book: muskism by quinn slobodian and ben tarnoff
Another book I finished in July was Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff. It argues that instead of seeing Musk as an individual or even an exceptional outlier, he should be seen as a symptom of a bigger playbook, something other forces in society brought forward and shaped. Just like Henry Ford is where Fordism gets the name, the authors argue that Muskism is an ideology based on Elon Musk. Musk primarily sells a fantasy: That, if they buy into his walled garden, both individuals and states can be self-reliant, uninterrupted by grid failures, geopolitics and more. This is sold as techno-sovereignty, when it actually makes them rely on Musk himself. He depends on perpetual hype, online trolling/meme warfare, state symbiosis and financial fabulation to convince the public and for his businesses to even survive. In Muskism, everything is code, undesirable people are bugs, and empathy is an exploit. There is a huge focus on vertical integration, lean production, Agile-like processes and being anti-union. Sovereignty is seen as infrastructure instead of just territory, and is much more decided by access to bandwidth, compute, and orbital real estate. Governments everywhere are reliant on few companies to ensure their duties. The authors dive in deep into Musk's personal history: Joshua Haldeman, his maternal grandfather, wrote for the Technocracy Incorporated journal and dreamed of a future in which society was run under the dictatorship of engineers who would allocate resources according to scientific principles. After Canada banned Technocracy in 1940, he emigrated to South Africa with Elon's mother Maye; two years after the National Party introduced apartheid. That is where the embrace of technology as facilitator of self-reliance and hardening of racial inequalities started happening with support from IBM, Ford, and Toyota, as their tech was used, among other things, to count, track, and reallocate Black laborers, enable homegrown industries and nuclear weapons. South Africa was an early "biometric state", where the "Book of Life" identification system recorded racial classifications of every citizen. Pretoria, where Musk was born in 1971, was a prime example of fortress futurism, as it housed the executive offices and government buildings that instated and managed apartheid. As other groups were pushed to segregated townships on the outskirts, the white elite, including Musk, lived in wealthy suburbs like Waterkloof. Black labor was able to be cast aside or drawn from quickly, and entire communities were displaced for cheap industrial sites. Musk's family directly benefited from all of it, and it set the tone for the way Muskism sees most people: As faceless laborers in the background, ready to be added or deleted at a whim, as "NPCs", as he loves to call people. Many of his pursuits relied on state creations and tax payer money: Using free military GPS data for Zip2 maps, using the federally ensured stability of the US financial system for online banking (his attempt at the earlier version of X.com and his resulting PayPal involvement), and the internet, a technology invented by the government. He later grafted himself onto the state via his companies gaining a lot of government contracts: Using the increased military spending and visions of network-centric warfare after 2001 to launch small satellites via SpaceX, and then subsequently getting a $8 million, then a $100 million contract by the DARPA and the Air Force in 2004 and 2005 to build rockets and provide low-cost orbital launch vehicles and services, plus a COTS contract of $278 million in 2006, to name just a few. Later on, this provided the money and power in space to bring Starlink to life, which by 2025, made up about two thirds of all active satellites and is available in over a 100 countries. It also got plenty of government contracts and subsidies, one being $900 million for internet in rural US areas, and a $1.8 billion contract in 2021 for Starshield, a military version of Starlink. Tesla fared the same way, using the fear of foreign oil, the War on Terror and the resulting green/clean tech boom post 2001 to get massive financial funding from the government. According to the book, Diarmuid O'Connell, former chief of staff for George W. Bush's assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs lobbied for Musk and got Tesla a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy in 2008 (under the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program), as without it, Tesla likely would have gone bankrupt. Which means: Taxpayer dollars went to a company that produced a basically unaffordable 100k car with fewer than 200 units in existence back then, just to bail it out. xAI is going the same way of using government money: In July 2025, they announced that they have entered a contract with the Department of Defense to offer a suite of AI products to them. The goal for Musk has always been that governments can only exercise their authority by purchasing services from a monopoly provider, which he tries to be, and at least with SpaceX, is. If the government cedes its sovereignty to an immense degree, it would be forced to buy it back in increments from corporations. Via this government contractor route, his companies can also evade compliance with some regulations. The authors also draw connections between Musk's favorite media and his business decisions as well as product names and more, especially The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , Star Trek , Battlestar Galactica , Transformers and Robotech . He would grow obsessed with the idea of colonizing space, and with becoming one with the machine, which can be seen not only with Neuralink, but him saying that to avoid AI killing humanity, humanity has to become one with AI. He co-founded OpenAI with Altman over his AI fears. 2022 is when he increasingly started to share right-wing viewpoints, especially talking about the "woke mind virus". For the first time, he seemed to be very pre-occupied with the problem that, in his previously ideal solution of a merged together, cybernetic intelligence cluster of half human, half AI population, there's a risk that the system could become infected. In an interview, he shared his personal horror scenario, in which AI nannies would go around, see that there are too many white men in power, and go kill some - kill him. His fear is that for once, instead of always targeting other groups, he could be targeted and treated like he has treated them, because of rules that infected everyone's mind and turned them against him; rules that he has no control over. This fantasy is also what got him to buy Twitter, use it as a training ground and invent Grok, the "non-woke" AI and its Grokipedia. It's his idea of a safeguard against an army of AI coming to the conclusion that people like him need to be eradicated. He constantly influences the training data (by pushing his tweets artificially and giving them wider reach) and the training itself (by suddenly proclaiming that Grok is giving too woke answers, and adjusting, leading to events like the MechaHitler outburst). Despite his transhumanist ambitions, he does not consider modifying ones body within a gender transition as a good thing. A merger with AI could be dissolving the boundary between the natural and artificial, but it might open other boundaries like gender to be redrawn. But he actually wants to strengthen traditional social hierarchies, so a humanity segmented by gender, race and class is still possible. Don't forget: One reason why he hates his daughter's transition is because he does IVF sex selection and paid specifically for a male sex. He wants total power over how people function and live. His takeaway from South Africa's apartheid is that some humans are born to rule, others to be ruled, and these are the markers needed for that. That was also a big motivator behind DOGE: See the government as a platform, eliminate information silos that were there to ensure legal and privacy safeguards for privileged information, and then prepare systematic overreach, misuse and surveillance by working on ways to integrate information of different agencies into one database, to better "purge" unwanted people. For example, via the SSA's death master file, which cut off people's access to credit cards and bank accounts by declaring them dead - a form of "financial murder", where the goal was either for people to die or to "self-deport". Efficiency, in this case, became an excuse for centralization, and the Trump administration had no problem with it as it further advanced their own goals and made Musk the fall guy, as he got the blame while most things stayed the same. This entire climate paved the way for Palantir's $30 million ImmigrationOS contract with ICE, which promises near real-time visibility for non-citizens. He relies on this sort of oppression to make his businesses and lifestyle possible. To just name one example: The data center in Memphis powering Grok is in a historically Black neighborhood that originated as a community for emancipated slaves (cheap opportunity for him) and the facility's methane gas turbines emit pollutants linked to asthma, respiratory diseases, heart issues, and cancer. You can be sure that this would not be built in the kind of areas Musk grew up in. This is also visible in his increasing focus on fertility and population numbers, alleging a white genocide or a "Great Replacement". Fertility is actually fine in many countries; it's just not the right countries for him, as they aren't white. This is another remnant of his South African upbringing, in which white politicians in the apartheid era warned of being swamped by Black people and wanted to win the "cradle race" by boosting white fertility, and where it was normal for white people to live in their own settlements and schools away from the rest (as he does, with his own schools for his children). It actually is at odds with the rest of his views, as he keeps talking about robot descendants, merging with AI, and that within the next decade, humanoid robots will outnumber humans ten to one. He seems to facilitate a different kind of replacement, and it leaves you wondering what the supposed difference is between an AI-merged, cybernetically enhanced Black man and a white man, or whether human or robot does the "replacement". Why do white birth rates matter if they are going to be surpassed by robots, and if human labor will be less and less needed in his view? Towards the end of the book, the authors suggest 4 ways Musk could move forward - either a return to clean tech and electrification ("Carbon Musk", unlikely), even more state symbiosis ("Contractor Musk", inspired by Palantir's current successes), focusing harder on segregating from the rest via schools/settlements and on his white genocide bullshit ("Compound Musk", inspired by Bezos and Jon Lonsdale doing the same), or doubling down on AI and robots ("Cyborg Musk", with more Neuralink stuff). The book ends with an idea of what the ideal Muskism future could look like, slightly exaggerated at times I think, for comedic effect? Or because our future has sincerely become ridiculous? I can't tell. But I'm glad I read it. Published 10 Aug, 2026
Books
Writing
Culture
Entertainment
Business
Marketing
Gaming
Sports
AI
Programming
Testing