The World That Made Elon Musk Possible

0:00Stephanie Flanders:So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now, a global workforce of 300 ,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94 % of common questions. Not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business. IBM. Never bet against American grit or American energy. Through innovation, Venture Global is not only building some of the largest energy facilities in the world right here in the United States, but delivering American energy at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time.

0:48So while others are busy talking, we're busy building. That's Venture Global. That's unstoppable energy.

1:00This is Robert Smith from Business History. If you're listening to this, there's a good chance you're a small business owner. And like every small business owner, you started with a dream to do what you love and watch it grow. What you probably didn't dream about? Keeping up with cyber threats. That's where MasterCard can help with access to tools that help identify cyber threats to better protect your business. Building your dream business? Priceless. For cybersecurity in a changing world, there's MasterCard. Learn more at Mastercard.com slash smallbusiness.

1:47Stephanie Flanders:I'm Stephanie Flanders, Head of Government and Economics at Bloomberg, and this is Trumponomics, the podcast that looks at pretty much everything in the economic world of Donald Trump. Today we're stepping back from the news for one of our sporadic conversations about a book that I think casts new light on some key trumponomic themes. The book is Muskism, A Guide for the Perplexed. It came out a few months ago and I should say it's not a traditional biography of Elon Musk, but an analysis of Muskism as a worldview, or as the book puts it, an operating system for the 21st century. Now, we should probably also add it's not a sympathetic portrait of the man or that worldview, but the authors do capture some of the big developments in 21st century capitalism and Trumponomics that we're living with now that were either pioneered or greatly exploited and accelerated by Elon Musk.

2:44Stephanie Flanders:And those authors, I'm happy to say, are with me now. Ben Tarnoff, technologist and co-founder of Logic Magazine, who's written for a lot of publications and also wrote in 2022 the book Internet for the People, The Fight for Our Digital Future. Ben, thanks for joining Trumponomics. Thanks so much for having us. And Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at Boston University, a Guggenheim fellow for 2025-26, and author of the book Hayek's Bastards, Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, which won a bunch of awards, including National Book Critic Circle Award. Quinn, welcome.

3:22Stephanie Flanders:Happy to be here.

3:26Stephanie Flanders:I'm going to not necessarily point particular questions at either of you and just hope that you've reached a kind of symbiosis having written this book together. One question, the obvious one, is why write Muskism? What was the point of doing it? Well, I think we'd both been in the same position, which is being overwhelmed by the presence of Musk and in many ways wanting to mute him from our stream, both metaphorically and literally. But especially at the height of Doge and after having respectively reviewed the Isaacson biography, we felt like there was a story about Musk that wasn't really being told.

4:00There was really a more structural story, story about political economy, less about his psyche and his drug habits and more about the world that made him possible. So we really wanted to explain this gap between his absurdity, grotesqueness and almost risibility. And then the fact that he has been rewarded more generously and opulently by the global economy than any person in history. How can you account for this gap between a kind of a mockery of a man and the rewards of the system? That was the motivating question I think we set out to answer.

4:38Stephanie Flanders:That was what was striking to me. Some of it was illuminated by his life story, or you were using bits of his life story to show how he had come to exemplify these kind of key features of a certain model of capitalism. And as you say in the book, an operating system for the 21st century. Also, a very prominent feature of Elon Musk is his political worldview. But for this conversation, I'm particularly focused on these sort of elements of his approach to capitalism that you draw out. One of them is this key theme, his approach to business that doesn't try to escape the state, but actually using the state to build market power, to build wealth and profit.

5:24Stephanie Flanders:So maybe take us through that and a little bit of where we've seen that in his life story. Well, this is one of the misconceptions that accompanies quite a bit of the commentary on Musk, which is to present him as a libertarian, as a figure who's interested in shrinking the state or escaping the state. But what one finds when you look at the entire arc of Musk's career since his early beginnings in Silicon Valley during the 1990s dot-com boom is that he has consistently sought to instrumentalize the state as a source of power and profit. that far from trying to exit the state, he has tried to achieve what we describe as state symbiosis.

6:08So to find a profitable integration with government power in ways that help him build his businesses. And the really clarifying case here is that of SpaceX, which more than any of as other ventures has managed to really achieve this extraordinary level of state integration.

6:34Stephanie Flanders:I mean, it's funny because I was talking to someone in Europe about, you know, they were doing a sort of classic economic study of public-private partnerships and how the Europeans had worked with various rocket manufacturers and others and which ones were successful and which weren't. And I was asking him sort of, OK, but is it a success if you've got a lot of rockets, but you're completely dependent on this one private sector company that you've worked with. I mean, that is one of the key things that you bring out, these sort of public-private partnerships today, not partnerships of equals, especially when you see things like Starlink.

7:11Yeah, I mean, if one of the canards we were hoping to dispel with the book was this idea that Silicon Valley ideology can be easily summarized as libertarianism, I think another one of the easy dismissals of Musk that we wanted to unsettle was the idea that he's simply a crony capitalist and a kind of a parasite on the system. If you follow the stages of his career, as Ben suggested with the example of SpaceX, he's been extraordinarily adept at making himself useful to the government at different moments. When he rolls out SpaceX in 2002, that's to aid in the expansion of the global war on terror and the new model of network-centric warfare that Rumsfeld imagines it to be conducted through.

7:53But then just a handful of years later, he is making himself useful to Obama in the green industrial policy that's designed to electrify the auto sectors to make America less dependent on fossil fuel and less required to enter in quagmires like the Iraq war. So he is actually, as you're saying, managed to offer an expansion of state capacity in certain ways. We talk about this as sovereignty as a service, which in very concrete ways allows governments and clients to do things that they couldn't do before, right? It's very important, even as critics, to point out that he, through SpaceX, has reduced the cost of putting mass into orbit by over 90 % across 20 years of business.

8:39So that seems on its face like a kind of positive thing, you could say, a successful public-private partnership, good industrial policy. But it comes with this catch, of course, which is that he holds veto power ultimately over that feature of state capacity you've just gained through your contract with him. And this is made extremely clear, of course, through the discretionary and arbitrary and unexplained and actually disavowed decisions to turn off internet connectivity in the battlefield for the Ukrainian armed forces on at least one occasion in Kherson and probably in Crimea as well. So this is the promise of sovereignty through technology that cashes out as deep dependency on private, ultimately unaccountable individuals.

9:25And Musk is in some ways only the most extreme and exaggerated version of that phenomenon across the digital capitalist space.

9:33Stephanie Flanders:The Ukraine case was very striking. And you remind us the Polish foreign minister has suggested after one of these incidents that they might be forced to look for other suppliers if Starlink was an unreliable provider. And Musk just said, be quiet, small man, which I think embodies, obviously, the way he approaches things. Peter Thiel famously thinks you should just build monopoly businesses. You don't want to actually have competition. You want to be in the only one in your space. He is quite suspicious of government and wants to replace government. And Elon has had this different approach of colonizing the state.

10:10Stephanie Flanders:But the monopoly control is a big piece of it. Thiel is a funny case because, of course, among his best-known ventures is Palantir, which was founded shortly after SpaceX. And benefits from, I would say, many of the same political economic developments, rides this contracting wave of the war on terror and successfully implants itself deeply in the American state, just as deeply as SpaceX. So while Thiel, as you point out, has fashioned himself as a libertarian ideologue of sorts, his actual business practices do bear some resemblance to this muskist state symbiosis dynamic that we're describing.

10:53But I think that does point to a deeper dissimilarity between the two men, which is that Thiel has always He's been interested in presenting himself as an intellectual of sorts, of someone who has intellectual and ideological motivations for his actions, whether or not those entirely justify or align with the outcomes. Whereas Musk, and this is something that I think made writing about him a bit challenging, but also quite interesting. One finds Musk's ideology, if you like, in the everyday operations of his businesses, particularly before he turns to the far right. He's generally disinclined to make the kind of grand pronouncements that a Peter Thiel might.

11:45But if you want to learn what is the operating system of Muskism, you actually have to look at how does he practice capitalism every day.

11:58Some people treat ChachyPT like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done. ChatGPT Work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs, and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChachiBT.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

12:41Running a business means you're always on the move. The Delta SkyMiles Reserve Business American Express card is made for frequent travelers who want premium benefits that works as hard as they do. For a limited time, new Delta SkyMiles Reserve Business card members can earn 200 ,000 bonus miles, the highest miles offered this year. And when you need to recharge or find a quiet place to work, the Delta Sky Club can turn a layover into precious productive time or a restful reset. You can enjoy 15 visits each medallion year to the Delta Sky Club when flying Delta and unlock unlimited Delta Sky Club access after spending$75 ,000 in purchases on your card during a calendar year.

13:22Plus, receive four one-time guest passes each medallion year so you can bring a colleague along. That's 15 Sky Club visits plus four guest passes for an annual value of up to$950. Value estimate based on$50 per visit rate to purchase additional visits or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Apply today at www.delta.com slash podcast. Offer ends 11-426. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. This is Robert Smith from Business History. If you're listening to this, there's a good chance you're a small business owner. And like every small business owner, you started with a dream to do what you love and watch it grow.

13:58What you probably didn't dream about? Keeping up with cyber threats. That's where MasterCard can help with access to tools that help identify cyber threats to better protect your business. Building your dream business? Priceless. For cybersecurity in a changing world, there's MasterCard. Learn more at MasterCard.com slash small business. The thing about AI for business, it may not automatically fit the way your business works.

14:24Stephanie Flanders:At IBM, we've seen this firsthand. But by embedding AI across HR, IT, and procurement processes, we've reduced costs by millions, slash repetitive tasks, and freed thousands of hours for strategic work. Now we're helping companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business, IBM.

14:56Stephanie Flanders:One of the other themes that you're sort of pulling out from his version of capitalism is that he was kind of ahead of his time before deglobalization. He was into a sort of fortress economy approach to building things, a very vertically integrated production at the time where actually most other big businesses around the world were actually building their very globally integrated supply chains. That is something that comes through and in the end is a great advantage for him, I guess. Absolutely. And that's, I mean, following what Ben said, our analog really here is Fordism, right? And Fordism is not a system that people understood purely by reading the life and work of Henry Ford, but it's something they understood by seeing how he organized manufacturing and then the world outside the factory.

15:40But this feature of Musk that is often related to Ford, namely vertical integration, this desire to bring as much as possible of the production under the roof of one firm, has often been remarked on as a unique feature of Musk. He was doing it before it was cool, so to speak, right already in the 2000s at the high point of kind of supply chain capitalism and high globalization. He was already trying to make as many of the components he saw himself, reduced dependency on contractors and so on. That's always been remarked on, but very rarely or if ever explained. Where did the inspiration for this come from?

16:21And I think this is one of the interventions of our book, actually, is to draw on his South African upbringing, not only or merely to explain his later turn to ethno-nationalist and exclusionary racism, but to explain some of his political-economic inclinations. So late apartheid South Africa, where, of course, he was raised and left in his late teens, was in a third way, in contradistinction to U.S.-led globalization already at the time and Soviet-style search for self-sufficiency in a block model. South Africa was creating what we call fortress futurism. They were using IBM mainframes to practice apartheid.

17:03They developed their own nuclear bomb. They built out their own auto industry through licenses from the major companies. And Musk seemed to have brought this mentality with him. He sells and has been successful in marketing to both households and nations the idea that you can harden the walls of your own security in a time of increasing threats, whether those are climate-related, social-related, political-related, immigration-related. So this seemed to have sort of prepared him in advance for what we now think of as a more recent trend towards reshoring, re-territorialization, and de-globalization.

17:42He was already on that train. And when COVID hit in 2020, he was especially well-suited to pivot to a more domestically anchored production model because he was already doing it. And furthermore, he'd already sold that model abroad. So the Gigafactory in Shanghai had opened in 2019. It would open a few years later in Brandenburg. So he's interestingly, you know, globally franchising a model that is at least partially premised on deglobalization. And that's one feature of Musk that I think is often overlooked.

18:15Stephanie Flanders:What you've just talked about for an individual business or for his business, as you suggest, he's also kind of selling it to individuals implicitly that they can be there's almost like a kind of prepper feel to it. As you say, he sells the fantasy that states and individuals in an increasingly unstable world can fortify their self-reliance by plugging into his infrastructures. But of course, the paradox is that they become reliant on him in the process. No, I think that's absolutely right, that this sovereignty through technology can be scaled either up or down. It can be scaled up to the level of the nation state so he can sell satellite service or launch service to militaries and intelligence agencies around the world who are attempting to protect their countries in a world that feels increasingly unstable.

19:10but that he can make that same promise at the individual level. We quote from a presentation he gave where he described a integrated Tesla dome where the various technologies that are provided by Musk could help you achieve total self-sufficiency in a storm. So for instance, you would have solar panels on your roof. You would have a Tesla battery in your basement. You would have a Starlink receiver up top. So you're able to continue to get electricity. You're continued to get internet service and you have a cyber truck in the garage. And when we try to explain this concept of the prepper side of Muskism, we often use the cyber truck as a perfect visual illustration of that, because it really is the car that is designed for the end of the world.

20:09I mean, not practically speaking, as various researchers have discovered.

20:14Stephanie Flanders:Certainly not designed with aesthetics in mind. No. And I think its actual resilience is somewhat debated. But in terms of the cyberpunk look, what it's telegraphing is the notion of a world that is breaking down, a world of social and political and infrastructural and even ecological chaos that you'll be fine driving through the hordes of protesters or the flood zone in your cyber truck. And that, I think, it also helps explain how he has pivoted politically. Because if you think about Musk purely as the Obama-era bright green future guy, as we call it, then it can be a bit bewildering to now see his current political and ideological incarnation.

21:05The cyber truck, I think, helps provide that missing link of the future getting darker and the response being more about adaptation and hardening rather than trying to actually solve the deeper problems. One of the things we also wanted to push back at in the book is the idea that at some point in the Relative Libreason past, quote unquote, Musk went crazy. In fact, we think that if you follow certain guiding principles, he's actually been quite consistent. And the shift from the sort of cherry red roadster to the cyber truck may look like a kind of U-turn. But if you think about even awareness of climate change and its consequences and how that's sharpened and radicalized from 2008 when he rolls out the roadster to the 2020s when he rolls out the cyber truck, well, the way we understand the future under conditions of climate change has also darkened, right?

21:56There's no longer this vision of the possibility of an energy transition in which middle-class consumer lifestyle would remain relatively untouched. There's no prospect of that now, right? Radical weather events are a matter of fact. Extreme transformations of landscapes and territories, whether through forest fires or flooding, are now a matter of seasonal occurrence. So you actually are still the green musk. It's just that the world has changed around you.

22:25Stephanie Flanders:Yeah, and I think people in that conversation for many years didn't want to sound like it was too late or paint only a negative vision. They wanted to suggest that you could still do things because they didn't want to instill a sort of apathy. But I think given the direction that things have gone, they've sort of given up on that. Yeah, there's a fatalism now, even in the ecological community.

23:12Thank you. through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode, available on plus and pro plans. Running a business means you're always on the move. The Delta SkyMiles Reserve Business American Express card is made for frequent travelers who want premium benefits that works as hard as they do. For a limited time, new Delta SkyMiles Reserve Business Card members can earn 200 ,000 bonus miles, the highest miles offered this year. And when you need to recharge or find a quiet place to work, the Delta Sky Club can turn a layover into precious productive time or a restful reset.

24:00You can enjoy 15 visits each medallion year to the Delta Sky Club when flying Delta and unlock unlimited Delta Sky Club access after spending $75 ,000 in purchases on your card during a calendar year. Plus, receive four one-time guest passes each medallion year so you can bring a colleague along. That's 15 Sky Club visits plus four guest passes for an annual value of up to$950. Value estimate based on$50 per visit rate to purchase additional visits or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Apply today at www.delta.com slash podcast. Offer ends 11-426. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply.

24:38This is Robert Smith from Business History. If you're listening to this, there's a good chance you're a small business owner. And like every small business owner, you started with a dream to do what you love and watch it grow. What you probably didn't dream about? Keeping up with cyber threats. That's where MasterCard can help with access to tools that help identify cyber threats to better protect your business. Building your dream business? Priceless. For cybersecurity in a changing world, there's MasterCard. Learn more at MasterCard.com slash small business. The thing about AI for business, it may not automatically fit the way your business works.