The New Yorker Radio Hour - How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

Elon Musk, who’s chainsawing the federal government, is not merely a chaos agent, as he is sometimes described. Jill Lepore, the best-selling author of “These Truths” and other books, says that Musk is animated by obsessions and a sense of mission he acquired through reading, and misreading, science fiction. “When he keeps saying, you know, ‘We’re at a fork in the road. The future of human civilization depends on this election,’ he means SpaceX,” she tells David Remnick. “He means . . . ‘I need to take these rockets to colonize Mars and that’s only going to happen through Trump.’ ” The massive-scale reduction in social services he is enacting through DOGE, Lepore thinks, is tied to this objective. “Although there may be billions of [people] suffering here on planet Earth today, those are miniscule compared to the calculation of the needs of the billions of humans that will one day ever live if we can gain escape velocity from planet Earth. . . . That is, in fact, the math that lies behind DOGE.” Lepore’s BBC radio series on the SpaceX C.E.O. is called “X-Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story.” Plus, an organizer of the grassroots anti-Musk effort TeslaTakedown speaks with the Radio Hour about how she got involved, and the risks  involved in doing so. that poses. “It’s a scary place we all find ourselves in,” Patty Hoyt tells the New Yorker Radio Hour producer Adam Howard. “And I won’t stop. But I am afraid.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It may take us many years to understand fully what's happening in America right now. This attempt by Donald Trump, as well as Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, the authors of Project 2025, and so many others to radically reshape this country in its institutions as quickly and as brutally as possibly. We've been talking a lot on the radio hour about the colossal upheaval of the first hundred days of the Trump administration and what could be more important. But today the subject that we're going to drill down on is an appraisal of Elon Musk and his vision of our future. Of the many politicians who have tried to position themselves as Trump's heir and closest advisor, really only Elon Musk rivals the boss.

And in some ways he exceeds him. There's that astronomical untold wealth. There's his delight in trolling his enemies and his contempt for government and its rules. And there's a deep belief in him that what's good for Elon Musk is precisely what matters. And yet the thing is, Elon Musk is not just a chaos agent, as he's sometimes called. He's driven by a distinct ideology, or at least a clear set of obsessions. And to find out more about this, I called up Gilipur. the best-selling author of these truths and other works of history.

And I called her because she's written about Elon Musk for The New Yorker, and she's also produced a podcast about him called X-Man. She's a professor at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. We spoke last week. Jill, Elon Musk is only recently a MAGA figure. He supported Obama. He supported Biden in 2020. He was strong on climate change and the shift away from

fossil fuel. So to what degree do you understand him as a self-interested agent where Trump is concerned, or is he really sincere in his turn to the right? I think Musk is a man of many costumes, and he likes to play roles. He is a person who is very immersed in the world of video gaming and comic books and science fiction in Hollywood superhero movies. Wearing the dark MAGA hat and the Occupy Mars black t-shirt is as much a costume and a performance as it is an expression of sincere political commitment. So Musk went to Stanford in 1995

and for a PhD program, and he left after a couple days to start his first company. In order to raise funds for their ventures, they were all encouraged to promise to be altering the destiny of the species. And that sense of the messianic language

that was required to get funding from venture capitalists, I think a kind of fully grown-up person would engage in that and know that it was bullshit. I'm sorry, this is radio. A fully-grown-up person would engage in that and know, you know, there's just nonsense.

This is what you have to do to get money. But I think a very young impressionable sort of arrested development person who's grown up on superhero culture might really come to believe that, that they are better than anyone else on the plan. And the future destiny of humanity is something that they hold in their hands.

Uniquely. And if I want to be a Messiah, there have to be existential risks that I can save humanity from. So they have to keep propagating new risks. So, you know, then it's AI, and Musk is determined to either defeat it or create it or depending on the time.

But, you know, in our, consciousness, I think most Americans, certainly most people around the world, didn't start paying attention to Musk, until he decided that the existential risk to the future of humanity and civilization was Twitter itself in 2022, and then he decides to buy it to defeat the woke mind virus. And at that point, people start paying attention to him. But that's just the latest in a list of existential risks that he and he alone can fix. And so, And it's soon after that that he hitches himself to Trump. Before he gets to anything ideological,

what Musk encounters first and takes very seriously is the pop culture that he's immersed in, the science fiction, the comics. Talk to me a little bit about that immersion in pop culture. And in fact, you compare Musk at one point to Batman himself. The thing about it as a historian that really pisses me off, This is pedantic and narrow, but like he misreads everything that he reads. He miswatches it all, right?

Like, he looks at Batman, and he kind of wants to be the bad Batman. You know, the Christopher Nolan, the dark night. The one who dresses in black. You know, the guy who is just a fascist ruling over the city of Gotham because the people are so stupid and such losers. Yeah, he's not the Adam West. He's not Adam West. He's also not the Batman of the 1930s comic books, you know, who was really created in 1939 to fight fascism. It's a weird underwater world to try to be in the mind of Elon Musk or even just the Let's Conquer Mars and the spirit of H.G. Wells.

You know, H.G. Wells was a critic of British imperialism. All of his colonization stories were anti-imperialist cautionary tales. This isn't a reference that I'm intimately familiar with, to be honest, but it's, some of our listeners will be, and you say this is critical to understanding Elon Musk. Let's listen. Zavad Vibelbrox now knows himself to be the most important being in the entire universe, something he had hitherto only suspected. It is said that his birth was marked by earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes, firestorms, the explosion of three neighboring stars. However, the only person by whom this is said is Bebel Brocks himself. And there are several possible theories to explain this.

Douglas Adams Hitchecker's Guide to the Galaxy, which started as a BBC radio drama in 1978. It was broadcast to Pretoria where Musk was a little kid. So Musk talks about a very consistent kind of how I became Elon Musk's story that he has told for the whole of his adult life was that when he was 12, he had a kind of existential crisis about being human, and he, you know, he read Spinoza and Nietzsche, and he didn't really understand them, but then he read Hitchhiker's Guide, there's a book version as well, and it helped him to understand the meaning of life,

and he dedicated himself to exploring the cosmos and bringing the light of human consciousness to the stars. And this truly... drives me insane. But it's all about world historical genius who's going to usher humanity into a new era, isn't it? Yeah, it's Saffod Bebelrocks, who is the captain of the heart of gold spaceship, which is what Musk has promised his first spaceship to Mars

will be called in honor of Bebelrocks. Bebelrocks, he's a goon. He is the most self-deluded, grandiose idiot. He's a bumbling fool. And the whole point of Hitchhiker's Guide, which is itself a spoof of Isaac Asimov's foundation series, which it does not take seriously, is an indictment of the mega wealthy. And you're saying Musk missed the irony of the entire book. So one of the details I came across in doing the work for this series, I found an old auction notice for the typewriter that Douglas Adams used to write the scripts in 19, like around 1976, 1977. And it has a sticker on the side, a bumper sticker on the side of the typewriter that reads end apartheid.

Like, think about that. Think about Douglas Adams writing Antigar's Guy in the middle of the 1970s. You know, the anti-apartheid movement, the boycotting is going on. It's a really strong movement. It's not as powerful as it become in the 80s, right? It's not like everybody who's got an end-apartheid sticker on their typewriter in 1977. But Douglas Adams does. But how did Musk respond to the apartheid all around him?

I mean, in fairness, Musk left South Africa at the age of 17. And you could easily conclude that that was in order to avoid compulsory military service and defense of the regime. And I think that's the charitable way to understand his desire to leave the country. How did he come to be so enraged by what he called the woke mind virus? Was that out of personal experience with his kid? There's this famous interview he gave with Jordan Peterson in which he said, you know, in 2020 during the pandemic. He was sort of pressured into approving puberty blockers for one of his children, and he greatly regretted it, and now he would say, you know, the woke mind virus killed my son.

His daughter, Vivian Wilson, essentially disowned him. And she has said, you can't blame this on me. Like, that's a story that he tells it makes him feel happier about himself. Like, there was something virtuous in his mind about his rightward turn, but he had always been this. way. So it's a family saga. I don't have any particular insight into that. You know, Jill, you mentioned these existential crises that Musk wants to solve, and one of which is getting human beings off the planet and settling in space. This motivates his interest in privatizing space travel, and of course the creation of his company, Space X, even the name of which seems to be ripped out of an old science fiction paperback.

Yeah. There actually is like a whole real real real. lovely genealogy of science fiction stories about the commercialization of other planets, all of which, again, are cautionary tales, but that Musk reads as instruction manuals. But there's a kind of, on the farther side of the far right, embrace of the economic opportunities and the military prospects of space exploration. So I think that turns a lot of people in Silicon Valley towards. Trump because he seems to be, you know, somewhat open to it. And he doesn't know very much about it.

But he is, he is, of course, delighted by the attention of billionaires. So I think there's a kind of courtship that begins to happen there. And then, of course, you know, Musk earns a great many contracts through SpaceX, including under the Aegis of Space Force. There's an interview where Musk says something like, it takes as long to do the paperwork to build a rocket as it takes to actually build the rocket. And so becomes really committed to the idea that there's regulatory excess that can only be eliminated through Trump's victory. So when I hear Musk say at those rallies, you know, we're at a fork in the road, the future of human civilization depends on this election.

He means SpaceX. He means I need the federal government to, without any restriction, delay, impediment, I need to take these rockets to colonize Mars, and that's only going to happen through Trump. And part of this larger project of Doge is to divert funds that are used to serve the poor, the needy, the sick, immigrants, anyone who might be vulnerable and not worthy somehow,

I think, in how Musk likely sees the world. their needs ought to be put very much at the back of the line so that we can bring humanity to space and also so that we can pursue unfettered the development of artificial intelligence. And this also relies on the quantification of human needs, whereby we shouldn't feed the poor, we shouldn't clothe the naked, we shouldn't heal the sick, we should let them all suffer and die because their needs, those are minuscule compared to the, calculation of the needs of the billions of humans that will one day ever live if we can gain escape velocity from planet Earth. That is, in fact, the math that lies behind Doche. And that has nothing to do with democracy or citizenship or decency or any set of beliefs or commitments or moral clarity about the nature of the human condition. But I think a lot of Trump voters

traditional Republicans, think of Doge, think of Musk's efforts purely as cost-cutting. In a way, I think what you're suggesting is that the ideological component here, which is far darker, is being snuck in through the back door. I remember in 2009 or so I went to a Tea Party rally in Washington, and I remember chatting with some very nice people from Texas, and I was asking them what they had seen. while they were in D.C. for this rally. It was like a Glenn Beck, like, 9-12 rally or something like that. I said, did you know, did you go to the Smithsonian? Did you see the monument? Did you go to the Jefferson? Like, what did you go to the Memorial? Lincoln Memorial? Like, what'd you do?

Right. And they were like, no, we would never go to any of those places. They would defile us. You know, their hatred for the federal government extended to the buildings that were built with taxpayer money to celebrate American ideas, American ingenuity. American art, American beauty, American music. I was really staggered by that. That there was just such a strong hatred of the fact. And I do think that's not an ideology. That's an appetite.

That's an emotional response to something. But I do think that Musk's doge taps into some of that. To what degree do they overlap in their interests? I understand that Trump loved getting hundreds of millions of dollars for his campaign. But when it comes down to what you just explained about the way Elon Musk sees the world and the future and what the interests of the government should be or should not be, I wonder how much it overlaps or not with what a guy whose background is not Musk's, but is in fact in New York real estate and reality television. How do they overlap at all?

If you publicly, as an elected official, disavow the threat of climate change, but instead propose to purchase or conquer Greenland and Canada, which are great real estate opportunities given the reality of climate change, then you are actually engaging in a kind of calculation that is as cynical and as indifferent to human suffering as is muskism. And I know that historians don't like to predict the future any more than halfway decent journalists wouldn't, but Musk and Trump are going to break up fairly soon, either for reasons of conflict or because Musk's attention or wander elsewhere. Where will Musk go next? I wouldn't be surprised if he moved to Europe. I wouldn't be surprised if he moved to Germany or Italy. I think he needs to mix it up and enjoy the arrows that. come at him so that he can use those arrows to construct a vision of himself as invincible.

And I think that there's a invincibility around kind of leaving Washington with his tail between his legs. He's going to need to exert his virility in a very public way. And I don't think he's going to be like doing battles and state elections like in Wisconsin again. I think that Moment is over. We're talking the week, of course, that Harvard University decided to, in a sense, stand up to the Trump administration. It had some very difficult decisions to make. Jill, you've taught at Harvard for a long time, so I can't help it ask.

What do you think Elon Musk makes of that situation? I think Musk is probably surprised at witnessing an act of real principle and courage and defiance that comes from a sincere commitment to deeply help. centuries-old values. That is a rare thing in our world. It is no part of his experience of the world insofar as I have ever witnessed it. And it's something to be cherished. I am full of admiration for that act. I hope it is emulated. I hope it has vast consequences. It may not. It's easy from where I sit in Cambridge to think that Harvard is the center of the world, and it is not. And yet it is a really momentous decision. And I can't see

Yeah. Musk lives in the world of the trivial. As profound as the consequences of his decisions are, he is a deeply trivial human being. Tell me what you mean by that. He delights in, you know, the goofy, snarky, forward tweet, you know, with an emoticon after it. He's a trivial person. Jilipur, thank you so much. Thanks so much, David. Jill Lippoor is a professor of American history and of law at Harvard University. Her podcast about Elon Musk is called X-Man, and you can read her at New Yorker.com on so many subjects, and you can also subscribe to the New Yorker at New Yorker.com.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and we've been speaking today about Elon Musk. Earlier in the show, I spoke with historian Jill Lepur about the influence of science fiction on Musk, his business interest in space travel, and how it relates to his work in Doge, slashing federal government programs to the ground. But Musk's role in Doge and his support of far-right movements around the world are now coming into conflict with some of his business interests, in particular with Tesla. The people who tend to buy electric cars are usually quite well. healed and at least somewhat progressive. That had been the case for a long time, but now Tesla sales

seem to be dropping, and there are sizable protests at dealerships. And they're kind of getting under Donald Trump's skin. You also gave us a directive to prosecute the people who are going after Tesla, to the fullest extent of the law, some of the greatest police work I've seen. Within the next 24 hours, you're going to be seen another huge arrest on a Tesla dealership president. And that, that person will be looking at at least 20 years in prison with no negotiations. That's great. That's great. That will stop it. Cold. One of these grassroots efforts goes by the hashtag Tesla Takedown. Our producer Adam Howard spoke with an organizer about how she got involved with the movement.

My name's Patty Hoyt. I live in north of San Francisco, in a small town called Nevada. and although in the first administration, I did organize rallies and protests quite a few, I've had a break. And very recently, a friend of mine who's a veteran reached out to me and wanted to bring to light the plight of veterans. And knowing my background, he asked if I was interested and being the daughter of a veteran, sure. And having to choose, there's so many things going on, what am I going to focus on? I selected veterans and immigrants is where I'm going to put my energy. And I had attended a couple of Tesla takedowns and thought, okay, this looks like the perfect thing to do. Hands off the VA.

And was it the cuts to the VA? as part of Doge? I'm sorry, yes, yes, that's exactly. The fact that, you know, 30% of the federal workforce happens to be veterans. Right. So not only the VA being threatened with a 20% cut in staff, but just throughout the federal workforce, there are so many veterans. You mentioned being part of protests during the first Trump administration.

From your perspective, are the vibes and the sort of atmosphere at the protests different in any way than they were in the first term? I would say there seems to be more anger, and what I'm encountering, who I am encountering this time around is a lot of people that didn't protest that and have never protested before and now are out there. What do you think is motivating these people who are getting on the streets for the first time. Fear and anger that, and I think perhaps the speed of which all of this is coming, I can't

even keep track of what next. I think it was different in the first term that it took longer for people to get energized. They felt they had more time. But we're not the only ones in my little town. quarter to Madeira is where the dealership is in our county. There's a protest at noon on Saturdays, ours at three, and then another done on Sundays at two. So different groups are coming out at various times, just providing that place where people can come and bring, yes, some funny signs, but also, you know, just collectively here we are all together feeling this one way. I'm sure you've seen the reports about Tesla stock taking a hit.

The sales apparently are down 9% this year in the U.S., even though the UV market is growing. What do you make of the impact that these protests are having? Do you feel like these protests deserve some of the credit for the hit that Tesla's taking? Yes, I don't think that the people who protest are the only ones that hate him and what he stands for. But I go with the I want to shame you into not buying a Tesla. I want to shame you into dumping stock. I'd love you to sell your Tesla, but I understand that that's not possible. They're not even taking Cybertrucks as trade-ins Tesla itself.

So I think you're embarrassed to drive a Tesla precisely because you're now associated with Musk and his fascism. And it goes beyond Musk, of course, but in terms of... oligarchy and billionaires. That's what I, my goal is, and I absolutely believe that we've made a difference in people saying, no, that's not, I don't want people to flip me off as I drive. I don't want people to give the Nazi salute as I drive by my Tesla. Right. I'm sure you've seen the same videos I have of Tesla's being smashed. There's Tesla's being set on fire, a little bit more extreme. How worried are you about Tesla takedown being associated with more maybe violent action or vandalism, that sort of thing?

It doesn't bother me that I believe they're wrong, but, and there's nothing I can do to convince them otherwise. I do think it detracts. You don't want that. You don't ever want violence in the name of your protests to happen, and I don't encourage it. The President of the United States is making some pretty extreme. threats to protesters, talking about domestic terrorism. Among the folks that you are doing these protests with, are there fears about reprisals coming from the government, or are they basically

tuning that stuff out? Oh, no, they're afraid, which isn't to say I'm not. But, and, and I can cite quite recently somebody no longer wanting to have their name associated with it because of that fear. But I, it, given attention, and such at these protests. It doesn't seem to be stopping anybody from coming. And I only see a couple of people who wear masks to try to hide their identity. It's a scary place we all find ourselves in, and I won't stop, but I am afraid. There are a bit at least rumors that Elon Musk might be stepping away from all of his Doge activity.

we spoke about the financial impact that this has had on his business. I'm curious, where do you see this all ending in terms of Musk's role in the federal government and this Tesla take down movement? It doesn't undo the damage he's done just by saying he stepped away, nor do I believe he actually would step away. I mean, by news account reports, he's not even the leader of Doge, but who believes that? I don't believe that, I should say. But even if it were true, you don't just not punish someone for the damage he's doing. Patty, thank you so much for taking time to speak to me. I really appreciate it.

Okay. Take care. Patty Hoyt is an organizer in the movement known as Tesla Takedown. And she spoke with the Radio Hours, Adam Howard. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccat. And we had additional help this week from Jake Loomis.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trina Endowment Fund.