Anyone attempting to think seriously about Elon Musk is confronted with a forbidding cognitive dissonance. Musk is the richest person on the planet, and among the most powerful capitalists in history; before a recent slump in SpaceX’s stock price, the company’s IPO briefly made him the world’s first trillionaire. His companies have redrawn the boundaries of multiple economic fields—the automotive industry, the aerospace sector, satellite communications—and his direct influence has helped transform the world’s most powerful government. He is among the most famous people alive, and surely the most prominent entrepreneur. To exist in this time is to be forced to think, whether you like it or not, about Elon Musk.
And yet for God’s sake, just look at the man—at his dispiriting attempts at humor, his weirdly off-putting outfits, his incessant posting of banalities and faux profundities and extreme-right disinformation on social media. Just look at the uniquely awkward way he inhabits his own body, as though exercising doubtful control over a dysfunctional robotic exoskeleton. For all the immensity of his wealth and power, all his world-bestriding influence, it’s remarkably easy to dismiss Musk as a malignant clown who is not worth the energy and aggravation of thinking about. It’s tempting, even, to view him as living proof that exceptional entrepreneurial success has no relationship to exceptional brilliance.
Here we must recall Joyce Carol Oates’s devastating assessment of Musk, which went viral last year on the very social media platform he owns and devotes so much of his attention to:
So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates—scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history. In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the “most wealthy person in the world.”
But the sad and somewhat degrading fact is that this man is unquestionably important. If we want to think in any kind of consequential way about the present and the future, we have no choice but to take Musk seriously—if not as a man, then as a manifestation of a cultural-political malaise. This is the premise, more or less, of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, a short and potent new book by the historian Quinn Slobodian and the tech writer Ben Tarnoff. It is not a biography; its authors are much less interested in Musk as a person than in what his centrality to our culture says about us and where we’re heading. The question they want to ask, as they put it in the book’s introduction, is “not who is Musk? but what is Musk a symptom of?”
Their attempt to answer this question leads them to posit the existence of a loose set of beliefs and ideas they call Muskism: a quasi ideology of which Musk himself is less an originator—in the sense that Marx was the originator of Marxism, or Freud of Freudianism—than an avatar. They’re not aiming, in other words, to portray Musk as a coherent or systematic thinker, as someone whose political convictions and business decisions are shaped by a stern and immovable ideology. They see Muskism as a contemporary analogue of Fordism, a word that neither Henry Ford nor his colleagues used but that economists and political theorists have used to think about how early-twentieth-century mass production and consumption were shaped by the industrial practices he originated. “If Fordism was the operating system of the twentieth century,” Slobodian and Tarnoff write, “we contend that Muskism offers a possible operating system for the twenty-first.”
While Fordism relied on highly rationalized production and disciplined workers to create durable structures for mass consumption, Muskism, as Slobodian and Tarnoff see it, is much less oriented toward the broad distribution of societal goods. It aims to provide great benefits to a relatively select few, and to disregard everyone else; it is a worldview of hard borders and hardened hearts. (Two of Slobodian’s previous books, Crack-Up Capitalism and Hayek’s Bastards, have traced the intellectual and ideological roots of our hypercapitalist time, and Musk is a fleeting figure in both of them.)
Though Slobodian and Tarnoff mostly steer clear of the biographical mode, Musk’s early life in apartheid-era South Africa provides a kind of origin story for his later reactionary preoccupations and for the Muskist vision of what they call “fortress futurism.” South Africa, by the time Musk’s maternal grandfather immigrated there from Canada in 1950, was not just an apartheid state but a state whose commitment to racial segregation was inseparable from an ideology of technological futurism. Intricate machineries were required to keep minority rule running smoothly; as with Germans in the previous decade, the barbarism of South African whites was facilitated by sophisticated technologies of surveillance and control. The architects of apartheid considered themselves futurists; they found support, write Slobodian and Tarnoff,
from international firms like IBM, Ford, and Toyota, which sold them technology to bolster their sovereignty. Mainframes were used to count, track, and reallocate Black laborers; blueprints for auto factories were used to create homegrown industry; nuclear weapons gave the regime the ultimate defense against its enemies.
The strategic ideal the South African state aspired to was one of vertical integration. Musk grew up largely in the country’s administrative capital, Pretoria, a city Slobodian and Tarnoff identify as a model of fortress futurism: its Black population was forced into segregated townships on the perimeter, while the white elite clustered in “enclaves of swimming pools and green yards, with quick roads into the ministries and military installations of the city center.” Pretoria’s perimeter, they write, was dotted with factories and warehouses, “sites of industrialization where South Africa hoped to build domestically the things it had previously imported.” It is telling that when Silicon Valley was pursuing globalized production—building its products in Shenzhen, relying on Taiwanese chips—Musk was embracing vertical integration, making as many components in-house as he possibly could.
South Africa’s self-enclosure included its media environment: it was one of the last industrialized countries to make television available to its population. Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, often referred to as the “father of apartheid,” insisted that television had a destructive capacity comparable to the atomic bomb and that it was incumbent on the state to “watch for any dangers to the people, both spiritual and physical.” Slobodian and Tarnoff don’t explicitly link that idea to Musk’s later purchase of Twitter, or to his general obsession with eradicating what he calls the “woke mind virus,” but the resonance is there for anyone who cares to pick up on it.
The book also traces Musk’s transhumanist preoccupation with the merger of humans and machines—evident in his founding of the brain–computer interface company Neuralink—back to a kids’ TV show that aired in South Africa when he was a child. In the Japanese-American anime show Robotech, a team of heroic humans fights waves of extraterrestrial invasions using manned humanoid robots, or “mechs.” This idea of a human merger with machines has been a motif in Musk’s intellectual life, which has remained in many ways (and with many terrible results) that of an arrogant and cloistered adolescent boy.
At the heart of Musk’s unprecedented success is a business relationship with the state that reflects these South African origins and has set him apart from his Silicon Valley peers. As with his friend and associate Peter Thiel—the influential venture capitalist whose fortune also originated with PayPal—there is a tendency to refer to Musk as a techno-libertarian. But Musk is no more libertarian than Thiel, whose data analytics firm Palantir was founded with the help of CIA venture capital and has since been substantially dependent on state contracts.
Musk departed PayPal in the early Aughts after it was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion; as the company’s largest shareholder, he walked away with a check, according to his biographer Walter Isaacson, for $250 million. In the years that followed, Musk tacked hard against the prevailing Silicon Valley trade winds by pursuing the government as a crucial business partner. SpaceX, which he founded in 2002, capitalized on military contracts during the “war on terror”; he secured large contracts to build rockets for launching hypersonic weapons into space, and to provide orbital launch hardware and services to the air force. During the Obama administration, with its emphasis on green capitalism, Musk’s other major company, Tesla, benefited enormously from state subsidies and low-interest loans. In recent years NASA has become heavily reliant on SpaceX’s hardware for launches and for transferring cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station. Military and intelligence agencies in the US, and in a number of European countries—Sweden, Poland, the UK, Spain—increasingly rely on Musk to get their satellites into low Earth orbit. Musk’s own satellite Internet network, Starlink, and its military-specific offshoot, Starshield, have become crucial in battlefield communications in Ukraine.
All of this has given him, as a business owner, a level of power that is basically unprecedented—closer to that of major states than to even the most commanding of corporate entities. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Ukrainian military has been reliant on Starlink for its Internet-connected drones. According to a Reuters report last year, during a crucial period of the war’s early months in which Ukrainian forces were pushing to retake territory from Russia, Musk ordered a shutdown of Starlink coverage around Kherson; Ukrainian drones went dark, and long-range artillery units struggled to find their targets. Apparently he was concerned that a Ukrainian escalation in the region would trigger a nuclear exchange and decided to shut down vital military infrastructure. As one of the Starlink employees interviewed by Reuters put it, this amounted to Musk taking “the outcome of a war into his own hands.”
Musk’s most seductive sales pitch is not for cars or rockets or satellites but for what Slobodian and Tarnoff call “sovereignty as a service.” This is, they write,
the fantasy that, in an increasingly unstable world, both states and individuals can fortify their self-reliance by plugging into his infrastructures. The paradox is that, in doing so, you become reliant on him. What is sold as techno-sovereignty is entry into Musk’s walled garden, to which he holds the master key…. Trying to unplug from Musk, you realize he owns the socket.
The crucial term here is “fantasy,” as it is in any consideration of Musk—the fantasy of his monumental entrepreneurial success and political impact. He is, despite his personal awkwardness, undoubtedly among the great salesmen of our age; he became the world’s first trillionaire because he succeeded in selling the future. And he has been able to sell it because he has convinced the world, and more specifically the capital markets, that he is the one who’s creating it. Not many people, in our time of climate anxiety and economic despair, can talk convincingly of the future as a realm of technological wonder and human possibility. Musk is one of the few remaining public figures of any prominence to speak fluently the dead language of futurism. And the point of his futurism—his talk of human settlements on Mars, of fleets of humanoid robots catering to our every whim, of the threat and promise of superhuman artificial intelligence, of the coming merger of humans and machines—is not to predict what may come next, by which metric he has been consistently abysmal, but to influence markets in the present.
Critics of Musk have a tendency to write him off as an obvious grifter whose fabulism appeals primarily to slack-jawed crypto-marks and debilitatingly online reply guys with wall-mounted katana swords over their gaming PCs. But if that were the extent of it, he’d have become only moderately wealthy from shilling supplements and meme coins. Aside from the US government, Musk’s largest backers are asset managers like Blackrock and State Street. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is one of the largest institutional investors in Tesla. These people are not easily duped and do not especially care about owning the libs.
Similarly, Musk’s use of social media makes it tempting to dismiss him as an Internet-addled conspiracy theorist. How can anyone who posts so relentlessly run a business in any kind of competent way, let alone multiple businesses? This is a man, after all, who in 2023, a few months after he took possession of Twitter, called an emergency meeting at the company because a tweet he posted during the Super Bowl received less engagement than one posted during the game by President Joe Biden; he ordered a team of engineers to recalibrate the algorithm to push his own posts into more timelines. This is not, surely, a serious man.
But posting is a serious business, a deep and decisive component of his machinery of power and influence. In 2018 Musk—a late but zealous adopter of social media—posted on Twitter that he was “considering taking Tesla private at $420.” He was invoking a stoner meme with a long and storied history (he is also a late but zealous adopter of not particularly funny jokes), but the market took him seriously, and Tesla’s stock instantly leaped by 11 percent. In 2021 he added “#bitcoin” to his Twitter bio, and the cryptocurrency immediately rose 20 percent in value. Musk has been able to bend the reality of markets, and significantly increase his own wealth, simply by posting. In this light his seemingly maniacal investment in his own social media engagement metrics, and his decision to buy Twitter, seem less eccentric. His purchase of the platform was never about the revenue he might make from it. He saw the social network, Slobodian and Tarnoff explain, as “a central node in the cybernetic collective—and one that had been thoroughly infected by the woke mind virus.”
One of Musk’s more insistent jokes involves announcing that he has “become meme.” Slobodian and Tarnoff take this to refer to something larger than Musk seems to intend: not merely the extremity of his onlineness but his own entry into a cybernetic flow state, a oneness with the machine. And this, they convincingly argue, is part of the grander vision of Muskism: a preoccupation with the merger of humans and technology, characterized by about equal parts desire and anxiety. He has long been concerned about the prospect of a superhuman artificial intelligence going Terminator and annihilating humanity. It’s not that Musk hasn’t read any books, it’s that the few he has absorbed are bad ones: his anxieties about AI and existential risk are substantially derived from Superintelligence (2014), by the transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom, which made the now familiar argument that an artificial general intelligence might take over and even destroy the world in order to advance its goals.
Musk’s proposed solution to this threat is for humans to merge with AI. In 2016 he founded Neuralink with the aim of creating brain–computer interface technology that would allow people to control computers with their minds. In those early days, Neuralink shared an office with another company Musk had cofounded: OpenAI. Both organizations, Slobodian and Tarnoff write, shared a single aim—to prevent an AI apocalypse:
“This is going to sound pretty weird,” Musk announced in Neuralink’s first public presentation in 2019, but the company aimed to “achieve a sort of symbiosis with artificial intelligence.” The brain implant, which he claimed would eventually be inserted into “hundreds of millions” of people, would let users connect their minds directly to the internet, accelerating the man–machine merger that was already underway in the cybernetic collectives of social media.
Muskism, in reading its subject as more a symptom than a person, doesn’t offer any kind of psychological interpretation of Musk’s worldview, but many of his pronouncements and preoccupations reveal an ontological confusion of the categories of human and machine. This might be the result of a life lived among and for computers. It also reflects the sort of reactionary interest in militarized, technologized human bodies that the German sociologist Klaus Theweleit explored in Male Fantasies (1977), his two-volume study of protofascist male subjectivity in the Weimar era. Theweleit’s forensic analysis of the cultural production of former members of the Freikorps militias reveals an obsession with contagion and contamination, with communism threatening to drown the Fatherland in its feminized “red flood.”
Musk’s fixation on what he calls the “woke mind virus” suggests both an understanding of humans as machines and an obsession with the threat of left-wing contagion: a conviction that people can be hacked like software and that progressive ideas—cultural Marxism, gender ideology, and so forth—act on the system as a kind of intellectual malware. His first public use of the phrase, Slobodian and Tarnoff point out, was a tweet he posted in 2021: “traceroute woke_mind_virus.” “Traceroute,” they explain, “is a diagnostic tool used to map the path of data through the internet—the digital equivalent of injecting dye into a patient’s veins to illuminate areas of concern in an MRI.”
His turn toward an openly reactionary position is generally attributed to two events, one political and one personal: the effects on Tesla’s productivity of the Covid-era lockdowns, and his daughter Vivian’s coming out as trans in 2020. In a dense but illuminating portion of the book, Slobodian and Tarnoff chart the connections between the complicated wound inflicted on Musk by his daughter’s transition, his apocalyptic outlook on progressive politics, and his cybernetic worldview. In an interview with Jordan Peterson, the Canadian room-cleaning influencer and anti-trans windmill tilter, Musk declared that he believed his child to be dead, “killed by the woke mind virus.” Humanity itself is, he believes, likely to go the same way unless some kind of antivirus software gives the culture a thorough cleansing. “Unless it is stopped, the woke mind virus will destroy civilization and humanity will never [reach] Mars,” as he put it in 2022, in a formulation that implicitly presented the destruction of civilization as undesirable because it would prevent humanity from getting to Mars.
Musk’s transphobia, Slobodian and Tarnoff write, might explain what the idea of a “woke mind virus” really means to him and why curing it feels so existential:
Muskism’s mandate to meld us with our machines represented an effort to turn humans into cyborgs, both figuratively and literally. The cyborgs of the Muskist imagination were drawn from cyberpunk science fiction, where cybernetic augmentation gives people superpowers, such as enhanced strength and intelligence. But it is also possible to think of a transgender person as a cyborg. Their superpower is the ability to modify their body to better fit their gender identity, which is achieved through the use of technologies like hormone replacement therapy and surgery. This raises a troubling possibility for Muskism: dissolving the boundary between the natural and the artificial might open the door for other boundaries to be redrawn.
Musk’s desire to effect a transformation of the human through technology does not get in the way of his finding it unnatural, and therefore wrong, that his own child might use science in her own way, to change her own body. A father who announces that his child is dead because they have come out as transgender is not so different from a father who says he’d rather have a dead son than a gay son. Technological futurism has, of course, long been the handmaiden of regressive right-wing ideologies. “We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice,” wrote Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in his Manifesto of Futurism well over a century ago; had the woke mind virus been a feature of Italian cultural life at the time, Marinetti would no doubt have come out swinging against it.
In his 1945 essay “Germany and the Germans,” Thomas Mann ran a kind of traceroute command on the mind virus that had, in recent years, consumed his country and left Europe in ruins. Nazism, he insisted, was rooted deep within German history and inextricable from the culture itself, characterized as it was by an “efficient modernness, on the one hand, and dreams of the past, on the other—in a word, highly technological Romanticism.” The historian Jeffrey Herf coined the term “reactionary modernism” to refer to the way the conservative revolutionaries of interwar Germany, and later the Nazis themselves, embraced technological advancement while rejecting the values of the Enlightenment, along with the culture of liberal democracy that grew out of it.
In his public pronouncements, Musk speaks incessantly about “human civilization” and the need to defend it against existential threats—not just the woke mind virus and the wrong kind of AI superintelligence, but also natural disasters and asteroid impacts and so on. He speaks of “preserving the light of consciousness,” a project that must be pursued by spreading that light throughout the solar system. Beyond his rhetorical invocations of “humanity,” however, Musk doesn’t merely lack feelings of fellowship with actual humans—hardly unusual, in any case, for a multibillionaire—but is outright hostile to the very idea of such feelings. The terms “humanity” and “Western civilization” are largely interchangeable in his lexicon; and what Musk means by Western civilization, as Slobodian and Tarnoff make clear, is white civilization.
In a notorious conversation on Joe Rogan’s podcast last year in which he spoke about his belief that the Democrats were working to import as many immigrants as possible to the US so that they could shift the demographic makeup of the country in their favor—a cherished conspiracy theory of the internationalist far right—Musk used the idea in typically computational terms. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” he said. “They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
If Musk’s brief and disastrous tenure as the de facto leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency last year achieved anything, it was to run a virus check on the system of the American government, and to remove from its code anything that might look like the empathy bug or the woke mind virus. Under his reign, DOGE oversaw the dismantling of the US government’s Agency for International Development. The aid cuts are estimated to have resulted in more than 700,000 deaths, mostly of children, in the last year alone. According to The Lancet, the funding cuts could lead to 9.4 million deaths by 2030.
That fact might give us some idea of what a world defined by Muskism would look like. It might, in other words, look like the cybernetic merger of the world’s richest man with the world’s most powerful government, the withdrawal of vital aid to the world’s poorest children, and the funneling of public money toward his own companies. Musk’s worldview, in this as in many other ways, is an explicitly antihuman one. But it is also—and this is the point of Slobodian and Tarnoff’s persuasive and vital book—not just Musk’s worldview. It already underpins much of contemporary capitalism and may come to be seen as the presiding pathology in our time of monsters.