featured many veterans of the distressed debt sector, including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who was dubbed the King of Bankruptcy by Fortune magazine, and represented bondholders against Trump in his Atlantic City bankruptcy. This time around, the second in command at the Pentagon is billionaire Steve Feinberg, co-founder of the top private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management.

Bill Pulte, whose private equity firm invests in housing and development has been nominated as the top housing regulator. By these lights Musk's hirelings at Doge are less latter-day squadristi than radicalized management consultants. Instead of brickbats and Lugers, they wield red pens to mark layoffs and offload inventory. But this attitude has been a bipartisan consensus since the 1990s. That decade, Bill Clinton's Democratic Party reoriented itself from the post-civil rights era

toward the business-friendly conviction that the private sector could always do things better than the public. In 1993, Clinton and Gore posed with pallets piled high with paperwork and regulations to be shredded. One of the signature pieces of cost-cutting legislation was the 1994 Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act. This law required that the government accept private tenders for services previously performed

by the state. Twenty years later, Elon Musk would get his first big entry into government contracts when he sued the state under this very law and compelled them to take on SpaceX as the launch provider for NASA. So one could stop here and conclude that Musk is no king. He's simply Clinton's feistier nephew. He just wants to turn the government from being a bad corporation to one that is marginally less bad. A managerial dictatorship perhaps, but a temporary one, the same way that a company in Chapter 11 bankruptcy requires a workout and a turnaround to be restored to some level

of economic health. One could stop here, but of course, Quinn's Lobodian doesn't. He continues what he calls the intellectual history of someone who's not an intellectual, illustrating what he sees as the real backstory behind the way Elon Musk now sees the world. When I spoke with Quinn Slobodian after his talk, I wanted to know more about his own intellectual backstory and how he Slobodian now sees the world. This may be going just slightly outside of the scope of your lecture, but I'm curious how you would answer it. Like we do seem to be entering this new age of oligarchs, Russian or American or whatever, who seem to be transnational in nature. Are you able to just give some sense of why you

think this is so pervasive today? Yeah, I mean, people have referred to it as a reactionary international, which has been helpful because for a long time I think people assumed that right-wing politicians as nationalists had a mostly domestic focus and wanted to more or less be left alone. So they're seen as isolationists or in successionists of different kinds. And yet for at least a decade, it's been quite clear that there's a lot of information sharing and convening and discussion at gatherings like CPAC that move from Hungary to Brazil under Bolsonaro to the United States under Trump. So there is actually a collective effort to remake the world order by governments and

parties of the right in ways that continue to privilege definitely the mobility of the wealthiest as long as they're loyalists within their government. Whilst somehow, and this is the confusing part, managing to conscript the loyalty of the large parts of the population for what often look like pretty nakedly extractive and exploitative forms of accumulation and profit making. So that really I think becomes the puzzle for scholars and observers is not so much why would these people want to seize control of governments and then use it to asset strip their own countries and secret away the profits, but why would anyone support

that project at a grassroots level? What's in it for them? That still remains a puzzle. And it's, I think, part of the spectacle of Musk and Trump needs to be understood that way. You know, when Musk gives away $1 million checks to people for being part of a campaign he's interested in or Trump is able to move world markets with a single tweet, then it's impressive. It's a sign of their omnipotence and people are in awe of that, you know, partially for

good reason. So in a time when a lot is uncertain and insecure and a lot of people feel like they're living on the edge economically, if it seems like your allegiance to one very, very powerful person might make the difference in your life one way or the other, and there's evidence to show that, then that's often reason enough. It is true that the idea of running a country like a business is not so novel, but the radical ends to which Musk is driving it requires more backstory than mere Clintonism. In fact, to get to the deeper code of Musk's fantasy of running a country like a company, we need to leave the continent and follow the utopias that market radicals have charted

far beyond North American shores and across multiple decades. One such utopia was discovered in the late 1970s by Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago economist that Elon Musk's regularly posts memes about, warning of the perils of public spending. When Friedman visited the British Crown colony of Hong Kong in 1978, he felt he had discovered a territorial fix to the problems of the post-war interventionist state. Hong Kong had avoided excessive demands on the social state by never introducing them in the first place.

It had ensured people would not use their ballots to bankrupt the state by never giving them ballots at all. Free of the pressures of democracy, Hong Kong could be run according to the needs of the global market. What a place this was, thought Friedman. The finance secretary was more important than the governor, and businesses had more votes than residents. To Friedman, the crown colony of Hong Kong

looked like a model for an unruly world, where the nations that emerged out of empires were increasingly demanding some measure of reparations, self-determination, and social redistribution in the General Assembly of the United Nations. The vision of running a country like a company was the antidote to disorderly global democracy. Milton Friedman was not the only one to be smitten. China's paramount leader Deng Xiaoping also admired the nimbleness of Hong Kong as a model of capitalism without democracy. Other countries

seem to excel at this creation of a CEO-like head of state. In the 1990s, we think of Francis Fukuyama declaring the end of history with liberal democracy as the only political form left standing. Yet the first article he published after that famous book came out was on what he called Asia's quote soft authoritarian alternative. He observed that one party states like Singapore were winning consent from the population while keeping the opportunity for voice at a bare minimum. Into the 2000s other candidates became objects of praise. With the spike in oil prices after the American invasion of Iraq, Dubai and Abu Dhabi became

sites for glitzy real estate investment, exotic tourism, offshore manufacturing, and even satellite university campuses. In a few short decades, the emirate on the Persian Gulf staged a dizzying ascent from a gold smuggling outpost with houses built of coral and sand to the gilded home of the world's only seven star hotel, the world's tallest hotel, the world's only ski slope in a desert, and the world's highest tennis court. In 2003, plans were announced for an amusement park three times the size of Manhattan.

The same year, ground broke, or better,, on an archipelago of 300 artificial islands loosely shaped like a map of the world. The developer soon announced a sequel, the universe, an archipelago of planets and the moon. What democratic country could ever pull off something like this? One place where this model of government became especially attractive was in Silicon Valley. Immediately after Trump's recent election, the New York Times ran a large interview with a man named Curtis Yarvin, an acquaintance of the incoming Vice President, J.D. Vance.

Yarvin had been praising the idea of the CEO dictator for years. In 2009, he compared Dubai favorably to Iraq next door. What was democracy, according to his question, compared to the economic success of the Emirate? It was no coincidence that this attitude towards management was resonating in Silicon Valley. In the early 2000s, huge fortunes were being made, and politicians were lining up to bow down

to the new value creators and innovators. As Fred Turner has shown, the old hippies who had found out how hard it was to make a real world utopia on communes found out it was much easier to do so online. Yet there was always a subset of people in the valley who were still trying to make the immaterial material. One of them was the grandson of Milton Friedman, the very neoliberal economist who had praised Hong Kong as a microstate run like a business in the late 1970s. In the 2000s, Patry Friedman, the grandson, started promising that there could be a thousand

Hong Kongs. It was only an engineering problem to make it happen. His solution was what he called seasteading, and he received early support for it from the person who started PayPal with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel. In 2009, Thiel expressed frustration with the sluggishness of politics. I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible, he wrote. The great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms.

Maybe it would make sense to produce more polities, more jurisdictions. If we want to increase freedom, he said, we want to increase the number of countries. On Ideas, you're listening to Quinn Slobodian's global history of Elon Musk, recorded at the McGill Faculty Club in Montreal. Ideas is heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US public radio, across North America, on SiriusXM, on World Radio Paris, and in Australia on ABC Radio National. Stream us around the world at cbc.ca ideas and find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. I'm Sarah Trelevin and for over a, I've been working on one of the most complex

stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this?

What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now. Historian Quinn Slobodian has a few things in common with the subject of his critical lecture, Elon Musk. Both Slobodian and Musk built their careers

in the United States after spending their formative years in Canada and in southern Africa. Crucially, I was in southern Africa rather than South Africa, namely in Lesotho, you know, a post-colonial black governed small state that is entirely surrounded by South Africa has recently come into the news because it's become a punching bag for Donald Trump in the US aid expenditures. And in the 1980s, it was a real focus of a lot of NGO work and foreign aid work because there was a desire to make it a showcase of economic development surrounded by a white

supremacist apartheid South Africa. So my father was there, he's Canadian, he was there as a Lesotho flying doctor under the umbrella funding of CEDA, the now defunct Canadian International Development Agency. And the kids that I knew, the people we knew were all there, you know, with the best of intentions, doing what they saw as humanitarian work, making connections to the local population. My school was not an all-white enclave. It was kids from all over the world, including many Basutu children of the national elite, so to speak.

So I was in kind of a bubble of a different version of the late 20th century, I guess. It was still this UN idea that everyone could slowly move their economies towards a higher standard of living, that disease could be eradicated, that there could be some cooperation with independent governments after empire. And meanwhile, right next door, Musk was living in a very different place, which was late apartheid South Africa, where he was, you know, drinking really deeply of the ideology that his father was serving him, namely that the whites were the only people who had made value in this barren territory, and they are constantly besieged by, you know, hordes of parasitical and, you know, vengeful local black actors who need to be seen as barbarians at the gate, quite

literally. They were building enclaves that needed to be defended from the actual residents of that land. And that built in a very deep form of social Darwinist nihilism into his core that we're starting to see surface more and more clearly, most obviously lately in his campaigning for the rights of supposedly persecuted white Afrikaners to become refugees in the United States. And right now, some 60,000 white Afrikaners have actually filed applications to become asylees in the US. This is the only refugee population in the world that the Trump administration sees as

worthy of attention and they're certainly not the ones who are suffering the most acutely. So I think that our lives running in parallel in certain ways, I went from there to then teenagehood in Canada and then university and the rest of my career in the United States is a kind of uncanny mirroring in some way because I feel like I'm really holding on to certain possibilities of redistributive internationalism and cooperation and a reformed model of globalism. Whereas he obviously has now made his place in the camp that believes that the whole thing needs to be broken up and that states are actually just the servants of the makers and the entrepreneurs who have the better ideas and that democracy is entirely disposable

rather than for me that being a sort of precious principle that needs to be defended both here and in Lesotho and everywhere. Quinn sees an important development in how people, especially in the cultures of Silicon Valley and libertarian politics, began to shift the way they viewed the world. It took place around 2010, as exemplified in a Ted Talk given by Paul Romer, an economist at Stanford University. Professor Slobodian describes how Paul Romer made a case for an economic experiment known as the Charter City. What if the Cuban enclave of Guantanamo Bay, he suggested,

still being used as a black site for the war on terror, were turned over to Canada to turn it into a commercial metropolis. Three years later, he again pitched Canada on a similar role for Honduras. This was no humanitarian mission, he insisted. It was a business proposition. The Charter City would be a captured market and a client for Canadian services. Canada could offer education, healthcare, environmental management, and tax administration

on a fee-for-service basis. He even imagined a Caribbean contingent of the RCMP, patrolling the zones with wages drawn from land revenues. Romer found no takers in Canada and ended up ditching the project in Honduras, but in time it was taken over by a clutch of Silicon Valley investors and turned into what is now a very much real and existing enclave called Prospera on the island of Roatan just off the north coast of Honduras.

If disrupting government was the final frontier for the Silicon Valley tech class, it seemed they had found their ground zero. From the point of view of venture capital, statecraft looked like a grand slam, an untrodden field waiting for an investor with enough guts to enter. Patry Friedman, who was early in Honduras with his venture capital fund, which specializes in charter cities, pointed out that government services accounted for 30% of global GDP. People talk about disrupting medicine or energy or education, Friedman said at a conference being held at a libertarian university in Guatemala founded by a former collaborator

with a military junta that featured a three-story high relief wall fashioned after Ayn Rand's the fountainhead. Might be Atlas Shrugged, actually. Those are small potatoes, Friedman said. This is the big one. Government was the biggest cartel in the world. Let's think of countries as firms and citizens as customers, he said.

If there was such a thing as state failure, then we can cash in on it as entrepreneurs. Peter Thiel distinguished between the logic of globalization and the logic of the startup. Globalization was about mimesis, copying, emulation. In his terms, it went from one to N. A good startup was something else. It went from zero to one,

creating something that did not exist before. The startup city was a governance hack, a way of not simply creating a better nation state, but a novel kind of polity altogether. This was why Thiel funded Friedman's Seasteading Institute. He wanted to see innovation in the space of governance. He described the US at the time of the revolution also as a startup. If laws were software, Patry Friedman asked, then why was America's operating system written

in 1787? Reform was too slow and offered few new markets to capture. The path to better governance and profits was exit followed by what he called entry for entrepreneurs. By 2025, Prospero has moved heavily into medical research, life extension and unregulated body modification. Patry Friedman himself had his Tesla key implanted into his hand in Honduras last year.

Its buildings are designed by Patrick Schumacher, the principal of Zaha Hadid Architects, an avowed anarcho-capitalist who sees startup societies as a chance, as he put it, quote, to extend what might be possible, for instance, monarchies, perhaps ethnically based, even openly discriminatory polities, or illiberal theocracies using draconian forms of social control. These choices are probably not arbitrary.

They pretty much match the politics of Saudi Arabia, one of Schumacher's major clients. Zaha Hadid architects, it must be noted here that Zaha Hadid has been dead for some time. They're still trading off the capital of her name. Is one of the main architects for the futuristic and probably never to be constructed Neom project, which will hypothetically include a ski resort in the desert.

In Honduras, the startup society is facing off now against the government. The zones themselves had been set up after a right-wing coup, and a return to democracy meant an attempt to eject the Silicon Valley interlopers. Their response? Sue Honduras threw international treaties to the tune of $10.8 billion, one-third of the country's GDP. As one former investor who had co-authored a book with Whole Foods founder John Mackey on conscious capitalism, put it, without irony,

libertarians don't like international trade law, but it turns out international trade law is tremendously helpful. Facing friction in the global south, there are now efforts to bring the governance hack into the backyard of Silicon Valley. Last year it was revealed that tech billionaires had spent $700 million buying up 600 acres of farmland for the so-called California Forever development in Solano County, east of San

Francisco, an effort to found their own city. These developments were a few hours from Milton Friedman's own summer home in Sea Ranch, California, where Patry would have spent some of his holidays. Gated communities around the country with sprang up in the 1990s, offered living laboratories for the private government idea

where wealth, not citizenship, determined who made decisions. They were also in their own way the modern descendants of the company town of the Western frontier, where people were paid in script, usable only inside the community, and all property was held by a single owner. The latest version of this now has been moved to a vote

in the Texas legislature, Starbase Texas, where Elon Musk will be able to write his own laws. When Peter Thiel talked about why he was supporting the Seasteading Institute in 2009, he had said that there was no solution but exit from politics in all its forms. Yet only seven years later the same man was speaking at the Republican National Convention. One could conclude that he had decided it was easier to take over an existing nation than to start a new one.

Yet despite his prominence in the campaign, Thiel did not seem to have many opportunities to pursue his more utopian efforts in the first Trump administration. During the Biden years, he regrouped, putting money into the senatorial campaigns of two of his former employees. One lost his race, Blake Masters in Arizona.

The other, JD Vance, won his and is now the vice president of the United States. The foundations that Thiel has laid over the last decade are starting to take shape now and are plugging into new opportunities with the government. The same piece of Clinton era legislation that Musk had used to get the SpaceX contract was used just two years later by the company Teal had founded, Palantir, to secure a state

contract for surveillance as well. Despite all of these efforts at the global margins, however, and Teal's movement into the heart of power, it would take the wealth and recklessness of Elon Musk to bring the attitude of the startup society into the heart of power. It would take the wealth and recklessness of Elon Musk to bring the attitude of the startup society into the heart of government. His takeover of Twitter served as a dry run for the evisceration of a workforce. This is the ethos he brought with him

when he arrived in Washington. If that service could fire 80% of its workforce and keep running, then why couldn't the government do the same? His current run of sacking tens of thousands of workers and cutting tens of billions of dollars in expenditure, including whole agencies and departments, is putting the principle to the test.

At the same time, Trump's gestures towards territorial expansion and outright annexation seem to look like a different kind of animal. Isn't this more like old school empire than a futuristic startup society? Well, the answer depends on how old-school you mean. In the 19th century, Empire II was conducted through a mosaic of different legal arrangements and often through the initiative of private actors who made agreements with local authorities, defeated military forces, and then

set up their own enclaves. What tech bros now call countrypreneurship has a history, from the Englishman James Brooke who became the Raj of Sarawak, to the Michigander John Monroe Longyear, who staked out a patch of the Arctic and fashioned himself as the King of Spitzbergen in what is now Svalbard. Central America has long been a place where freebooters or so-called filibusters would set up a kind of quasi sovereignty and then hope the government would retroactively validate it.

The most famous of these, of course, was William Walker, who was executed, as it turns out, not far from where a special economic zone had been planned in Honduras in the 2010s. The way the Panama question has been apparently resolved and is an example of how outsourcing can become the way empire works. The US didn't end up annexing the Panama Canal.

Instead, they pushed the Hong Kong-based Hutchison, one of the grandchildren of that trading crown colony, to sell to an American company, the giant asset manager Blackrock. This empire by contractor model is also how things could progress in Greenland and perhaps even Canada itself. Rather than absorbing these land masses, the more likely model is pressuring them into granting forms of extraterritoriality to mining outfits, satellite downlink stations, and military installations. What begins to emerge is less the broad patches of a map painted in the colours of nations and something more like a mosaic or what I've called crack-up capitalism.

One place where this logic of fragmentation or ruling through things other than nation states was pushed farthest was of course in Elon Musk's own birthplace of South Africa. His grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, had left Regina in his own dreams of building a tech-nate of North America through Technocracy, Incorporated, to the place where a new apartheid state was building a version of technocracy with human difference as the central organizing principle. Apartheid South Africa innovated by blending colonial past laws with elements of post-colonial self

determination to create a facade of freedom for its controlled population. innovated by blending colonial past laws with elements of post-colonial self-determination to create a facade of freedom for its controlled population. The first of what would be 10 Bantu stands were created in Transkei in 1959 and given a phony independence in 1976, an internal fragmentation of South African territory where black South African residents were stripped of their citizenship and granted citizenship in

fictional territories known as homelands. The idea was to manage black workers as a reserve supply of labor while keeping up the thinnest facade of self-determination. Yet even as it experimented with its own version of blank slate racialized startup jurisdictions, South Africa remained deeply integrated into global industrial production. When Henry Ford's autobiography became an international bestseller in the 1920s, selling

20,000 copies in the Soviet Union alone, his name transformed from a proper noun into an ideology. Fordism meant mass production plus mass consumption, coupled with scientific management principles applied to the assembly line. Under apartheid, South Africa eagerly adopted Fordist principles, with Volkswagen becoming one of the first global brands to set up factories there, making the Volkswagen Beetle ubiquitous on South African streets. Elon Musk was born into this world in 1974, in a country that combined the archaic with the futuristic.

South Africa's so-called folks capitalism made it appear as a stable, prosperous enclave amid what was often cast as a black sea of chaos and disorder. Despite its partial diplomatic isolation, South Africa remained plugged into global supply chains and consumer markets, demonstrating capitalism's flexibility. It judged not first, but rather asked first what you had

to offer the market. When activists sought to create a scandal out of South African racism, they targeted goods in European supermarkets. In Holland's stores selling South African products were vandalized and gas stations of companies that did business in South Africa were destroyed by left-wing militants. Inside South Africa, some libertarian critics of apartheid believed the system needed to change too, but they rejected the model of universal suffrage and democratic citizenship.

Instead, they looked at places like Switzerland and Hong Kong for inspiration, proposing a system where governance was determined by consumer choice and market sovereignty rather than political representation. Before Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom became the dominant narrative of South African history, the country's bestselling book was South Africa, the Solution written by Leon Lowe and Francine Kendall. Its authors proposed breaking the country up into small cantons, stripping the state of its redistributive power and devolving authority

to miniature market enclaves, where admission would be based on property ownership. They envisioned a free market in politics, where various enclaves could exist, Marxist, black nationalist, libertarian, Maoist, white supremacist, all of them could flourish together. Of course, for many reasons, this model lost out to Mandela's vision of a multiracial democracy

with the unitary borders of South Africa left intact. But Elon Musk left South Africa just before this transition, bringing with him to Canada a memory of politics as violent struggle and an unsettled understanding of what citizenship could or couldn't mean. His father who stayed in South Africa retained a similar notion of membership in a political community as continually contested and sometimes needing to be defend with private security forces and even deadly force. Nothing of the notion of unitary Republican citizenship here. The 1990s in South Africa were in many ways the last moment of decolonization and Matt Musk had been there to witness it. A moment

when what a state could be or should be was being questioned in the most fundamental way. So all of these ideas that we might have about the obviousness of a certain model of post-Atlantic revolutionary statehood or nationhood are simply not part of his upbringing, not part of his political education. One of South Africa's closest allies during apartheid was Israel, a state similarly determined to turn its embattled isolation into a virtue and the use of territorial strategies to manage

a caste class of unwanted racialized residents. By the 2000s Israel had branded itself as the startup nation, where intelligence services funneled talent into a thriving tech sector, producing products that were immediately applicable to national security. When Musk expanded his empire in the 2000s, he also began seeing how his products could align

with the needs of the state. This is one of the many ways that he was different from his other Silicon Valley boy king brethren. He wasn't just trying to figure out ways for people to be better consumers and to connect outside of the state, but he was always quite intent on plugging into the state. While he's most identified with Tesla, SpaceX is now worth approximately half as much. Tesla cars themselves can be misunderstood as being primarily consumer objects. As Musk describes them, they are less vehicles than data harvesting machines. They are

autonomous robots disguised as cars, as he put it once. Every Tesla has eight cameras and 12 sensors, continually gathering information about its surroundings and the driver's behavior. This is ostensibly in service of creating self-driving vehicles, but more fundamentally it represents a broader vision of technocracy, a world where human decision-making is removed, replaced by principles that cannot be contested. Since the creation of his own AI company, XAI, in 2023,

he has become more and more open about the need to train his model on a new set of data. He believes that his erstwhile partner Sam Altman at OpenAI had allowed his AI to be, quote, ingested by the woke mind virus in its training. Thus, there was a need to create one that was pure of that, or arguably one that would rather spread an anti-woke mind virus. Most ambitions extend beyond technology to politics. He funds political actors who align with his vision from Georgia Maloney's brothers

of Italy to the German alternative for German for Deutschland. We could call this a counter infiltration strategy. Disruptive media campaigns, financial manipulation, and state alliances aiming to secure a world where the marketplace, not democratic governance, dictates social organization. We have a fuller vision of what this might look like in the undertaking of Musk's unelected role now in the deconstruction of the American central government

over the last six weeks. And also a fuller manifesto by someone affiliated with him in the broader ecosystem, Alexander Karp, the founder of Palantir. In this number one New York Times bestselling book, Karp argues that Silicon Valley has been misguided by spending too much time on building social media platforms and ride hailing apps, often pejoratively described as burrito hailing apps. Tech workers have also been wrong to protest against surveillance contracts for the Pentagon or the Department of Defense. Instead, tech needs to run in the opposite direction

into the hands of the government to rebuild it from the inside. Carp argues that we need 1,000 Manhattan projects, anchored by a belief in an impending existential rivalry between the United States and its adversaries. To win consent for this project, they will need to be sufficient prosperity. But because consent will not be complete, some forms of democracy might not be possible.

So in other words, the removal of all of those employees in the federal government is not assumed simply to be downsizing, but their substitution with new forms of automated processes. Meanwhile, the data that is pulled out of those often antiquated databases is used to feed the new proprietary AI software and thus theoretically elevating its ability to make better than human decisions.

One of the secrets, of course, of Ford and Tesla is that the machine is right, but the boss is always even more right. One of the twists in the global history of Elon Musk and his allies in Silicon Valley is that they see themselves as emulating China. But this is a China that doesn't actually exist. As we in the humanities could have pointed out long ago, Western ideas of the East are always simply reflections of how the West wants to see itself. The media theorist Wendy Chun coined the term

techno-Orientalism to describe the way cyberpunk saw Japanese and Chinese modernity as a fusion of geishas with androids, samurai warrior casts with cyborg modifications. Now the techno-orientalism that matters most is the diluted belief on the part of Carp, Musk and others that China operates through a collusion between the heads of state and a few hand-picked tech moguls who determine all allocation of funding and state investment. Musk has tried to flex his own status in this direction, meeting with top party officials to secure special access

for his factory in Shanghai. And yet China actually operates very differently, with intensely competitive provincial ecosystems where a large number of startups die unceremonious deaths and a select few claw their way out. Having achieved something close to monopoly in their respective sectors though, the techno-orientalists of Silicon Valley want to lock in their dominance permanently.

The assault on the federal government by Doge is partially an execution of the blueprint contained in the think tank Bible of something like Project 2025, and Musk himself is obviously being used as a bludgeon by hard-right conservatives like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought. But it is also the most breathtaking effort yet at building a startup state, this time in the guts of the world's still dominant hegemon. The elimination of whole agencies, the determination to swap out legacy military firms like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon with upstarts from the Valley like Palantir and Anderil.

Recall Patry Friedman's statement, let's think of countries as firms and citizens as customers. Can we cash in on it as entrepreneurs? The final frontier of tech, it turns out, was not further west, in the cloud, the oceans, or the Central American isthmus, but back east in the heart of power. Populated by bureaucrats and courts, too flat-footed and bound by expectations of decency and convention, to expect that they'd be fed one day, in Musk's metaphor, into the woodchipper. The global history of Elon Musk has to end here. As sales of his cars fall around the world, he has nothing to fear because he has now made himself indispensable to the very functioning of the U.S. government. This is authoritarianism by algorithm and the arbitrary whims of the man at the controls.

In 2019, Musk posted that he was accelerating Starlink to build the Martian technocracy. So far it is both more and less than that. A globe spanning financialized enterprise to annex government and subordinate populations to the role of feeding data to his machines. Welcome to the startup future. You were listening to Quinn's Lobodians, a global history of Elon Musk delivered at the McGill Faculty Club in Montreal. This episode was produced by Tom Howell. Thank you to Edward Dunsworth and Melissa Gismondi. Ideas is a broadcast and a podcast. If you liked the episode you just heard, check out our vast archive where you can find more

than 300 of our past episodes. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed.