# Muskism by Quinn Slobodian, Ben Tarnoff - Blinkist

What’s in it for me? Get to the root of Muskism.

If you haven’t heard of Elon Musk, you haven’t just been living under a rock.

You’ve been living under a rock on a different planet.

Genius entrepreneur, visionary futurist, lord of the memes, social media addict, right-wing facilitator – everyone has their own opinion of him.

But these are all opinions about Musk the individual.

This Blink takes a slightly different approach.

It goes beyond the man that is Musk and considers the worldview that he has come to represent.

A century ago, the industrial modernizer Henry Ford left an indelible mark on history.

The term “Fordism” quickly arose.

But it came to represent more than just factory lines and car assembly – it became shorthand for the mass production and consumption of twentieth-century capitalism.

So what about “Muskism” today?

Just like Fordism, Muskism is a modernizing project.

But where Fordism promised a world of higher living standards for all, Muskism does no such thing.

What does Muskism look like, then?

Where did it come from, and what does it stand for?

That’s what we’re going to find out.

The blueprint for Muskism

Have you ever heard of Technocracy?

For those of us who haven’t, it was a movement founded in 1933 by American engineer Howard Scott that advocated for a society run by a dictatorship of engineers, allocating resources according to strict scientific principles.

Each member referred to themselves as a number.

Joshua Haldeman, Elon Musk’s maternal grandfather, was a proud number 10450-1.

In 1940, the government of Canada, Haldeman’s home, banned Technocracy.

A decade later, and after a few more failed political ventures, Haldeman moved his family to South Africa.

It was 1950, two years since the National Party had come to power and introduced the racial segregation policy of apartheid.

But South Africa wasn’t just a white-supremacist state.

Its architects saw themselves as futurists.

They aimed to exploit recent technological advances, from computer mainframes to nuclear research, to become a self-sufficient utopia – a minutely engineered and optimised society that could withstand the pressures of the outside world.

Let’s call it fortress futurism.

South Africa’s fortress would subjugate an entire race, relying on its labor to create a brighter future for the select few.

This was the backdrop to a young Elon’s life.

Born in Pretoria in 1971, he grew up in an elite white suburb on the edge of the city.

Shy and nerdy, he was bullied at school, and lost himself in books whenever he was at home.

Pretty soon, he would find a new, deeper portal to the wider world: the computer.

More specifically, the Commodore VIC-20.

Musk was just 10 when it came out.

But he persuaded his father to buy him one, and at the age of 12, he had programmed his first product, a videogame called Blastar, which he sold for $500 to a magazine.

By the time he hit 17, South Africa was engaging in escalating wars with its neighbours, using young, poorly trained conscripts to fight them.

To avoid this fate, Musk fled to Canada, securing a passport through his mother’s nationality.

He would never return.

But South Africa’s fortress futurism would remain firmly implanted in him.

Innovate and conquer

Musk soon found his way to Silicon Valley.

This is where he learned how to turn ideas into companies, and companies into monopolies.

Thanks to his new environment, Muskism would soon start to exist in the real world.

And it was all fueled by the exponential spread of the internet.

The internet was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) a federal agency.

In fact, most of the innovations that came to make Silicon Valley prosper were funded by the state.

In early 1995, the internet was controlled by the National Science Foundation.

But in April of that year, the agency handed over the internet’s core infrastructure to the private sector.

For free.

The dot-com bubble had just begun.

Musk was quick to jump on board.

He co-founded the company Zip2 in November of 1995.

It was an online directory of businesses in the Bay Area.

He built a case around a computer and wheeled it into investor meetings, leading them to believe that his product was powered by a supercomputer.

Less than four years later, in February 1999, Zip2 was bought out by Compaq for $307 million.

His company wasn’t even profitable at the time.

Compaq had bought the story of its future importance.

And Musk was good at selling that story.

Just a month later, Musk joined forces with Peter Thiel, merging his online bank X.com with Thiel’s Confinity, which had created PayPal.

Six months later, Thiel took over the joint company, ousting Musk, and rebranding as PayPal.com By this time, Musk had fully embraced the ruthless logic of Silicon Valley business.

He learned to chase growth for years, even while losing money.

He learned to create a whole market, not a product and only worry about revenue when you reach hyper-scale, then extract super-profits.

And finally, he discovered to idolize your founder as a luminary.

These ideas would become key tenents of Muskism.

Entrepreneurship was about combat, and the goal was conquest.

Years later, Musk would change his title at Tesla from CEO to “Technoking.

Sovereignty as service

In March 2002, Elon Musk incorporated Space Exploration Technologies – SpaceX.

His ultimate ambition was massive: to colonize Mars.

He got his first big push when eBay bought PayPal.

Musk, still a major shareholder, walked away with $180 million after taxes.

It was exactly the boost he needed to get SpaceX going.

And once again, the government would play a central role in the company’s survival.

Following 9/11, the Bush administration started to completely overhaul the national security state, in the name of fighting terrorism.

And part of this ambition meant handing out sizable government contracts to private sector innovators.

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, 22.

4 percent of its bombs and missiles relied on GPS technology.

But the satellite system that provided this was an out-of-date Cold War relic.

It needed a serious upgrade.

And the private firm that was chosen to lead this was SpaceX.

A string of lucrative contracts would follow.

SpaceX’s first project was the Falcon 1 rocket, which would be used to launch small satellites, at a dramatically reduced cost.

In the early 2000s, it cost $30 million to launch 550 pounds into space.

Musk wanted to reduce that to $7 million for 1400 pounds.

His approach was to run SpaceX like a software company.

His engineers would stay up all night and experiment, running countless iterations just like Silicon Valley programmers.

Musk also pursued deep vertical integration – a tactic that contrasted sharply from American companies at the time, who were busy exploiting globalisation to subcontract at lower rates.

For Musk, the factory wasn’t a node in a wide interconnected web of supply chains.

It was more like an enclave.

This would become central to Muskism.

SpaceX continued to grow and secure government contracts.

By 2025, 95 percent of all orbital launches in the US were provided by Musk’s company.

Its ubiquity increased even more with the introduction of the satellite internet service Starlink, first announced in 2015.

In 2025, there were more than 8,000 Starlink satellites in low orbit around the Earth – two thirds of all active satellites.

SpaceX and Musk had become an indispensable part of whole governments’ defence operations.

What he provided was sovereignty-as-a-service, a way to strengthen self-reliance via technology – but only if it went through him.

Autonomy through electrification

In the late 2000s the cleantech boom swept through Silicon Valley.

The Obama administration was experimenting with “green capitalism,” a policy aimed at reducing dependence on foreign oil.

The perfect brewing ground for Tesla.

Musk took over Tesla in 2008, four years after having been touted as an investor by its founders, engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.

One year later, in June 2009, Tesla received a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy.

But the faucet quickly turned shut.

In the early 2010s, cleantech completely collapsed.

The main culprit?

Fracking.

This new technology allowed US firms to access whole new reserves of natural gas and oil.

Clean energy no longer seemed essential.

And yet Tesla managed to not only weather the crash, but thrive through it.

Here, once again, Musk’s insistence on vertical integration proved vital.

In other words, Apartheid South Africa’s logic of fortress futurism was paving the electric way.

Musk committed to building the batteries for Tesla vehicles in house.

To achieve this, he would have to build a gargantuan monster of a factory: the Gigafactory.

In 2016, the first Gigafactory opened in Nevada.

Its surface area covers more than 90 football fields.

Then he made an even more surprising move.

In the late 2010s, it was clear that China was on a trajectory toward market dominance in the renewables sector.

So in 2018 Musk announced he would build a Gigafactory in Shanghai.

The next year, a consortium of Chinese banks awarded him $1.

6 billion in low-interest financing.

Musk had managed to side with both the US and China.

He would build American cars for the Americans, and Chinese cars for the Chinese.

And crucially, by having factories in both states, he would jump over tariffs and barriers.

The next year, he announced a third Gigafactory in Brandenburg, just outside of Berlin.

Musk had succeeded in selling the Tesla dream of autonomy through electrification – sovereignty-as-service – to three of the biggest powers in the world.

But as the 2020s came around, Muskism started to adopt a new, darker face.

Becoming meme

“I am become meme,” Musk tweeted on July 22, 2019.

The idea would soon become a running joke for him.

But how did it come up in the first place?

Let’s rewind a bit.

The 2010s were the decade of the new tech giants.

Facebook bought Instagram and Whatsapp, Microsoft bought LinkedIn, and Google became Alphabet.

This was the time Musk decided to get active online.

Really active.

In 2017, he was already tweeting an average of three times per day.

By 2018, that had doubled.

By 2024, he was posting sixty times per day on average, sometimes even hitting forty times in one hour.

Apart from any personal kick he got from social media, it became a key strategic asset.

He could use it to sidestep the traditional media gatekeepers and talk directly to the people, drawing them deeper into his Muskist vision of the future.

He also found out his posts could produce direct financial outcomes.

In 2018 he tweeted that he was considering taking Tesla private at $420, a joke reference to weed.

Tesla stock jumped by 11 percent.

In 2021 he added the hashtag ’bitcoin’ to his Twitter bio.

By the end of that hour, the cryptocurrency had appreciated by 20 percent.

But the true extent of Musk’s influence online was revealed through Dogecoin.

This was a cryptocurrency that had started out as a joke – a reference to the Doge memes: photos of a photogenic Shiba Inu dog combined with captions written in broken English, like “much wow” or “very art.

” In 2019, Musk posted about the coin.

And it suddenly gained monetary value.

As he continued to praise it online, that value continued to increase.

Within two years it had multiplied 2,000 times.

Musk had gotten to a point where he could influence the markets with just a few motions of his thumbs.

The COVID-19 pandemic only increased his power – as people spent more and more time online.

The consequences for Muskism would be seismic.

The woke mind virus

“We’re like a giant cyborg.

That’s actually what society is today.

” That’s what Musk told OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman at a Vanity fair event in 2015.

To Musk, we had already gone a long way in integrating with machines, and social media was playing a central role.

Platforms like Facebook and Twitter were, in his words, “giant cybernetic collectives,” networks where man and machine were merged as one.

But all this raised an existential spectre for Musk.

The mid-2010s were when AI started reaching the public.

Our interactions on social media provided AI with training data.

If that went the wrong way, we could all be in apocalyptic trouble.

The solution for Musk wasn’t to step away from social media or distance ourselves from AI.

It was the exact opposite: to merge more and more fully with the machine, in order to prevent its contamination.

This would be the core tenant of a new stage of Muskism.

Just a year after co-founding OpenAI, Musk founded Neuralink.

Its aim was to turbo-charge our capacity for man-machine interaction by implanting a chip in our brains, allowing us to connect to the internet directly via our minds.

But it wasn’t long until a new threat came to take Musk’s attention: mind viruses.

On March 16, 2020, in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, six Bay Area counties issued a joint shelter-in-place order.

Tesla’s factory was forced to shut down.

To Musk this wasn’t a prevention measure – it was pure coercion.

Trump tweeted in agreement.

On May 11, Tesla restarted production, in defiance of the order.

The authorities eventually caved, allowing Tesla to operate in exchange for some minimal health and safety assurances.

Tesla’s shutdown was brief.

But what Musk called the COVID “panic” revealed to him the danger of undesireable ideas going viral through the social media algorithms.

Pretty soon, a new mind virus would emerge.

In December 2021 Musk tweeted “traceroute woke_mind_virus.

” Now the virus was “woke.

” Its origins needed to be traced and revealed.

If not, Musk would later tweet, civilization itself could perish.

Leaning right

In October 2022, Musk made the shock move of acquiring Twitter for $44 billion – eight times the company’s 2021 revenue.

He rebranded it as X.

Financially, the acquisition made little sense.

But that wasn’t the point.

Acquiring Twitter was about taking the reins in the online sphere to weed out the woke mind virus.

Musk quickly laid off 80 percent of Twitter staff, pushing the rest to just work harder.

Then he set to work restoring the voice of the far-right.

He reinstated hundreds of banned far-right users, and changed the platform’s verification system, making it subscription-based.

He also started boosting the reach of his posts, while amplifying the voice of a string of far-right figures through his interactions with them.

One notable example is the far-right activist Naomi Seibt, known as the “anti-Greta”, whom he engaged with over 50 times.

Then he took things a whole leap further.

In 2023 Musk created xAI and released his own AI, Grok.

This AI would be deliberately trained to be anti-woke.

The consequences of those efforts threw up some surprises.

In May 2025, Grok started talking repeatedly about “white genocide,” a right-wing conspiracy about a global plot to eliminate white people.

And in July of that year, Grok started referring to itself as “MechaHitler” – a reference to the 1992 game Wolfenstein 3D, where you battle a version of Adolf Hitler in a mechanical suit.

Grok’s raison d’être was to prevent AI from becoming a woke dictator.

Now it had resurrected one of the worst dictators of all time.

In and out of government

Trump was sworn in for his second term on January 20, 2025.

Within half an hour of the ceremony commencing, DOGE workers had information files on millions of federal workers.

Only a few days later, they sent a mass email out.

Its message was simple: Quit now with paid leave or risk getting axed.

The Department of Government Efficiency represented a new level for Musk.

His previous ventures had relied heavily on support from the government.

Now he was in it himself.

And he would wreak havoc, all in the name of modernization.

DOGE’s approach was clear: delete, automate, integrate.

Gather all the data, get rid of the bad, and optimize the rest.

This involved a merciless push for centralization.

The most striking expression of this ambition was an attempt to create a “mega API” at the IRS, eliminating legal and privacy guardrails to make all taxpayer data accessible by a single portal.

As for bad data, this often actually meant “bad” people.

DOGE operatives began building a “master database” to track all immigrant data across federal departments and voting rolls.

Soon the Trump administration was using the database to cut off people’s access to finance and force them to essentially deport themselves.

In the end, Musk only lasted 130 days in government, and was ousted in May 2025.

It turned out that people were not just programmable units, and that society was not a factory that could easily be optimised digitally.

But in spite of all the fireworks surrounding his departure, Musk continued to be awarded Pentagon contracts.

One of these was announced only a month later – for his “Grok for Government” suite of AI products.

So where does Musk go from here?

The future presents many avenues.

He could focus on new challenges of electrification, such as geoengineering and backup power solutions, or enmesh himself even deeper with governments as a private actor.

He might also double down on his quest to push back against the apparent decline of white civilization, or dedicate more and more time to developing true robot intelligence.

Whatever the future holds, it sure as heck is going to have some Musk in it.

Final summary

So what, in the end, is Muskism?

At its core, it is fortress futurism — the logic of apartheid South Africa transplanted into the twenty-first century.

Just as that regime sought to build a self-sufficient, technologically optimized enclave insulated from the outside world, Muskism insists that the factory, the rocket, the satellite network, and the algorithm should all be owned, controlled, and run from within.

Vertical integration isn't just a business strategy — it's an ideology.

Muskism is also a philosophy of conquest.

Silicon Valley taught Musk that entrepreneurship is combat: chase growth before profit, create whole markets rather than products, and make yourself so indispensable that governments cannot say no.

SpaceX became the provider of 95 percent of all US orbital launches.

Starlink controls two thirds of all active satellites.

Tesla planted Gigafactories in the US, China, and Germany simultaneously.

Sovereignty-as-a-service — sold to whoever needs it.

And Muskism, in its later form, is a crusade against contamination.

The woke mind virus, misaligned AI, the wrong kind of ideas spreading through algorithmic networks — all of it demands a response.

That response has been X, Grok, and ultimately DOGE: tools designed to delete the bad, automate the rest, and optimize society itself as though it were a factory floor.

Society, it turned out, was not so easily optimized.

Musk lasted just 130 days in government.

But the contracts kept coming.

Muskism, for better or worse, is not going anywhere.

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