Dreaming Against the Machine - July 28, 2026


Episode 16: What is Elon Musk? With Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff

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Episode 15: Hopeful Science Fiction, with Becky Chambers Episode 17: Weapons of Math Destruction, with Cathy O’Neil

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56 minutes

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8,392

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354

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5

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Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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00:00:00.000 Welcome back to Dreaming Against the Machine. I'm your host, Adam Becker. This week's guests
00:00:07.860 are Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian. Now, Quinn and Ben wrote a book called Muskism.
00:00:14.600 And I know that just saying the name of that book has at least half, probably more like
00:00:20.700 three quarters or 90% of you retching and making various weird sounds. I feel the same
00:00:26.940 way. Don't worry. But I think that unfortunately, we do need to take a closer look at Elon Musk.
00:00:35.020 This is a guy who has way too much power, way too much money. And if we want to get him out of that
00:00:43.260 position and make it so that he does not have as much effect on our world, we need to understand
00:00:51.320 how he got there and the way that he operates. And, you know, there's a part of me that feels
00:00:57.400 like talking about Muskism is kind of like talking about Trumpism. There isn't like a coherent,
00:01:06.520 well-plotted out plan that Musk has, I think, any more than Trump does. He's just sort of
00:01:14.560 operating on instinct and naked self-interest and some vague ideas that he has about what he likes.
00:01:21.320 that don't bear a lot of relationship to reality.
00:01:24.300 But the fact that he's been able to rise to power
00:01:27.540 says something about the business and financial
00:01:30.620 and governmental systems that we have in place.
00:01:33.700 And in order to make the changes to those systems
00:01:38.180 that we want to make,
00:01:39.280 both to take the power away from Musk
00:01:41.360 and prevent this from happening again,
00:01:43.420 we got to understand how this happened.
00:01:45.820 And that means talking with Quinn and Ben.
00:01:48.320 So here they are.
00:01:51.320 quinn ben welcome to dreaming against the machine good to be here thanks for having us
00:01:59.400 actually can i ask you two to introduce yourselves i i know who you are but i don't
00:02:04.540 i fear that if i tried to explain who you were i would get it wrong i'm ben tarnoff i'm a writer
00:02:10.020 from massachusetts co-author with quinn of muskism a guide for the perplexed my name is
00:02:18.000 Quinn Slobodian. I am a professor of international history at Boston University. And I've written a
00:02:24.640 few books, mostly about the history of neoliberalism, and happy to have just written
00:02:29.020 this one with Ben Tarnoff about Musk. Well, thank you again for being here.
00:02:34.100 Our pleasure.
00:02:34.960 So I met you guys at a public event for your recent book, Muskism, in downtown Oakland. What,
00:02:43.740 I guess that was last month, something like that.
00:02:47.060 Wasn't it May 1st?
00:02:48.040 Oh, yeah, it was May 1st.
00:02:49.300 How could we forget?
00:02:50.340 Yeah, of course, it was May Day.
00:02:52.200 No, you had a trivia contest about Musk,
00:02:56.960 which I unfortunately won as a ringer.
00:03:01.400 Absolutely.
00:03:02.840 Still a little bit angry that you didn't recuse yourself.
00:03:05.660 No, I probably should have.
00:03:06.940 That was some skullduggery.
00:03:07.840 Yeah, well, I mean, my team was counting on me,
00:03:11.360 and yes you redistributed this boil i did yes yes i absolutely did um but your book is great
00:03:23.080 it's also terrifying it hadn't occurred to me to think of a thing called muskism i tend to think
00:03:34.980 of musk as just doing what he does i mean that's not true i think if i think of musk as having some
00:03:41.000 method behind his madness, but that's not even really what you were going after. You were
00:03:47.740 not saying that Musk himself is doing this stuff with this sort of coherent ideology in mind,
00:03:56.480 right? That's right. I mean, I think it's an interesting comparison to your book, actually,
00:04:01.640 because in that case, I think there was a little bit more to work with as a kind of intellectual
00:04:06.400 history, right? Because the rationalists and the long-termists, I mean, they actually write books,
00:04:12.600 they tell you what they believe, and then they take actions that you can then compare with what
00:04:17.700 they said their beliefs were and say, like, they're misleading us or they're being faithful
00:04:22.580 to their crackpot ideas or whatever. But Musk, of course, is not really a coherent thinker in that
00:04:28.480 way. He's never written his own manifesto. He blurts out these kind of brain farts throughout
00:04:34.560 the course of the day, often in what seem like self-destructive kind of outbursts, often quite 0.94
00:04:41.320 racist. So it takes some work to try to cobble together something out of that. And I think that
00:04:48.240 it's important to maybe insist right from the top that what Ben and I were trying to do was not say
00:04:53.980 like he secretly has this coherent worldview and we've uncovered it and you just have to look
00:04:59.520 closely, it's more like the way people have treated Fordism. So Fordism, when people talk
00:05:06.420 about that for the last hundred years now, they don't mean Henry Ford was secretly this genius
00:05:12.700 thinker with tons of foresight, a kind of political philosopher. What they mean is the way that Ford
00:05:19.820 did capitalism implied a certain social world that then we as social scientists or theorists
00:05:26.660 or observers can kind of reassemble basically after the fact.
00:05:30.620 So it doesn't have to be a kind of a backfilling
00:05:33.180 of the superior intelligence of a Musk or a Ford.
00:05:37.100 And indeed, that's not what we're doing at all.
00:05:39.800 But it's a way of trying to name an ensemble
00:05:42.440 of kind of social forces and political relationships
00:05:45.880 that can be provisionally given a label
00:05:48.760 to help us figure out what's going on.
00:05:51.280 This is probably a place where the comparison
00:05:52.500 to Trump is helpful.
00:05:54.300 Musk and Trump have many similarities that you might guess at, such as their fondness
00:05:59.880 for social media.
00:06:01.320 But I think more profoundly, they're both improvisational figures.
00:06:05.560 They both seem to operate more by intuition than premeditation.
00:06:10.360 But that doesn't mean that we can't think about something called Trumpism or something
00:06:16.520 called Muskism.
00:06:17.880 I think we would probably argue that Muskism is a more useful analytic than Trumpism, but we're not trying to sane wash Musk or say that we're going to give the secret key that unlocks precisely his roadmap to success.
00:06:35.680 But rather, when you zoom out, as we do in the book, and look at the life and work of Elon Musk as a whole, you find certain through lines, certain themes that recur. And interestingly, these themes always have to do with the political economic era in which Musk is living.
00:06:55.840 So Musk can be seen as a Forrest Gump or Zellig-like figure that actually takes you through these distinct stages of global political economy from the dot-com boom of Silicon Valley in the 90s through the global war on terror, through the Obama experiment with green industrial policy, through the Web 2.0 period, so on and so forth.
00:07:21.600 And that's why we think Musk is uniquely suited to this kind of treatment. It's not just that he's the richest man who's ever lived, but also that the arc of his career gives us a structure for understanding how we got here.
00:07:35.420 The idea of Musk as chaotic, evil Forrest Gump had not occurred to me. Now that's going to just live in my head and I'm going to have to deal with that. So what is Muskism?
00:07:50.520 like in your you know analysis like what yeah i i would agree that musk does not have like
00:07:59.060 a single coherent philosophy and never really has uh i mean he has things that he wants
00:08:06.000 but even those are not always fixed in the book you describe it as sovereignty as a service
00:08:13.940 sort of, right? What do you mean by that?
00:08:17.800 I mean, if you think about sort of pithy formulas
00:08:22.100 that encapsulate other ideologies, so for example, when people talk about
00:08:25.900 Fordism, they often say mass production plus mass consumption.
00:08:30.260 Or people talk about neoliberalism, which will probably be relevant
00:08:34.140 for our conversation at some point. Sometimes they'll say
00:08:37.360 the dethronement of politics by economics, or the ongoing effort
00:08:42.100 to make capitalism safe from democracy.
00:08:45.220 We think about Muskism as the promise of sovereignty
00:08:49.100 to both nations and individuals through technology
00:08:53.500 that cashes out as a greater dependence
00:08:55.840 on private service providers.
00:08:58.900 So it's not quite the same as neoliberalism.
00:09:02.260 There isn't a kind of sacralization of the market
00:09:05.020 or a demonization of the state.
00:09:08.260 The state is actually welcomed as an essential partner in the project.
00:09:14.680 We use the term state symbiosis to think about this dynamic relationship between primarily tech providers, the hardware and software companies that have driven American stock market growth and economic innovation for the last quarter century.
00:09:32.760 to domestic clients, foreign clients, mostly governments, but not always.
00:09:39.220 Often people, too, who, in a crumbling world where the future seems ever more uncertain,
00:09:47.060 the promise of Muskism is that if you plug into these private infrastructures,
00:09:52.740 you will be safe inside of the Tesla dome, as it were.
00:09:57.480 Even if you're on Mars, which as we know, it's very hard to get by on based on the rather vivid descriptions that you offered in your book.
00:10:06.260 Yeah. No, that's not happening. Let's take a little time to unpack this before we get in deeper because I have all sorts of stuff I want to talk with you guys about.
00:10:15.580 I think that this is not a way of thinking about Musk that most people are accustomed to, right?
00:10:25.380 I think that insofar as people think about, like, you know, people who don't do this for a living think about Musk at all, these days I think they think of Musk's relationship to the state, for example, as, you know, something more like neoliberalism.
00:10:45.080 That he's interested in dismantling the power of the state. And you push back against that in your book, and I think rightly so. But I think it's not well appreciated that Musk's power and money has largely come from working with state apparatus rather than trying to undermine it the way that someone like a Peter Thiel does.
00:11:10.280 We want to make the argument very strenuously that Musk is not and has never been a libertarian, that he's always instrumentalized the state as a source of power and profit, that he's always identified it really as indispensable to his business operations, really from the very beginning.
00:11:28.080 And he does so in a number of ways. I mean, like other figures from Silicon Valley, he's quite dependent on the state, of course, as a source for R&D funding of the kind that sustained the basic technologies that Silicon Valley has enriched itself with, including perhaps most importantly, the Internet.
00:11:48.820 But more broadly, Musk has also identified the state as a source of subsidies, and perhaps most importantly, as a client, as a customer.
00:12:01.360 He gets involved with provisioning services to the state quite early.
00:12:06.400 SpaceX, as you may recall, which he founds in 2002, gets its start as a government contractor during the early years of the global war on terror.
00:12:15.640 So in many respects, Musk is ahead of the curve. He's doing things before it becomes cool, so to speak. And there's been a lot of discussion about how in the last few years, Silicon Valley has turned to the state in the AI era as an essential partner for securing the massive energy inputs required for data centers that are training large language models.
00:12:45.300 for access to land, for a permissive regulatory environment, and so on and so forth, and that
00:12:52.220 this signals an inflection point, let's say, from the Web 2.0 platform era, where really what
00:13:00.340 Silicon Valley wanted from the state was a fairly hands-off approach, economic liberalization
00:13:07.400 domestically and globally, whereas now they need a more active state partner because AI is frankly
00:13:14.440 so capital intensive that a different type of state capital relation is needed.
00:13:21.140 Musk is an innovator in this respect.
00:13:25.620 He's developing that new state tech fusion as early as the 2000s in the form of first
00:13:32.760 rockets and then cars because Tesla is important to also place within a geopolitical frame.
00:13:40.120 Tesla is really able to survive because the first Obama administration identifies it as a crucial partner for an attempted energy transition in the late 2000s, which Obama is framing as necessary to reduce our reliance on foreign oil, which will then reduce our appetite for disastrous military adventures abroad like the Iraq war.
00:14:06.000 So it's important here to see Musk not just as someone who is seeking fusion with the state of various kinds, what we describe as state symbiosis, but as someone who has always been a creature of geopolitics long before geopolitics became a headline term.
00:14:23.780 maybe i can just add a couple things there um just to append that helpful answer from ben i think that
00:14:30.160 when people who are critics of musk do address his relationship to the state and and they do
00:14:35.580 they almost always describe it as crony capitalism or parasitism right or like yeah looting the public 0.95
00:14:43.620 purse or ripping off the taxpayer or you know sucking the teat of the government however you 0.94
00:14:51.080 want to phrase it. And we're actually resistant to that description, too, because crony capitalism, 0.96
00:14:58.180 which of course exists, and there's certainly a lot of it going around right now, is about finding,
00:15:03.360 you know, inefficient choke points in political economy that you can gather rents from because of
00:15:10.340 your relationship to the government. So by definition, it can't be innovation creating,
00:15:15.060 It can't be capacity expanding.
00:15:16.940 You need to be, you know, making things worse for both customers, the government, and for
00:15:23.220 everyone except yourself.
00:15:24.860 And there's certainly been moments when Musk has, you know, taken wealth from the public
00:15:31.040 purse and not produced something useful or, you know, failed in his efforts.
00:15:36.140 But there have been also times when he succeeded.
00:15:39.240 And I think it's really important for us to give him his due in a way when he actually did deliver on creating new markets that maybe hadn't existed before, like the consumer EV market, like satellite internet, like affordable launch.
00:15:59.620 These are things that were not described well as crony capitalism, right?
00:16:04.000 Actually, in the case of the Tesla example that Ben just mentioned in the Obama administration,
00:16:09.080 that's really industrial policy.
00:16:10.740 Yeah, yes, the Obama Department of Energy de-risked Musk's investments.
00:16:16.660 But that's also what Biden was doing in the IRA for the years that he was in power.
00:16:23.820 And that was considered not to be necessarily wasteful or parasitic on the part of, say,
00:16:29.700 semiconductor fabs opening in Arizona, or people starting up new solar panel manufacturing
00:16:36.460 facilities with government subsidies that was considered like, okay, they're making progress
00:16:41.300 on a new sector that's socially important. But the other thing I wanted to mention, especially
00:16:46.280 probably relevant to some of your listeners, is this idea of Musk as kind of seeking to dismantle
00:16:53.900 society or government as someone who's who is does seem to be trying to seek the ultimate exit as
00:17:01.420 Balaji Srinivasan put it years ago and there are things you can certainly point to right I mean
00:17:08.360 first the Mars fantasy is at some level like the ultimate exit fantasy like no I'm going to another
00:17:14.580 planet so I think I would make sense if someone listened to what we were saying and saying like
00:17:20.520 come on he said his main thing is like to found a new civilization on another planet so like what
00:17:25.480 about that you know and i think we would say that's true but what does that language of going
00:17:33.760 to mars actually deliver to him here on planet earth and isn't that maybe more important that
00:17:39.240 isn't let's say the capture of military contracts for the use of starship for the you know delivery
00:17:46.000 of materiel from point to point on planet Earth
00:17:49.060 or the use of Starlink satellites
00:17:52.200 in the planned Golden Dome missile defense project.
00:17:55.840 Like maybe this is actually the story
00:17:57.500 and Mars is kind of not the story, right?
00:18:00.760 Even if he presents it as a sort of shiny object.
00:18:04.760 I mean, the other thing you point to
00:18:05.920 is things like Starbase and Snailbrook
00:18:08.860 and the company towns he's producing here on Earth as well,
00:18:12.580 which do kind of look like enclave, exit, kind of dropout spaces of the kind I described in my
00:18:20.360 earlier book, crack up capitalism. And I think there's some validity there too. But the trick,
00:18:27.220 and it's important not to miss that, is that he's having his cake and eating it too. He's having it
00:18:32.420 both ways. So yes, he's producing these rebooted company towns in which the decisions being made
00:18:39.560 are aligned 100% with his own bottom line and interests
00:18:43.680 and he can immunize himself
00:18:45.440 against different kinds of legal feedback mechanisms.
00:18:49.640 But he's also completely dependent
00:18:51.720 on having that connection to the federal government,
00:18:54.200 the central government, not just in the US,
00:18:55.920 but also globally.
00:18:56.960 He needs buy-in from every global governing power
00:19:01.700 to get to where he wants to go.
00:19:04.740 So one needs to be able to hold two things
00:19:06.820 in your head at once.
00:19:07.480 Yes, he wants to go to Mars and drop out and live in a compound in Texas, but he also needs to be basically a diplomat and sit down with Modi and sit down with Xi Jinping and make the case to them why their governments should do business with his government to secure the contracts that he needs.
00:19:25.760 This brings me to a question that kept coming to mind for me when I was reading your book. As you said just now, Quinn, so much of what he does is sort of, you know, inherently contradictory in some way.
00:19:41.840 Uh, and yes, he sells us on this fantasy of Mars and it very much is a fantasy. It's not going to happen. Um, and he uses that as an excuse to both like insulate himself from having to deal with the consequences of, you know, living in a society while also, you know, engaging in this sort of state symbiosis that you're talking about.
00:20:09.320 But I am curious, though, there was a word that you kept using in the book, and I want to understand a little bit more about why you said that some of what he did ends up looking kind of prescient, right?
00:20:28.060 That, you know, he did things in, say, the 2000s and early 2010s that went against the sort of globalization trend of the time that now in this de-globalization era look prescient.
00:20:43.600 And I kept thinking, I mean, probably because at the end of the day I'm a physicist and this is how I think about things, I kept thinking about this as a kind of selection effect, right?
00:20:54.720 I tend to think about Silicon Valley as being essentially a giant casino where you have many, many people pulling the levers on these one-armed bandits all day, and most of them don't succeed, and then a few of them do, and then a very few of them succeed over and over again.
00:21:18.680 And yes, there's something about the decisions that they're making that leads to those repeated successes, but a lot of it is just luck.
00:21:28.260 And so I find it difficult to believe that Musk, you know, discerned or somehow enabled or brought about this sort of anti-globalization turn and that's why he was doing what he was doing.
00:21:46.140 And I'm not saying that that's what you were saying. I'm just curious, how much of this do you think is like, yes, Musk did this because if he hadn't, we wouldn't be talking about him?
00:21:56.980 Well, I think there's a few things in your question, Adam. I think first is what is the division of labor between luck and ability in making someone successful? Obviously, there are a lot of people in Silicon Valley who got very lucky, who were staying at the right place at the right time and got hit by a lightning bolt of money and then have to kind of post facto construct a narrative about why they deserved it.
00:22:23.560 I think someone like Musk, it's a bit harder to make the case because he's been so successful at so many different junctures that we do, I believe, need to talk about why. And I think we can talk about why in ways that don't necessarily ascribe a superhuman genius to him.
00:22:43.420 I think we can frame the why also in terms of structure. It doesn't need to be presented in such a way as to ennoble him or to elevate him. But I think we do need to try to identify, well, what are the things that he was particularly good at?
00:23:03.320 And one of the things I think he has been very good at is intuiting, because it frankly may or may not be conscious, but intuiting certain opportunities that are inherent in the political economic environment in which he is operating.
00:23:18.980 So when it comes to his production model, because that's another piece of your question, which from the 2000s, from SpaceX and Tesla, early days, is very much about vertical integration, is about reducing reliance on external suppliers, is about trying to make as much as possible in-house, where does that come from?
00:23:44.320 Well, we have one speculation we present in the book. We can't get inside his mind. But one piece of the puzzle that we present, because we think it's particularly interesting, is the fact that apartheid South Africa, where Musk, of course, was born and grew up, also pursued an industrial model that emphasized economic self-sufficiency.
00:24:06.320 It did so for political reasons primarily because the white apartheid leaders perceived themselves correctly to be encircled by threats both within and without their borders.
00:24:19.740 And in order to garrison their regime, they wanted to try to build certain things such as cars within the country and bring advanced technology such as IBM mainframes into the nation to help with implementing apartheid.
00:24:39.220 So one could place the emphasis on economic and technological self-sufficiency that was pursued by the apartheid regime alongside Musk's industrial model as developed at SpaceX and Tesla and say, these two things look like they have quite a bit to do with one another.
00:24:59.940 Now, does that mean Musk is a genius?
00:25:03.960 I mean, I was asked that point blank in one of many interviews that we've been doing, I think, by an Australian journalist.
00:25:11.000 Do you think Musk is a genius?
00:25:12.540 And, you know, it's terrestrial radio, so you can't give a long-winded answer.
00:25:15.960 But I've tried to give a version of what I'm trying to do now, which is to say that we think about genius as the quality of an individual.
00:25:27.260 Think of it in personalized terms.
00:25:29.320 What if we thought about it more as an emergent property of a system?
00:25:34.460 Could we say that Trump has a kind of genius, but he is not himself a genius in the kind of honorific sense of the term?
00:25:43.360 Yes.
00:25:44.240 Trump has, probably mostly by intuition, innovated a completely new political style that will be with us forever.
00:25:51.920 He's probably the most consequential American president since Andrew Jackson.
00:25:57.300 So could we look at Musk?
00:25:59.320 And also say that when you look at Musk as a system, when you look at Muskism, does it exhibit properties of genius in the sense that it innovates new styles that do in fact have a quite meaningfully disruptive effect on the social environment in ways that perhaps rewire it for the future?
00:26:21.680 I think, yes, probably.
00:26:23.600 But it's important, again, that we're not making a moral case here.
00:26:27.140 We're not saying, well, he deserves it.
00:26:29.000 He should keep his trillion dollars.
00:26:30.980 We're really trying to make an analytic case about understanding the sources of his power.
00:26:35.880 I think it's also a question of what our claim is, right?
00:26:38.760 And I think in most cases, we're not making a causal claim that Musk made history go in a certain way.
00:26:47.760 And without him, it wouldn't have gone that way.
00:26:50.380 More often than not, we're seeing the causality go the other way,
00:26:52.980 which is what Musk has had that genius for
00:26:55.680 is sensing new market opportunities
00:26:58.980 and then often moving very quickly into them,
00:27:02.540 maybe in some cases earlier than others,
00:27:05.500 and then later on, others did.
00:27:07.980 So SpaceX is a very good example, as we describe in the book.
00:27:11.780 I mean, it's 2002.
00:27:14.200 Immediately after the wake of the launch of the global war on terror,
00:27:17.820 where Musk says, hey, the time is ripe for me to slide into the position
00:27:25.080 that the military primes have dominated for decades
00:27:28.520 and to start to challenge them and to have a go at the legacy contractors
00:27:34.260 and use legal tools and use some of the rhetoric of the government itself
00:27:38.340 against it to crack open a new client base.
00:27:44.420 And it worked, right?
00:27:45.800 And after he did it, Palantir did it.
00:27:48.540 This is, I think, 2012, 2013 or something around there.
00:27:53.200 And now the idea of military tech or hard tech has been discussed for the last 18 months
00:28:02.300 as simply the forefront of investment and growth for Silicon Valley products.
00:28:10.060 so I don't think it's that far-fetched
00:28:14.960 to say that in that sense
00:28:16.880 his turning to the government
00:28:18.900 as an important client in 2002
00:28:21.520 was kind of prescient
00:28:22.440 because later on others would do it too
00:28:24.680 he didn't make it happen
00:28:26.980 and the other example with globalization
00:28:30.580 is I think worth mentioning
00:28:33.640 because it was also for me anyway
00:28:35.440 something I didn't know too much about
00:28:36.880 before researching for the book
00:28:38.680 But the way that Musk was setting up the Gigafactory, so he builds one, opens in Shanghai in 2019, was quite unusual compared to the way other auto factories were working, right?
00:28:54.440 So rather than being dependent on a whole network of subcontractors and suppliers, rather than moving the object of the car around often across borders the way, say, like Fords are built in the United States, crossing back and forth to either Canada or Mexico several times before they are actually built, Tesla was doing as much as they could in-house.
00:29:16.480 So that has since become their hallmark and indeed Musk's kind of calling card is this idea of vertical integration, which was deeply, deeply uncool in the 2000s when he started doing it.
00:29:27.900 And when the Gigafactory opens and six months later COVID hits and Tesla's factories are shut down in Fremont, California and elsewhere, he's of course devastated and angry and lashes out at anyone he can and calls the containment policy fascist and the rest of it.
00:29:49.720 But he rebounds more quickly than other car companies do because of the shortness of supply chains, because of the resilience that's built in through this model of vertical integration.
00:29:59.420 And to a lot of people there, there was another moment where, like him or hate him, people said like, oh, well, Musk was actually ahead of the curve with this trend towards nearshoring and reshoring.
00:30:11.380 And now, you know, it's, again, become the talk of the industry as the way things need to go.
00:30:20.680 So it's an interesting, you know, relationship between the market signals, you could say, that he picks up and then his efforts to plug into them, which, as Ben has been insisting, isn't necessarily always conscious or that's maybe not the most helpful way to look at it.
00:30:40.480 But it's always allowing him to accumulate more. And since that is really the primary law of the capitalists is to accumulate, then yes, he is finding new strategies and tactics, which are often then imitated successfully and unsuccessfully by those that come after him.
00:31:00.720 I mean, it's interesting to think of all the, and Musk himself, of course, always boasts about things like this.
00:31:05.480 The people who tried to imitate him have since disappeared.
00:31:07.980 You know, the Nikola's, wasn't that the name of the truck company that was just being pushed downhill?
00:31:13.520 Even Blue Origin.
00:31:15.760 I mean, Blue Origin isn't, you know, if you want to think that we have a better country,
00:31:20.700 if we switch government contracts from Musk to Bezos, then even then, I mean, is it really a viable replacement?
00:31:28.420 I mean, not yet.
00:31:29.760 So, yeah, I think that the best way to think about it, we think, is that different political moments produce certain market opportunities, and one of the traits that makes muskism helpful to think with is that you can often see the opening up of new sectors and new domains for investment,
00:31:55.180 new investment stories for people backing these endeavors
00:32:01.580 that maybe didn't exist immediately before.
00:32:05.720 And of course, just to wind it up,
00:32:08.060 that is really the story of what SpaceX is.
00:32:11.420 The reason why it's valued so highly
00:32:14.460 is because he's somewhat plausibly able to say,
00:32:17.760 hey, I created the space economy as a plausible, investable space
00:32:22.620 because I dropped the cost of launch by 90%.
00:32:25.700 So all those things that were in the science fiction books
00:32:29.280 and libertarian dreamers in the 70s and 80s
00:32:32.700 about doing manufacturing in space
00:32:34.820 and some space escalator and all that crap
00:32:37.760 that seems super far-fetched still is. 0.70
00:32:41.160 I mean, you know more than anyone.
00:32:43.440 But he can sell it in a way that no one else could
00:32:48.920 because of what he's managed to pull off.
00:32:50.740 unfortunately we still live in capitalism and that means we need to talk about our partners
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00:35:47.300 Going back to that moment in 2020 where the Fremont plant closed because of COVID restrictions,
00:35:55.300 there was a tweet from Musk that he sent out at the time that I feel like encapsulates so much of what he is and how he operates.
00:36:04.780 He posted, there will be no Mars if we let them take our freedom away.
00:36:11.620 And there's so much there.
00:36:14.620 It's such a perfect tweet in terms of like what Musk is and how he thinks.
00:36:23.120 Because of course, there's not going to be a million people on Mars, no matter what happens.
00:36:28.120 And also taking our freedom away is not what was happening.
00:36:31.880 They were just interfering with his manufacturing processes.
00:36:34.860 But it is fascinating to me because, yes, it's true.
00:36:40.260 SpaceX created the modern space economy, but it's also true that, as you just said, and as I was just saying about that tweet, these ideas that people have about what is coming for the economy in space is mostly wrong and not really a matter of opinion, a matter of physics.
00:37:04.880 um and that is so much of why spacex is valued so highly especially right now in the wake of
00:37:12.680 that ipo although of course as of at least yesterday i haven't looked this morning that
00:37:17.240 the numbers are coming down which is kind of interesting um but um but yeah i mean you know
00:37:24.480 that that valuation for spacex was not based on what it does now and what it could plausibly do
00:37:32.100 in the near future, most of that valuation was based on stuff that isn't going to happen,
00:37:37.360 like putting, you know, terawatts of data centers into orbit and millions of people on Mars.
00:37:46.080 These things are just not going to occur. And listeners, if you don't know why, we're going
00:37:53.040 to have an episode about that real soon, or you can go read my book. But I mean, this brings me
00:38:00.040 back to a question that everybody always asks about musk and i tend to dismiss but i think you
00:38:06.500 guys are going to have a more interesting answer i get asked a lot what happened to musk right like
00:38:12.740 the bumper sticker that you quote in your book uh you know i i bought this before elon went crazy
00:38:18.260 uh about the the teslas i i never liked musk i i um you know i like to joke and say that i'm a
00:38:29.240 hipster about hating Elon Musk. I hated him before it was cool. I've never liked him. But there's
00:38:35.120 definitely been a shift in how people think about him. You know, when you talked about Obama's
00:38:41.100 industrial policy around Tesla, I think that's right. I think that is industrial policy. And I
00:38:45.820 also kind of have to think that right now, Obama is probably kicking himself. But he was certainly
00:38:52.360 not the only one who thought that that was a reasonable thing to do and that Musk was a
00:38:57.020 reasonable person to partner with. And there's been a massive shift in how he conducts himself
00:39:04.180 publicly, for sure. And in the book, you sort of trace some of that to social media and him
00:39:11.120 realizing that he can sort of manipulate markets and, you know, cryptocurrencies with the power
00:39:20.040 of attention. But I would be curious, because like generally when people ask me what happened
00:39:26.160 to Musk, I say, oh, nothing really. This is the mask coming off. He was always like this.
00:39:30.940 I get the sense that you two maybe don't completely agree with that.
00:39:35.560 Yeah. I mean, I think if you do hear versions of this argument that Musk has always been
00:39:41.060 on the far right, and we can't look into his soul to know precisely, but he was not making
00:39:48.840 the kind of pronouncements that he's making now in the mid-2010s and the 2000s and the 1990s.
00:39:59.580 So certainly his public persona has shifted quite sharply to the right.
00:40:06.200 The question of what happened to Musk is something we devote the second half of our
00:40:11.960 book to. So I'd encourage listeners who want a more detailed exposition of this
00:40:16.980 to pick it up. But I would say more concisely that for us, the answer of Musk's rightward shift
00:40:27.760 is inextricably bound up with what we call his cyborg turn, which is his growing conviction
00:40:36.020 from the mid-2010s onward that humanity is becoming ever more entangled with its technology
00:40:44.780 and that in so doing we are becoming cyborgs this is a word he uses directly and further that this
00:40:56.940 process of cyborg synthesis is something that we should welcome yeah something that we should
00:41:03.100 accelerate because and this brings us into territory that you're familiar with adam
00:41:07.760 Because in Musk's view, riffing on figures like Nick Bostrom, the only way to avoid the existential risk of a superintelligent AI exterminating the world is to merge with computers such that we impart enough of ourselves to the AI that it won't destroy us.
00:41:29.980 So that may seem very far afield from Musk talking about white genocide and trying to rile up anti-migrant sentiment, but in our view, they're actually very closely linked.
00:41:47.880 Because what happens in the 2000s, you mentioned the factory closure in Fremont by public health order of Alameda County officials in 2000, sorry, in 2020.
00:42:01.560 And this is only for about seven weeks.
00:42:03.260 The factory's not closed terribly long.
00:42:04.940 Musk actually reopens it in defiance of the order.
00:42:08.880 But this is a quite frightening moment for Musk.
00:42:14.540 His prerogatives as a capitalist are being directly challenged by the state.
00:42:20.460 He reacts with alarm, as many other figures in the business class did, not just in Silicon
00:42:27.860 Valley, but across the country.
00:42:30.200 But then, of course, what else happens in 2020?
00:42:32.580 Well, we have the George Floyd uprising, the largest social movement in U.S. history in
00:42:36.460 the spring and summer of 2020.
00:42:37.760 We have also the election of Joe Biden, in fact, directly as a result of those protests, as a lot of social scientific research has shown. And Biden in turn pursues a relatively progressive domestic policy, which involves a pro-labor NLRB, Lena Kahn at the FTC getting serious about a regulatory and antitrust push, even some early moves around AI regulation and so forth.
00:43:07.240 And for Musk and really to his colleagues in the Silicon Valley leadership class, these are all very threatening developments. Now here I think Musk is quite characteristic of his milieu. I think one of the things we try to toggle between in the book is where is Musk being like other people in his world and where is Musk being distinctive?
00:43:32.060 When it comes to feeling freaked out by the social movement politics of 2020 and freaked out by Biden's domestic progressivism, Musk is frankly like every other capitalist in America.
00:43:47.220 This is a very common response. And in particular in Silicon Valley, where they're mourning the centrism of an Obama-style figure and wondering where did all of these activists in the street come from?
00:44:03.120 how did the American left revivify itself and start talking about justice and equality and
00:44:11.600 class and race in ways that were really pretty much absent from the scene in the 2000s when
00:44:18.000 Musk was emerging as a kind of Obama darling. Where Musk is distinctive however is the form
00:44:28.440 that his rightward politicization takes, not so much the content, but the form. And the form can
00:44:35.280 be summarized quite succinctly. The form is a single phrase, which is the woke mind virus.
00:44:41.580 This is the phrase that is most closely associated with must turn to the right. And, you know,
00:44:47.780 Adam, your reaction was perfect because when we say this phrase in public, presenting the book,
00:44:53.320 people groan yeah they roll their eyes they laugh they you know understandable reactions yeah but
00:45:01.660 for us a real breakthrough occurred when we moved past that and realized oh actually the best way to
00:45:08.440 understand this phrase is not as a joke not as a metaphor not as symbol of some kind but actually
00:45:16.540 is completely literal, that Musk believes that these various developments, factory closure,
00:45:25.560 people yelling Black Lives Matter, tech workers talking about forming unions on Silicon Valley
00:45:34.200 campuses, Lena Kahn at the FTC, what do all of these things have in common?
00:45:41.160 Well, they're all emanations of a mental contagion called the woke mind virus.
00:45:48.920 And the woke mind virus is a disease that afflicts the software of people's brains,
00:45:54.840 and it is transmitted through the networks of our giant cybernetic collectives, as he describes them.
00:46:02.640 So if you can recall that vision of cyborg synthesis that I spoke about just a moment ago,
00:46:07.800 which in the mid-2010s he was celebrating. We're using our smartphones more. We're more
00:46:13.240 online. These are good things. This is how we impart our humanity to the machines so that they
00:46:19.140 don't kill us all. Now he sees this process of cyborgification as potentially a vector
00:46:25.380 for bad ideas that can cause people to behave in ways that run counter to his interests.
00:46:33.160 So I think that's the best way to understand Musk, not only as a figure who's moved to the right, but as a figure who embodies what we describe as cyborg conservatism.
00:46:46.180 It's a cybernetically mediated vision of what politics is, and it comes with its own appropriately cybernetic political intervention, which is what do you do about the woke mind virus?
00:46:59.900 If your view of politics is that it occurs through memes, through the transfer of information into people's minds through networks, then you seize control of those networks and you reprogram them such that different memes circulate.
00:47:16.340 You propagate an anti-woke mind virus.
00:47:19.020 And this is how we can understand the transformation of Twitter into X and, in fact, the creation of XAI and Grok.
00:47:28.340 Okay, I have a lot of responses to that, and I also have other things I was hoping to talk
00:47:35.020 to you guys about, but we are running out of time, and so I am going to skip to the end
00:47:41.160 of the stuff that I wanted to talk to you about, which is at the end of your book, you
00:47:46.260 sort of take that idea of the anti-woke mind virus to its sort of logical conclusion, and
00:47:55.180 you map out possible futures for what would happen with musk but also what musk sort of wants for the
00:48:02.080 future and you sketch out a sort of idealized vision of what musk would want things to be like
00:48:10.240 10 15 years from now um and it's quite terrifying uh involving um you know basically musk having
00:48:20.140 complete control over the information economy, far-right governments in power worldwide, 0.63
00:48:25.760 and repression of ethnic minorities, queer and genderqueer people, so on and so forth.
00:48:34.240 I don't think that we are necessarily headed there. I don't think that you two think that
00:48:38.420 we are necessarily headed there. But what I want to know is, what does your understanding
00:48:46.420 of muskism give us in terms of ways to fight back against musk's power yeah i mean i think that our
00:48:53.100 choice in ending the book that way was really a response to the dominant way that musk has been
00:49:00.360 narrated in public for the last couple of decades until now which is really as as a brilliant
00:49:07.480 engineer and businessman right so if you take the analogy to fortism it's kind of like just
00:49:13.700 focusing on the assembly line and innovations in production and the kind of cars that he was able
00:49:20.380 to make so the rockets the cars um the iron man sort of self-image yeah the question that you know
00:49:29.260 to circle back to the way we started the conversation the question we wanted to ask was
00:49:33.740 what version of ideology and social relations are assumed to back up and make possible that
00:49:40.940 production model. So what are the things that are not the cars and not the factories? What kind of
00:49:46.100 realignment with governments, realignment with consumers, et cetera? What is the belief system
00:49:51.400 that's supposed to make this whole thing tick? How's that supposed to work? So we did our best
00:49:58.280 kind of analytically to bolt all the different parts of the Musk empire together. What's
00:50:03.160 interesting about the present moment is he's doing that himself, right? So the SpaceX that IPO'd
00:50:09.400 in June was not just the
00:50:12.940 rockets and satellites, but it was also the AI company. It was also
00:50:17.160 X.com. It was also the chatbot Grok.
00:50:20.840 And it was actually now sort of doing the work materially
00:50:24.740 that we had had to do interpretively before. Because now he is
00:50:28.700 saying he's building a vertically integrated and innovation engine.
00:50:32.860 That's the one-liner to describe what SpaceX is. And the folding
00:50:36.780 in of Tesla is, from the opinion of many observers, not far behind, in no small part
00:50:42.840 because the macro hard or digital optimist part of SpaceX is a very important part as it's about
00:50:51.460 how to create humanoid robots who can replace white-collar workers sitting behind screens.
00:50:57.760 So you need the optimist segment of Tesla to be right inside the factory to be doing that with
00:51:05.200 the SpaceX AI segment of the firm.
00:51:09.220 So in that scenario you described, that's what we illustrate or speculate the appearance
00:51:16.960 of is a world in which in the vignette that we offer, a guy goes to his job and ports
00:51:26.180 with his Neuralink into Grok and conducts state business of location
00:51:35.480 and expulsion of unwanted illegal immigrants.
00:51:40.340 Meanwhile, his daughter is at school, similarly porting into Grok
00:51:46.620 through Neuralink and receiving a module about superiority
00:51:50.060 of Western civilization.
00:51:51.440 and, you know, generally receiving kind of system-affirmative education
00:51:59.440 that is designed to reinforce a sense of social danger and enmity
00:52:04.520 against anything that's not coded inside of the white Western bubble.
00:52:10.860 Meanwhile, there's a kind of energy shortage
00:52:12.980 because the grid is being taxed to run the data centers
00:52:17.940 upon really which the whole thing depends.
00:52:20.820 keep in mind that 85% of the promised market for SpaceX
00:52:25.620 is the enterprise AI sector.
00:52:27.640 So that's supposedly where all this money is being made.
00:52:31.740 But when we've, I think, set up that image,
00:52:33.620 we weren't saying this is inevitable
00:52:35.860 or like we're all being frog-marched towards this telos
00:52:39.580 without any possibility of egress or exit.
00:52:43.520 In fact, to respond to your question,
00:52:47.180 I think that he's filled with vulnerabilities.
00:52:49.100 There is the loss of investor confidence, the loss of 20% of, or sorry, was it 10% of SpaceX's value within the first few days of trading up and down shows that these things can change very quickly.
00:53:04.040 And MSCI, one of the big kind of firms that provides ratings, gave SpaceX a one out of five stars on their corruptions and controversies or their controversies index because of all of the political question marks over relying so heavily on someone like Musk with all of his erratic behavior.
00:53:29.700 and completely concentrated monopolistic control of the firm.
00:53:35.380 So you could get questions coming from institutional investors.
00:53:39.440 You could get loss of faith from retail investors.
00:53:42.200 You can get adverse legislation.
00:53:44.660 So the EU has just set aside part of its spectrum
00:53:49.020 for EU-produced satellites
00:53:51.640 in pursuit of what they call satellite sovereignty.
00:53:54.940 And this is already causing Musk some headaches and anger.
00:53:59.280 He doesn't have, remember, Starlink receivers in India.
00:54:02.480 He doesn't have them in South Africa.
00:54:04.580 Brazil has shown its willingness to fight back against him.
00:54:07.840 If that many countries in the world reject the use of Musk's products,
00:54:13.660 then the profits that he promises can't actually be realized.
00:54:18.420 And eventually he kind of runs out of rope with investors.
00:54:21.600 So I think a combination of just exposure to market, ups and downs,
00:54:27.240 And then grassroots mobilization, pushing lawmakers to get off X, divest public employee unions from these unaccountably governed firms like SpaceX and Tesla, even if they are in the indexes.
00:54:43.620 I think that these things are actually starting to happen and the vulnerabilities are starting to accumulate, I think.
00:54:50.800 And Musk's turn to ever more inflammatory rhetoric, fomenting race riots in Northern Ireland and so on, is almost a sign of his irritation, not to say desperation, but a sense that he's not actually living as ironclad in existence as he would like to think.
00:55:09.040 As you mention in the book, and as he himself has said, if the stock price of SpaceX and Tesla went to zero, he would go bankrupt almost immediately.
00:55:19.560 Exactly. Let's make it happen.
00:55:22.220 No, let's make it happen. Absolutely. I think that that's a good place to end it. Thank you guys for coming on. This was a lot of fun. I don't know, we'll have to have you back because I have more that I wanted to talk to you about, including Asimov's Foundation trilogy.
00:55:36.440 And it's important to Musk, importance to Musk rather, and Quinn, your book, Hayek's Bastards.
00:55:43.060 So we'll see you guys again soon, I hope.
00:55:46.040 All right, Adam.
00:55:46.600 Thanks for having us.
00:55:47.600 Thanks again, Adam.
00:55:49.140 Thanks again to this week's guests, Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian.
00:55:53.320 Next week, we have Kathy O'Neill, and we talk about the pernicious uses of mathematics.
00:55:59.380 To submit questions for future guests and to suggest other guests, and to see more pictures of Babka, join the conversation on Patreon.
00:56:10.720 You can also find us on YouTube, on Instagram at DATMPod, on the web, and on Blue Sky at DreamingAgainstTheMachine.com, or just find us wherever you get your podcasts.
00:56:22.380 Dreaming Against the Machine is a proud member of Multitude Productions.
00:56:25.920 Our executive producer is Nick Carissimi.
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00:56:31.720 our show logo is by Nick James
00:56:34.480 and our fearless leader is Babka
00:56:36.840 the greatest cat in the observable universe
00:56:39.140 I'm Adam Becker and I'll see you next week