The new book by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, expertly explains why Elon Musk has increasingly chosen to use his wealth and power to advance far-right politics and why he advocates the integration of humans with machines. This strikingly lucid book develops a thesis and a set of arguments that are genuinely thought-provoking — and, for me, both convincing and frightening.
For some people, putting an “ism” at the end of names and movements is a blight on the English language and, in some cases — like claiming there is such a thing as “Starmerism” — this concern seems reasonable. In this case, however, the term “Muskism” earns its place: it helps us understand the ways in which Elon Musk has been a key figure (and an avatar) in the transformation of business and society through technological changes this century.
One of this book’s masterstrokes is to compare Muskism with Fordism, giving it a way of acknowledging how powerful Elon Musk and Henry Ford have proven to be, while also suggesting that they represent a model of work, economics and society bigger than either man. This gives the authors’ analysis a structural dimension, even as they acknowledge that Musk’s reach and wealth make him an incredibly powerful agent — a “great” man of history, even though academic historians generally want to eschew that type of analysis.
The building of highways and roads by governments was crucial to Fordism, whereas government contracts and even being symbiotically integrated into government have been crucial to Muskism.
The term Fordism is a well-established sociological term that means “more than cars rolling off assembly lines”, as Slobodian and Tarnoff put it: “it became shorthand for twentieth-century capitalism, built on the pairing of mass production with mass consumption”. Fordism was also associated with the contented suburban nuclear family and stable (male) employment. In contrast, Muskism is a mode of production that favours engineers, robots and vertical integration. The building of highways and roads by governments was crucial to Fordism, whereas government contracts and even being symbiotically integrated into government have been crucial to Muskism.
On the consumption side of the equation, Musk has gone from offering maps, payment systems and automobiles, to offering a way of seeing the world on X and potentially by means of neural implants provided by Musk’s company Neuralink. Just as Fordlândia in Brazil offered people working on Ford’s rubber plantation a complete lifestyle, Musk increasingly offers his consumers and followers a way of life that apparently will not just be available on earth. At a 2017 conference in Adelaide, Musk announced plans for at least two cargo ships to land on Mars by 2022 followed by missions in 2024 to start building a colony on the Red Planet. Just as Fordlândia was a dream that failed in practice, Slobodian and Tarnoff present Musk’s visions of the future as likely never to materialise and increasingly likely to fail.
They argue that Musk’s worldview has been shaped by video game language and culture; by sci-fi and anime novels, shows and films; by the world of alt-right trolling and memes; and by the apartheid South African technologically oriented state of the 1980s (which developed nuclear weapons, possibly with Israel’s support). This chaotic mix, the authors argue, falls short of an ideology but is worthy of being called an “ism”, because it represents an important strand of twenty-first century right-wing techno-capitalism.
Muskism has two parts: “foundation” and “cyborg”. The first draws its name from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels to set out the history of how Musk built his business empire: “Like the Foundation, Muskism would be a new order, built in the shell of the old.” The second section deals with Musk’s conviction that humans are already “becoming cyborgs” and as a result he needs to have a central role in accelerating this to “ensure that the right kind of cyborgs were being made”.
It is claimed by sci-fi aficionados that Musk gets the messages of famous sci-fi novels wrong or even backwards (Jill Lepore and the Know Your Enemy podcast have both made this argument). However, Slobodian and Tarnoff suggest maybe this is beside the point, because Musk is more interested in the form rather than the content of science fiction. They suggest that Musk is more a sci-fi writer than a reader.
A great example of this is Tesla, which Musk has long promoted as not an automobile company but a robot company. Explaining this on the Bungacast show, Slobodian states that the stock price of Tesla is:
up 50 per cent on the last year. Their stock premised on the completely baseless proposition that he’s going to make 100 billion humanoid robots within the next decade. There’s not even a working prototype right? There isn’t one.
The power of this myth is so great that not only do his fanboy investors believe this hype, but global pension funds — including Australian university superannuation funds — have “followed him on this flight of fancy and on this fabulation”.
When I asked the authors if Musk is a fascist, they quoted Slavoj Žižek, saying that Muskism is worse than fascism, because at least fascists believe in the corporal body and the survival of some humans, whereas Musk does not believe in the future of human beings independent of computers. Musk contends, as Slobodian and Tarnoff put it: “Humanity should merge with the machine”. In Musk’s own words “We are effectively already a human-machine collective symbiote”; or, as he told Sam Altman in 2015, “We’re like a giant cyborg. That’s actually what society is today.” Similarly, Musk explained on the Joe Rogan Experience: “Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and all these social networks — they’re giant cybernetic collectives.”
Slobodian and Tarnoff point out that Musk already sees many “meatsack” people as less than fully human, either because they have been indoctrinated by the media, because they are followers rather than leaders, or because of their low IQ. As the authors put it, “most human beings are not human for him” — the terms he uses to refer to these so-called humans is “NPCs, non-player characters, or shadow people, or bots or ghosts or vampires”. For Slobodian and Tarnoff this has both a racist and digitised dimension to it.
The notion that people are programmable, more like large language models than we perhaps wish to admit, is a common claim in books on AI — one finds this claim in Jeanette Winterson’s very humanist book on AI, 12 Bytes. Winterson’s solution to the rise and rise of AI is let it do the boring tasks and let humans focus on creativity and love. Musk has rather different solutions. Although he famously fell out with OpenAI’s Sam Altman over his concerns that AI in the Altman model could “enslave or exterminate humanity”, Musk’s solution to the problem that he has described as “our biggest existential threat” is to save what is worthwhile about humanity by accelerating the integration of people with machines while we still can endow AI with human beliefs and characteristics.
Musk has come to embrace post-humanism, but on increasingly ideological terms. There is a famous line from Michael Jordan, at a time when he was possibly the world’s most famous person: “Republicans buy sneakers, too” — this was his reason for not endorsing Harvey Gantt, the Democratic candidate running against the racist Jesse Helms, in the 1990 Senate race in Jordan’s home state of North Carolina. Such sentiments were typical of a certain era of globalisation discourse, when Francis Fukuyama claimed economics would end history by trumping politics. Fukuyama was partly wrong because politics never lies down for long; in our era, politics is often back in the driver’s seat.
Musk is a good example of this insofar as his politics have had a significant effect on Tesla car sales and he is still the driving force behind the platform formerly known as Twitter. In late 2024, bumper sticker started appearing on Tesla cars that read, “I bought this before Elon went crazy”.
When it comes to humans’ relationship with AI, Musk plans to create what Slobodian and Tarnoff call “cyborg conservatism”, which they say will be “segmented by gender, race, and class”. Here we need to explain Musk’s own mind virus — what I would call his “alt-right mind virus”. Musk’s politics turned to the far-right during the COVID-19 pandemic, during which one of his fourteen children came out as transgender by means of an Instagram post in 2020 and then filed to have her gender and new name officially recognised once she turned 18 in 2022. The authors write that “Musk later told Jordan Peterson that he considered his child to be dead — ‘killed by the woke mind virus’.”
The term “virus of the mind”, like the word “meme”, can be traced back to the writings of Richard Dawkins. Musk became obsessed with the idea that liberal and left-wing ideas, particularly about social issues, were destroying all that was worthwhile. As he tweeted in December 2022: “The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters”. Musk’s solution seems to be to put micro-chips in all worthwhile people’s brains, installed by his company Neuralink and programmed by his other company Grok. The fantasy seems to be one day these chosen ones may well leave Earth together with Musk and forge a new life on Mars in one of his promised “colonies”.
At base, “woke” politics is a call for greater equality, which is an entirely reasonable demand because inequality is the root cause of so many of society’s ills. In his previous book Hayek’s Bastards, Quinn Slobodian argues that opposition to equality became a central organising concept for American conservatives once the threat of communism receded. Following Hayek’s late career interests in socio-biological superiorities associated with white people, the American right in the twenty-first century has returned to arguing there are innate biological traits that justify inequalities.
Musk is an amplifier of such racist and scientifically bogus ideas, as they correspond with his own sense of superiority and his justifications that his wealth and power should not be curtailed by government regulations. All of this might have remained principally in the realms of business and internet culture were it not for what Musk’s money has actually bought: the levers of government power.
According to Federal Election Commission filings, Elon Musk spent more than $290 million during the 2024 presidential election. To put some perspective on how extraordinary this contribution was, Donald Trump’s entire 2016 campaign expenditure was $322 million. Once Trump was back in power in 2025, he notoriously appointed Musk to run “DOGE”, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, whose name originates from a famous meme about a misspelt dog. (As Slobodian and Tarnoff repeatedly point out, we should never underestimate the influence of meme and gaming culture on Musk’s thinking and language.)
For those that follow Musk’s tweets and public performances closely, his frat-house attempts at “humour” are remarkably puerile and sexist for the owner of some of the world’s most profitable companies.
Musk’s predilection for being the perpetual class smart-arse is clearly appealing for some; for others, it conceals the consequences of his actions. Take Musk’s jokey tweet on 3 February 2025:
We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could [sic] gone to some great parties. Did that instead.
This is likely to have devastating consequences. Research published in The Lancet found that 91,839,663 deaths, including 30,391,980 children under 5 years of age, “were prevented by USAID funding over the 21-year study period”, from 2001 to 2021. The authors of this study advised: “Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14,051,750 … additional all-age deaths, including 4,537,157 … in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030.”
Musk did not just feed another bureaucratic acronym into the woodchipper; he played a central role in one of the most callous actions in modern human history of the rich toward those less fortunate. USAID is an under-acknowledged example of where American wealth and power was often used to do good work around the world. To simply “delete” the agency, as though he were playing a game, illustrates the fact that Musk seems to really believe his remarks to Joe Rogan:
We’ve got civilisational suicidal empathy going on … The fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy, the empathy exploit. There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilisation, which is the empathy response.
Having a huge influence over US politics is not enough for Musk. He has strongly supported the neo-Nazi Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in Germany and Nigel Farage’s Reform Party in the UK.
Where does all this end? Are there limits to Muskism? Can it be defeated at the ballot box? Can it be regulated, or can we intellectually inoculate ourselves against it? Can we learn anything from the fate of Fordism, which was defeated by a combination of hyper capitalism, globalisation, women’s liberation and cheaper, more fuel-efficient, higher quality Japanese cars dominating the American and world market?
Muskism is likely to be weakened by Democrat victories in the 2026 mid-terms and the Democrats winning the US presidency in 2028, if these were to eventuate. Muskism is also likely to be undermined by Chinese EVs and by competition in some of the areas where Musk’s companies currently have a monopolistic presence.
Finally, Muskism is likely to be undermined by young men growing up and wising up to the reality that the toxic masculinity of Musk and Trump has clear limitations in terms of what younger women will tolerate. Musk, Trump and many on the far-right are obsessed with the “great replacement theory” — the belief that white people will be out-voted and out-numbered by non-white people in the near future. The more likely replacement theory is that sexist men in power will be replaced by less sexist men, and the 2020s will be seen as an unfortunate redux of the 1920s when openly sexist behaviour and the voice of the extremely wealthy were rampant before a major reckoning — or at least, a realisation that ranting about feminism and the “woke mind virus” on the internet is very unattractive.
Elon Musk’s wealth, power and antics ensure that he will long be a poster boy for progressive political causes and parties around the world — for, in the end, what is Musk but the twenty-first century’s smug robber-baron?