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Genius industrialist or clownish conman, humanity’s saviour from a rapidly crumbling planet or rabid social media troll – the verdicts on the world’s richest person vary in flavour, but most share something in common: they focus on Musk as an individual. In their study, Quinn Slobodian, a historian at Boston University, and Ben Tarnoff, a tech writer, wish to reframe the conversation. The most important question, they argue, is not “who is Musk?” but “what is Musk a symptom of?”
As the title suggests, their answer is “Muskism”, the coinage a deliberate nod to Fordism, the shorthand for 20th-century capitalism built on the pairing of mass production with mass consumption. If Fordism was the last century’s operating system, Slobodian and Tarnoff contend that Muskism is this century’s.
Like Fordism, it is a modernising project. Unlike Fordism, it does not aim to distribute its rewards widely. Its central promise is “sovereignty through technology”: the fantasy that, in an increasingly unstable world, states and individuals can become more self-reliant by plugging into Musk’s infrastructure. This is Muskism’s version of a social contract. But, as the authors point out, the reality is quite different: rather than self-reliance, we are offered merely greater reliance on the Techno-king of Tesla himself.
This might seem like an obvious point to make, but it develops into one of the book’s strongest insights, as Slobodian and Tarnoff follow the thread of dependence across Musk’s empire, from SpaceX (a near-monopoly provider to the Pentagon and Nasa, accounting for 95% of all US orbital launches) to Tesla, which sells electric autonomy in the shape of vehicles and batteries while drawing buyers deeper into Musk’s walled garden; and, more recently, to X and Grok, which promised a new town hall for the exercise of “free speech” before consolidating Musk’s own voice and his increasingly far-right agenda.
The chapter on the so called department of government efficiency (Doge), which describes Musk’s 130-day stint as a “special government employee”, is particularly eye-opening. It shows how his attempt to treat the federal government as a codebase to be debugged collided with the messy, irreducible realities of a state that supports millions of lives. Some of the book’s sharpest passages inspect the computational metaphors that Musk jokingly and not-so-jokingly uses in interviews and on X. In his view, empathy is an “exploit”, society is “corrupted code”, and tolerance is a bug to be patched. Most disturbingly, ideas, government agencies and people are all figured as variables that can be “deleted”.
The biographical chapters are well-sourced and appropriately fleet-footed (the authors are keen to remind us that this is not a biography), tracing Muskism’s roots to his grandfather Joshua Haldeman, a Canadian devotee of the Technocracy movement who emigrated to apartheid South Africa in 1950. Slobodian and Tarnoff tease out the continuities between Musk’s youth in Pretoria and the convictions he later developed: the faith in engineering as a mode of governance, the fortress mentality, the conflation of racial purity with civilisational survival. Apartheid South Africa, they argue convincingly, was the nursery of Muskism.
Fordism described a system that outlived Ford and operated independently of him. Can the same be said of Muskism? The writers suggest that its logic of state-tech symbiosis, algorithmic governance and racialised exclusion might persist without him, but the book has a hard time pivoting completely from the biographical. For all the structural scaffolding, this does sometimes feel more like the story of one man’s empire, built under specific historical circumstances. Perhaps it doesn’t matter: others may yet follow the blueprint.
In any case, even those who are bored by Musk and his dominance of the 24-hour news cycle will find Muskism compelling. It’s a well-researched account of how we have arrived at a point where so many resources are concentrated in the hands of just one man, and how this fact alone will inevitably shape the future, long after he’s gone.
