Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Elon Musk’s Final Plan: A Dangerous Blueprint For World Domination

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

Elon Musk has evolved far beyond a billionaire CEO. SUPPORT MY WORK: Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at usermag.co  Support my work on Patreon for bonus episodes, monthly Q&A livestreams, and more: http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz   According to political theorists Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, Musk has created an entirely new ideology called “Muskism” — a system where technology companies merge with state power, AI shapes politics, and billionaires become more powerful than governments.In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I sit down with Quinn Slobodian, co-author of the new book Muskism, to break down how Elon Musk’s worldview went from Silicon Valley optimism to tech authoritarianism. We discuss Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, AI censorship, OpenAI, Grok, surveillance, DOGE, data centers, Silicon Valley’s shift toward defense tech, and why Musk’s influence now reaches into every part of society.We also unpack:Elon Musk’s political transformationThe rise of MuskismAI paranoia and “woke AI”Why Silicon Valley is embracing militarizationMusk’s obsession with reproduction and population declineHow SpaceX and Starlink could reshape global powerThe future of AI and surveillance capitalismWhy tech billionaires are becoming impossible to escape

Open AI and Anthropic have created woke AIs that are now going to, in time, do things to him in particular, including my favorite, turn him into a woman of color. Elon Musk has become inescapable. And lately it feels like his ideology has completely upended our entire world. It's shaping governments, companies, and seemingly all of society. This is what writers and political theorists Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slibertian argue in their, their new book called Muskism. They claim that Elon Musk has effectively developed this new way of running society. The idea is to merge big business with government power in a way that's really never been done before.

So what is muskism? How is it affecting all of us and what can we do to escape it? Quinn Slobodian, the co-author of muskism, is here to break it all down. Happy to be here. So let's start off by defining muskism. The way we started thinking about muskism is the way people have talked about Fordism. So 100 years ago, people looked at this man Ford who was making the Model T, rethinking the way cars could be made, and they asked what kind of larger social system was implied by the ability to make an affordable consumer vehicle.

They called it Fordism, and it stretched from like the male breadwinner headed family to eventually the welfare state, the national economy at large. Our one-liner is that it's the promise of sovereignty through technology that ends up cashing out as, increased dependency on him in particular. So he sells the promise of electric autonomy, security, connectivity to customers, households, individuals, and also governments. But then in the process, you actually end up becoming more and more locked in his walled garden and subordinated, really, to the kind of whims of one billionaire, which is quite a high price to pay for state capacity and sovereignty. Yeah, it sounds like kind of what every tech CEO does, though. Don't Mark Zuckerberg and Bezos and all of these guys kind of trap us in their systems and profit off us.

Are Google and meta and these other platforms also acting as nation states? Yes and no. I mean, I think he is a kind of especially exaggerated member of this species for sure. But if you look at the success he's had in globalizing this, it actually stands apart from the people that you just named, right? It's been actually impossible basically for Zuckerberg to get into China, for example, no matter how hard he tried. It's been pretty hard for Bezos to get into China too, no matter how hard he tried.

Whereas Musk, at his height, has been able to sell his vision to the Chinese gigafactory in Shanghai, to the Germans, a gigafactory outside Brandenburg, and then to the Americans, a gigafactory in Nevada. So there's this way that he can sell the vision of nationalist hardening of borders, even though you're all kind of routing through him the whole time. And that hasn't been something that other people have pulled off very well. I guess this is what makes him the richest man alive is that he's been able to kind of like work in all these areas. And as you mentioned, he also produces hardware and rockets and satellites.

And the satellites are an important part of this, right? Because I think one of the times when people really started to sit up and take notice of Musk's new leverage was in the Russia-Ukraine war, where we know that he turned off satellite connectivity for Ukrainian soldiers in the battlefield at more than one occasion. And that was the kind of thing that, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, for all of his faults. Jeff Bezos, for all of his faults, have never had the ability to stop a war in its tracks or turn the tide of conflict,

the way that Musk was able to right there. One of the thing that's interesting about him is he isn't just making fairy dust and apps and social media platforms, right? Like, he was always in the business of making hard stuff, too. And that's part of the reason why people admire him so much. He's making rockets.

He's making cars. Even as he was, you know, buying X and becoming like the prolific meme lord that he is, Obviously, now he's risen to this height of the richest man who's ever walked the earth. And so that itself is something to be reckoned with. Like, how has this person seemingly got more and more deranged over time and yet has been more and more rewarded by like the supposed wisdom of the marketplace? So that conundrum was really at front of mind for us.

And then, of course, we started writing in the middle of Doge and the fact that he's storming into the White House unelected and co-governing alongside Trump for us was just like, are we seeing something that's kind of unprecedented in the history of capitalism, right? Like Henry Ford wasn't jumping into the Oval Office and trying to co-govern in the 1930s. It's actually pretty weird for capitalists to take that super hands-on approach. So it seemed like a kind of rupture was happening that we could understand better by looking at him. As we all probably know by now, Elon Musk grew up in South Africa. When do you think his ideology started to emerge? Part of our argument is that part of it emerges in South Africa itself. It's, of course, very easy and popular for obvious reasons to

attribute now his late turn to the right and his racism and xenophobia to his South African upbringing. But on the other hand, he was pretty opposed to the apartheid regime when he left South Africa as a teenager, called it a fascist army that he didn't want to take part in. So it makes more sense maybe to look at how South Africa's economy was organized. And the way it was organized, as we call fortress futurism. It was building its own nuclear weapon. It was using high-tech computers to practice apartheid. It was building its own cars inside of its borders.

So it was kind of turning the country of South Africa into a fortified enclave in a world of threats. And it's that vision that seems to be more at the heart now of what Musk is really selling people, like security in an insecure world. He's constantly conjuring up a vision of all of the threats, whether it's climate disaster,

or immigrant hordes, political unrest, and you can be safe if you buy his products and circle yourself in the Tesla dome that reaches from satellites to solar panels to a cyber truck in the driveway. It sounds like whether he was aware of it or not, he absorbed a lot of beliefs from his childhood in South Africa, as you mentioned this apartheid

techno state back then. But when he moves to Silicon Valley, he starts getting involved in tech. How do we see those beliefs evolving in this new environment? One of the interesting things about him is as soon as he gets to Silicon Valley, he's actually looking for ways that the state can help him further his own enterprises. And that goes right to Zip 2, which is his first business most people don't even know about. But it's basically like a way-finding city directory. But it was relying on free GPS data. GPS had just come online. So this is a state technology that now he's tapping into and commercializing. PayPal is when he made his first fortune. And that's taking advantage of the fact that the state covers deposits and banks. In the end, PayPal is just, using a digital payment service, but it's still covered by the state umbrella of FDIC that you see whenever you walk into a local branch.

So he never saw the state as an enemy, the same way that I think someone like Peter Thiel, circa 99, 2000, even up to 2009 was talking about exiting the state, going to C-setting in the South Pacific, or getting out of democracy and politics altogether. Musk was always interested in how he could kind of game the system, backstop his initiatives by Uncle Sam and plug into the state rather than unplugging from it. He's really kept the through line with that, which made him kind of a frontrunner in what came later. Now he seems like a standard Silicon Valley leader, because everyone from Alexander Karp to Mark Andreessen just wants to, you know, plug into the military industrial complex. But in 2002, when Musk started SpaceX as a basically contractor for the global war on terror, that was not at all.

the vibe in Silicon Valley. So he was out of joint or a bit out of time then, and he ended up being right on time a few years later. What about his move into Tesla and this persona that he develops around himself, really in the late aughts and early 2010? I feel like he was held up as this genius Tony Stark type figure that was, you know, pro-innovation and going to change the world.

And people really looked up to him. I mean, Tony Stark was also an arms dealer, right? So maybe the comparison isn't so far. off. And the Tesla story ends up being quite interesting for us because he gets his start with SpaceX, you know, in hard tech by capitalizing on the war on terror. He's basically like, I'm going to build the rockets and satellites that will allow special forces to go everywhere that will guide munitions to their target. That's 2002. Six years later, 2008, when Obama comes into office, people have really soured on the war on terror. Actually, it's not popular anymore. Obama is basically

the anti-war candidate, which is why he beats Hillary. So now you can do something that, you can do something that's for national security but looks quite different, which is creating electric vehicles. The argument that Obama made in 2008, very interestingly and basically forgotten, is that if we unplugged from fossil fuels, we would also unplug from foreign policy entanglements in the Middle East. And you could just have more autonomy as a nation if you build solar panels, built windmills, and electrify the auto sector. So he was actually bailing out the auto sector and making them build EVs. They didn't know how to do that. Musk actually had plugged into the expertise that did know how to do that.

So he gets a life-saving nearly $500 million loan in 2009, profiting now from the backlash of the war on terror that he had used the rollout to make his earlier bid with SpaceX. It sounds like he would kind of conservative low-key in the odds, but I feel like at least as far as I became aware of him, which was probably like the 2010s, he was perceived as this very liberal figure and like Democrats loved him. Is he just one of those people that's like a chameleon where he's,

sort of adopting the vibe of the time, or do you think that muskism was like on pause during that time or what? Yeah, I mean, that's really our approach is not to see muskism as this Bible that he was referring back to to figure out how to guide his investments and his actions. What we think of as muskism is coming out of his practice as a capitalist. So he's not getting his ideas like before bed when he leaps through like Ein Rand or Isaac Asimov. He's getting his ideas when he's rationalizing the factory floor, cutting payroll, persuading investors of his next initiative, getting backing from the United States government, that's where muskism emerges. And that actually stays quite consistent. If you think of the consistency being like, use the state

as a backstop, plug into whatever frontier technology he can capitalize on that has few competitors in it and then quickly build out to a monopoly stake, then you don't have to see him as a green peacnick for building Tesla as just someone who saw a market niche that was wide open and could be driven right into. So I think often it's people projecting things onto him rather than things that he's saying himself. I mean, the fact of the matter is that if you asked which party was really the party of Silicon Valley from the 90s into the 2010s, it was the Democrats, right? It was Al Gore who moved to Silicon Valley and became a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins. It was Clinton that gave the internet a state-funded entity to the commercial sector for nothing. So it was

natural to ally with the party that seems like it was the one that was going to be the site of your most enrichment. And when that mood changed into the 2010s and he felt now alienated by his previous people who he was the beneficiary of, then he changed his political affiliation. But the throughline of the principles, I think, didn't change. If you're watching this video and you like my work, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter at usermag.com. That's usermag.com. I don't have any long-term brand partnerships and a lot of my content is effectively demonetized. I've lost major brand deals for speaking out on certain issues and for challenging power. As you can imagine, advertisers are not exactly

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Every dollar of your support makes such a difference. You talk about in the book this concept of financial fabulism. Can you explain what that means? So it has to do with the way you can make money and sell a business in Silicon Valley, right? You have this venture capital model, which means there's a few people that have a huge amount of money, which they're willing to make very big bats on people with the hope that just one of 10 or one of 50 might pay off. The other 49 might fail, no problem. But if that one really hit, then it's going to subsidize the rest of the failures.

So to be one of those 50 of the hundreds and thousands of people trying to compete for that limited pool of money, you need to not just say, I'm going to make these like incremental improvements on a product that already exists. or just make this thing a little cheaper than it already is, you need to promise a whole new market. You need to say the future will be different once my product is rolled out. Once people can do X, Y, or Z online, then life will never be the same.

So it's part of the kind of venture capital way that you create a startup and get seed money for a startup in Silicon Valley that kind of makes necessary what would otherwise be called just lying. I mean, you have to be like, oh, yeah, and in 10 years, this company will grow 100x. and be delivering to a client base of over half the American population.

Not true in most cases, but even if you get, you know, a percentage of the way to your declared fabulous goal, then that might be enough to get you the backing. So I think a lot of the time what's called lying in the case of someone like Sam Altman or fabrication on the part of Musk is simply how business is done, right? It's actually quite practical to lie in that way, because if you were telling the truth, no one would back you. They would say, this is too moderate of a payoff and it's not worth an investment. Yeah, I feel like all of Silicon Valley is just based on inflated claims.

Absolutely. Because every once in a while, they pay off. And when they do, then it makes it all worth it. So Elon Musk comes out as pro-Trump. I feel like it's really post-2020 that he's like openly kind of radicalized into the right. Is that when you see this muskism ideology like really coming into fruition? I think that the through line of muskism we've been describing, which is just selling a product, or a service that allows the government to do things better

than it would have been able to do otherwise is something that he does throughout his career. He's doing it for Democrats at some points. He's doing it for the Chinese at other points. He's doing it for the German government at other points. But he's always offering that service. It's not just crony capitalism. It's like, I'm actually going to lower the cost

of putting mass in orbit by 90%. I am going to get reusable rockets. It's going to get much cheaper to do things that have been more expensive. But a couple of things that have been more expensive. happen in the Biden years that I think radicalize him. The normal way people talk about it is like Biden basically wasn't nice enough to him, right? Didn't invite him to the White House for the EV summit, appointed someone in the government who was going to like break up Silicon Valley

monopolies, regulate AI, raise taxes on the most wealthy parts of the population. All of those are true. But one of the things that we really focus on in the book, and we think is under-examined, is what we call his cyborg turn. So part of our argument is that why he ends up the way he is, is that he becomes more and more convinced, really more around 2015 than 2020, that the primary layer of reality is online and that everything offline is simply downstream from what happens on the internet. Now, I might be talking to someone who actually also believes that. I actually agree with him. So you're being like, uh-oh. You know, it would be interesting to see where you and him differ, because actually, I think in that opinion, he wasn't so far from the way a lot of mainstream opinion was going to.

I mean, if you think about the way that the 2016 election of Trump was explained by middle of the road liberals was like... Russia bought like Facebook ads and that's like Donald Trump. Troll armies, Cambridge Analytica, you know, Facebook juked the election. So that was also a belief that actually the real politics happens online and everything else is just downstream of that. But Musk like went extra hard with that belief. And arguably was already a few clicks further into it by 2015 when he founds OpenAI with Sam Altman. Because when he does that, people are like, oh, he was actually nominated as Luddite of the year, believe it or not, in 2015. Which is crazy.

I don't know about that. By who? Well, I can't remember, but it's out there. There's a Guardian article about it at the time. But if you listen to the way that his founding of Open AI is being described, you could kind of understand. Because it gets narrated as like, they're worried about a. runaway digital superintelligence, basically turning us all into paper clips or gray goo.

So they're warning about the pace of research and development of AI. But what is he doing like almost immediately after founding open AI? Founding Neurrelink. What is he saying that he's doing with Neurlink? He's saying, I want to expand the interface between the internet and the human brain. So it's like a rushing river instead of a pinprick. We actually need to become the AI to get out ahead of the digital superintelligence It's evil AI.

So that's a very not Luddite thing to say. And it's also like the opposite of Luddite. Yeah. And it's like, you know, your book is extremely online. I don't even know how much more you'd have to go. This is very, very, very, extremely online, right? The belief that we have become cybernetic collective, as he calls it, we are a kind of manned machine symbiote and we need to accelerate that process to be able to make sure that we thwart

the dangers that lie out there with a completely autonomous AI. So that was the way he was thinking, circa 2015. It takes it a very important turn, and this is where I would say, and me and Ben argue in the book, that his real departure from reality takes place in 2022 with the launch of Chad GPT and the coming to realization of the power of LLMs and chatbots, he says openly again and again that open AI and Anthropic have created woke AIs that are now going to in time do things to him in particular, including my favorite, turn him into a woman of color. What?

Yeah. That is on the record, him saying that he's worried that is going to happen eventually and become what he calls a woke super nanny that is going to, you know, exterminate people for misgendering someone or kill white people because that's the most radical form of affirmative action. This starts to sound just like he got delusional. Yes, but what happened in the course of that delusion, he found a whole block of investors behind him who are like, we agree, Elon, and we are going to back your XAI company to the tune of

like, you know, tens of billions of dollars. Okay, but can I say something about this? Now I'm scared. You're making me feel very paranoid. I'm like, wait, why do I? That must be hard to do, yeah. Okay, so obviously I don't agree with Elon of us. First of all, he is a terrible person.

But since I've gone independent, I have been using different LLMs. I kind of was just not using them. And then lately, I'm just like, wait. I'm a tech reporter. I need to use these as much as possible to, like, truly understand what's going on. And there's something about GROC. And I talk to another big content creator who uses GROC every single day now. Because there is so much censorship on this content.

Like, I'm constantly asking Claude or ChatGBT to generate a description of something or help me make an image of something. And it will be like, I can't do that. I can't do that. That's against my terms. Because it mentions, I don't even want to say all the words, you know, I cover a lot of controversial topics. And it misinterprets you as promoting those ideas rather than... Yeah. And so I myself, just yesterday, used GROC. He's making these arguments from like a completely bad faith, insane place.

But I also cover a lot to do with censorship and surveillance, which by the way, he doesn't give a shit about either. No. Let's be real. He supports the kids' online safety act and all these other censorship bills. I mean, it is scary that like open AI and anthropic were the only two. Like, should we have more competitors? Should they be more free and open in terms of expression? I don't know. I mean, again, And he doesn't actually care about those things, but is he maybe right? Yeah, I mean, he obviously exploits genuine grievances or genuine social needs. For example, the need to do like a green energy transition.

I mean, nobody that I know of is against the idea of decarbonizing, you know, the auto sector. And yet it is a bit tragic that you have to then buy a Tesla that comes preloaded with GROC, you know, which if you ask, you know, what is, you know, the great replacement theory will give you like a pretty softball version of what that is. So I think that he's obviously very canny at being able to exploit these market niches again, right? I mean, he was probably correct at the time that there was a space for something that would not produce pictures of the founding fathers that were like African American, as Google Gem and I famously did. Right. I mean, those were recognized bloopers by those companies at the time over correction that did need to be kind of, you know, brought back in within rational bounds and so on. So he, yeah, he's definitely made use of that. But, I mean, to say that he's not interested in free speech or safety is a pretty serious understatement, right?

I mean, he turned Grok into a CSAM generator just to juice user numbers ahead of its merger with XAI in the early weeks of this year. So he runs roughshod over the idea of actual free speech, even as, of course, he uses that language in his sales pitches. Oh, he banned me from Twitter for reporting critically on him. So along with a lot of other journalists, although I got back on eventually, but it really bothers me, too, as somebody that covers these speech laws and reports a lot on like these online safety laws being weaponized to silent speech across the country. Meta and Google are heavily involved in lobbying for these laws. Elon Musk, for all this he talks about speech.

He doesn't lobby for anything. If anything, he joins Meta and Google in lobbying for censorship and surveillance laws because he loves mass surveillance. And he happily complies with take down requests from people. like the Indian government. So yeah, no, I mean, it takes for granted that he's speaking out of both sides of his mouth. But the interesting thing about explaining

his turn to the right through this kind of cyborg turn is I think it gives it a different coloration. It actually helps to explain why he acted the way he did, for example, when he was in Doge. So Doge is this thing that now is almost like a fever dream for all of us. We're like, God, did that really happen? It was only about a year ago.

But at the time, it was understood by most people as being like completely haywire, just destruction for its own sake, almost. And then if anything was rational, it was like this attempt to root out wokeness through canceling USAID, canceling National Endowment for the Humanities grants and so on. But if you look through the cyber lens, which is what we do in the book, then you see that what he's actually doing is seeing the government, as he called it to Ted Cruz, as a bunch of computers. And in effect, actually seeing people as a bunch of code inside of a bunch of computers. So,

So when he's rooting out what he sees as like the viruses or the bots or the bad code inside of the Social Security Administration and then identifying them as like 200-year-old vampires or whatever, that's actually then taken offline as the hunt for those embodied computer viruses that end up being basically immigrants in all cases, right? So his fear of contamination by non-white populations is really actually just a physical version of his online fear of being infected by a virus. The woke mind virus is a term that's totally strange and hard to take seriously. But the mind virus is a term coined by Richard Dawkins in the early 1990s, who also coined the term

meme in the 1970s. So it comes along with it an idea that politics is just this decentralized network space in which people just copy and paste memes to one another and never actually reflect on things rationally or else like collaborate, find compromise, deliberate, mobilize. It's just a bunch of individual nodes just swapping back and forth. And then what you need is someone like him, like sysadmin, as he's tech support, as he called himself a doge to go in and just like clean the stables and root out the source code and then the embodied bad source code that is walking around the streets.

And of course, we know now actually that entire doge project cost. us billions of dollars because he didn't actually make anything more efficient. He made it less efficient. It's costing us even more now and now we're going to pay more taxes to deal with it. Yeah, or the state won't be able to collect taxes, right? It's more is more to the point. Well, on certain people, on certain people. Right, exactly.

Yeah. Where do you see this leading? I think it's helpful to think about like where are his strengths and where his weakness is. So his strengths right now, the reason why he's back in the news to some extent is because of the coming IPO of SpaceX. So, SpaceX is going to go public. It's going to be the biggest company to go public in history, reported to maybe go as much as $2 trillion, which is absolutely enormous.

So its first question is, why is it worth that much, right? Like, are those rockets really that great? And the answer is that it's mostly about the satellites, the most profitable part of Musk's huge empire, but in some ways the least recognizes the Starlink satellite system. which is responsible for a lot of revenue, and has some pretty eye-popping numbers behind it. So he started putting those low Earth orbit satellites

in space in 2019. Now there's over 11,000. And with the FCC, just a month and a half ago, he put in a request to put in one million satellites into orbit, which means he's trying to monopolize the whole orbital band of low Earth orbit in a bid to basically become the monopoly service provider for everyone who wants to do battle anywhere in the world.

Anyone who wants to connect to eventually their mobile, he's just launched Starlink Mobile and has spent a lot of money buying up Spectrum through other deals. So that's really the forefront of things right now. And who are the biggest holders of that SpaceX equity, Google and Fidelity, which is a big manager of index funds that manages people's personal investments, their college investments, their pension funds? So once SpaceX goes public, suddenly he's going to be like in everyone's lives, like whether they want it or not, right? Like you might hate Musk, but you might have a college fund for your child, as I do, for example, with fidelity that is nevertheless like partially rising and falling based on how SpaceX is doing. So his ability to make himself too big to fail for global investment markets is the part where I think he has the biggest strength. He's also making big moves, building his own chip plant called the TerraFab. We'll probably, I expect, merge Tesla into his other companies soon.

And guess what? Investors love it. It doesn't matter how freaky he acts. These supposedly sober-minded people that manage, like, the Swedish and Norwegian oil fund, will still sign off it and be like, yeah, no, we think that Musk will deliver. So he is bulletproof in some weird way. Like, he seems to keep on falling forward, even when his products don't always sell or work the way he wants them to.

But I think there's also weaknesses. So the weaknesses, I think, are that he and his whole Silicon Valley leadership class has basically made a one-way bet on generative AI right now. And that one-way bet relied on a couple things, relied on cheap energy, cheap credit, and a friendly government and power. And no resistance from the popular. And it just meant we're going to do a Manhattan-sized data center in Abilene, Texas, and nobody's going to bat an eyelash.

We're going to build another one in the state over and everyone's just going to let it happen, even though it will create no jobs, like besmirch the landscape, suck up the water. There are issues with data centers. I think that if they're going to be put anywhere to put them out in the middle of nowhere is fine. If you look at the energy use of like an Amazon warehouse, which is significant or some of these other big industrial plants or something that use a lot of energy, I mean, those provide jobs, even agriculture, which is a terrible industry in a lot of ways that's destroying our environment. And I think the issue with these data centers, like, after they're constructed, they're constructed. Right.

Just a couple people like overseeing them. Yeah. From the point of view of like the weakness of Musk, the problem here is that people are starting to get angry about these data centers, whether it's based on partial information or not. I mean, Maine just passed the first statewide ban on construction. It's hilarious because no one's putting data centers in Maine. New England is always going to be cranky first. I mean, you're not going to beat New England for crankiness.

Like it's what I both. paid and love about this part of the country. So that's going away. The cheap energy is obviously gone because of this misguided war. The cheap credit comes and goes, depending on the week. This is a good week for the NASDAQ. We don't know what next week will hold. And the midterms are coming. And I think a lot of kind of left populist and even canny Democrats and even Republicans probably are going to start lining up against the AI push, lining up against the data center push. Cynically or not, it's going to become, I think, a new default position. So that window, when the X-AI scaling could happen,

and Anthropic and Open AI might be closing for them. And it's not totally clear what they do after that, whether or not they then just have to keep on banning Chinese cars to make sure that they can hold on to their own market, or if there's some kind of pivot to a new growth story that we don't know about yet. So he, I think, is not invulnerable, is what I'm trying to say. I want to believe that.

It's interesting to see backlash to AI, and it does seem like that could potentially jeopardize a bit of his But Open AI was most vulnerable in terms of their consumer use declining because they're more of a consumer product. A lot of these companies survive on B2B business models and government contracts. And those things don't go away so easily. That's right. And one of my favorite things I read about today was that one in five cyber trucks right now is being sold to SpaceX itself. Oh my God. So and SpaceX is basically serving purely government contracts.

So I think you're right that I think part of their anti-democratic solution is to make themselves. consumer proof by just finding the one big client and then saying like, you know, Palantir or whatever, we don't care if you don't like us. We're the only game in town and ICE needs us and the Department of Defense needs us. So you can act like a clown like Alex Carp and basically put your middle finger up at everyone watching and it doesn't matter. So that impunity is definitely part of the muskest mix for sure. It is true that he's become so inescapable. And I think what's so interesting about the stuff that you're talking about is like, I feel like we've had so many books and so much coverage of like his niche business decisions and like the acquisition

of Twitter, you know, which I love those and I read all of it. But it's interesting to see this ideology that you're describing take hold and manifest. And I don't know. I mean, it seems like also other tech leaders embrace it. Yeah. I mean, me and Ben had started writing this book when Alexander Carps, the technological republic came out. And we were kind of taken it back when we picked it up because we're like, oh, this is basically what we're describing ourselves that we were calling muskism, Karp wrote that book basically with the intention of a Kamala Harris incoming presidency, and he thought he could sell it to a democratic kind of geo-economic administration too. What's the similarity between the two? Why is it different from like Zuckerberg era, Web 2.0

rhetoric? It's not making a promise of like connection, making the world a better place, you know, making you wealthy, making life easier. It's basically saying like the world is a dangerous place And you need us for security, you need us to fortify yourself and your nation against risks outside and inside. So basically stop complaining, man up, like stop ordering the burritos and like give us all of your trust and all of your data and all of your votes. And that's like a crazy kind of extortionist contract to give to the average person. But it really is right now what the hard tech version of Silicon Valley is offering to people. And I think everyone is just like, there must be another thing. offer, but it's still in question what it is.

That is all I see, especially when I see startups as well. Like, I think they've all really come to embody this. Obviously, I live in L.A., but like go down in El Segundo, it's like all these defense tech companies. And it's so different from when I started as a tech reporter in the early 2010s when it was this millennial optimism, like, we're going to change the world, you know, and now they're like, we're going to make up. Stray the enemy.

Yeah. One other thing that I'm just wondering about, you know, Elon has all these weird beliefs around reproduction. Like he's constantly trying to have more and more children. He offered for his employees, I guess the like hot female employees that a company could use his sperm for IVF. He has, God knows how many children. What role does that desire to procreate play in muskism?

Yeah, I think it's helpful to drill down on his actual reproductive practices. That's a horrible sentence. I'm sorry that I just uttered that because it helps put into context a lot of his really flabby claims. So, you know, he'll say like, I'm saving humanity. Okay, how exactly? Or even the white race is declining. We need to keep up the demographic birth rate. Okay, but have you ever mentioned anything like parental leave or baby bonuses or anything? No. So what is he actually doing when it comes to saving the human race is literally just propagating his own sperm as aggressively and rapidly as possible, right? And then getting his family office manager to manage his offspring that is spread around the world from what we understand. And the offspring are produced in many cases by literally Fedaxing his semen to the host or recipient. So this is a very strange form of pronatalism because it's super individualized.

It's like only me, the cent a billionaire, is going to reproduce my own bloodline. It's not even about the nation. It's not even about the race. Certainly not about humanity at large. Instead, it's actually closest to something, believe it or not, that was dreamed up by the Collins's, Simone and Malcolm Collins, these famous pronatalist couple that wears the quirky Wes Anderson glasses, they wrote a piece on like an effective altruism forum years ago that said, there's a weird but true fact that if one billionaire was able to come up with reproductive

technologies that would allow each generation from him downward for something like 14 generations to have 10 children each, then it would reach something close to a global population. The math that they laid out, I was like, that can't be right. And then I did the matter, like, actually, it's true. It's never going to happen that way. There's all kinds of social reasons. But he is now friends with them. Malcolm's brother was in Doge.

And I somehow think that maybe he's been persuaded by this idea that an ever-spreading tree of musks can actually ultimately repopulate the earth. I don't know how inbreeding happens under those circumstances. It would be very complicated to stay on top of the gene pools, but it does seem to be part of his thinking. is thinking. Or maybe they all just go populate Mars.

That would be great. That's true. One galaxy each. Well, Quinn, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a pleasure. All right, that's it for this week's episode of Free Speech Friday. If you like my work, please, please support me on Patreon or Substack via the link below. My substack newsletter gives you a weekly roundup of everything that I'm reading, seeing,

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