SpaceX rocket launch at night seen from Titusville, Florida (2020) | JP Chatt / Shutterstock
If Fordism named the operating system of the twentieth-century economy, what governs the twenty-first? Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff—a historian of global capitalism and a technology writer respectively—suggest that the answer lies in Muskism. Their new book, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Harper, 2026) is not so much an examination of billionaire Elon Musk’s world view as how we should understand a world in which this man has accrued so much power. The authors trace the rise of Muskism as an emerging political-economic model from apartheid South Africa to Silicon Valley. While Fordism paired mass production with mass consumption, Muskism offers a new model, in which sovereignty is consolidated through technology and delivered as a service to both states and individuals through privately owned infrastructures.
In this conversation with Public Seminar’s Lydia Zhang, Slobodian and Tarnoff examine how Muskism reconfigures the relationship between state and private capital, reimagines political subjectivity and projects a post-human future. The discussion has been edited for length and clarity.
Lydia Zhang: The book starts off by tracing the origins of Muskism back to apartheid South Africa, a project of “fortress futurism” where technology was used to secure self-sufficiency, while stabilizing a racialized domestic order. I’m curious how apartheid laid the groundwork for Muskism. Is Muskism best understood as a product of a specific historical model, or does it reflect a broader tendency in the twenty-first century?
Ben Tarnoff: Musk was born in 1971 Pretoria, South Africa. One way to understand apartheid South Africa and its political economy is as a third way beyond the two dominant models of the time: American-led capitalist globalization and the Soviet style command economy. In contrast to both, the apartheid regime was capitalist and anti-communist while also pursuing a degree of economic and technological self-sufficiency, driven by the perception that it was surrounded by enemies, both internal and external.
To safeguard the survival of the regime, apartheid South Africa invested in key infrastructures and advanced technologies to harden its defenses. For example, it obtained licenses from Ford and Datsun to construct automobile factories for domestic consumption. It also pursued a variety of high-tech projects, including a nuclear program that succeeded in building an operational bomb by the early 1980s.
This experience resonates with Musk’s later endeavors. One of Musk’s distinguishing features as an industrialist—at both SpaceX and Tesla in the 2000s—is his emphasis on vertical integration: concentrating production within the walls of the firm and reducing reliance on external suppliers. This ran counter to the prevailing logic of the aughts, the high point of free-market globalization, when companies outsourced production through global supply chains, relying primarily on East Asian production facilities. Musk, by contrast, insisted on building cars and rockets in California. One way to understand why this seemed available to him is to look back at the apartheid regime’s pursuit of economic and technological self-reliance.
Zhang: Many of the analyses in the book are grounded in the American trajectory: Fordism as the antecedent, Silicon Valley, and the relationship between prominent tech elites and the state. Is Muskism fundamentally tied to the American context, or can it emerge in other institutional settings? For instance, what would it look like in China, where the state exerts much stronger control over private capital?
Quinn Slobodian: We think about Musk’s success, and the robustness of Muskism as a political economic model, as riding on three waves of the early twenty-first century. The first is the growing concern of climate change and attempts to develop green capitalism. Second would be the rise of China as a near-peer and eventually greater economic power to the United States. Third is the dominance of digital capitalism, the growing power of a few large conglomerates that account for much of the stock market valuation in the United States. While these waves are centered in the US, they are not confined to it. The economic dominance of the US at the end of the Cold War meant that developments within it inevitably shaped the rest of the world. Muskism’s success lies in its adaptability beyond the American context. A clear example is his Gigafactories in Shanghai, China and Brandenburg, Germany, which demonstrates how Musk’s model can be adapted to different systems—a more state-capitalist model in China and a more social-democratic one in the EU. What interests us is how Muskism becomes detached from its American—and even South African—origins and evolves into a modular system that can be adapted locally.
Zhang: Muskism points out that Silicon Valley’s early development relied heavily on state funding, yet today the state is increasingly dependent on privately owned infrastructures developed by these firms. How should we understand this shift—from “state symbiosis” to what the book calls “State X”? What does it tell us about the changing state authority? Why does Silicon Valley continue to be framed as libertarian in public discourse, despite this reversed power dynamic?
Tarnoff: Silicon Valley emerges out of the US military. At the time, the Pentagon was both a major customer of semiconductors and computers and a funder of basic research, which was integral to the development of the industry. Many of the technologies underlying Silicon Valley’s current wealth, e.g., the internet, would not exist without billions in public funding. That fact has always sat somewhat uneasily with the characterization of many within the Silicon Valley leadership class, most notably Peter Thiel, as libertarian.
During the period when figures like Thiel or Musk made their first fortunes, namely the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, followed by the Web 2.0 era of the 2000s and 2010s, the relationship between the state and the industry became more distant. This was an era dominated by consumer-facing platforms like Google and Facebook, where profits came from advertising or software services rather than direct state contracts. The internet, of course, still depended on public funding, and its infrastructure had to be privatized in 1995 for the dot-com boom to take place, but the interface with the state was less direct.
What we track through Musk—whom we use as a prism for broader historical currents—is the emergence of a much closer relationship between state and industry, which we argue dates to the War on Terror. SpaceX, for instance, starts off as a government contractor, providing launch services to the Pentagon, including the deployment of smaller, more flexible satellites. If we follow this thread to the present, we see a US military increasingly dependent on the software services of a small number of Silicon Valley firms to wage its war on Iran. The speed and scale of recent military operations are enabled by AI-driven systems, in which older forms of target selection are replaced by services provided by companies like Palantir and Anthropic. This stands for a different type of interaction between state and industry than the kind prevailed during the dot-com boom or the Web 2.0 era.
This shift also helps explain the persistence of libertarian or cyber-libertarian ideology. It may appear contradictory, but it can be understood as a structure of feeling equally plausible in a period when the consumer internet was the dominant accumulation model. As that model begins to shift—with the War on Terror and, more recently, with the AI boom—different ideological formations become plausible. AI is not only indispensable to contemporary warfare; it is also highly energy-intensive and capital-intensive and thus requires the state as a partner. As a result, cyber-libertarianism appears less prominent in current discourse. When you listen to Peter Thiel today, he is no longer speaking about secession in the way he did in the 2000s. Therefore, we need to remain attentive to the material conditions that make particular ideologies feel imaginable in the first place.
Zhang: Muskism seems to bring together two different imaginations of the future. There’s this forward-looking, utopian version of space colonization and post-human futures, but at the same time there’s a defensive version of “fortress futurism,” where technology is used to fortify against external threats. How do these two dynamics coexist?
Slobodian: Musk’s visions of the future need to be understood as rhetorical strategies for the present. For example, the goal of reaching Mars opens up certain political avenues in the present. It justifies access to space programs, investment in rocket launch capabilities like Starship, and the expansion of computing necessary for interplanetary travel. This is evident in his efforts to influence leadership of NASA, which he ended up succeeding at with Jared Isaacman. Or what he calls a “Terafab,” a chip-making factory that unites the needs and uses of Tesla, SpaceX and xAI. While ostensibly oriented toward interplanetary ambitions, such initiatives also involve securing federal licenses, expanding data centers, and reconfiguring existing industries to serve broader AI-related goals. Rather than taking these future-oriented narratives at face value, it is more useful to examine what they enable in the present.
At the same time, these visions are paired with more defensive and exclusionary forms of rhetoric. Warnings about external threats such as immigration or social instability are mobilized to justify the expansion of technological infrastructures aimed at border control and internal security. In this sense, Muskism can be understood as selling a vision of “sovereignty through technology,” combining a negative dimension rooted in fear with a positive projection of a desirable future for the chosen few.
Zhang: One thing that stood out to me in Muskism is how this model enables a new group of tech elites who live on a different diet, plan to inhabit outer space and even aspire to radically extend their lifespan. When the lives of tech elites begin to diverge so radically from ordinary people, economically, politically, biologically, does the idea of a shared human condition still hold? Or is that common ground disappearing?
Tarnoff: For Musk, humanity is a category he frequently invokes rhetorically, as the ultimate beneficiary of his entrepreneurial ventures. At the same time, however, he embraces a cybernetic imagination, and not simply as an abstraction but as a reality he is actively helping to bring about. For instance, Neuralink, his brain-computer interface company founded in the mid 2010s, is the literal expression of the desire he has repeatedly articulated: to accelerate the integration of humans and machines and form what he describes as cyborgs. Taking that imperative seriously, Musk appears to pursue a cybernetic integration that augments human capacities, while simultaneously displacing human labor from the productive process through technologies he’s heavily invested in, like robotics and large language models. In broad terms, the future envisioned by Musk is post-human, rather than a transhuman orientation associated with figures like Ray Kurzweil.
Zhang: How does Musk’s idea of a “cybernetic collective” create a new form of subjectivity in the political sense, like new ways to exercise one’s political agency or participation, or does it eventually erode the political?
Slobodian: There are different points in the book where a kind of temporal shift appears, with Musk sometimes ahead of broader trends, sometimes aligned with them, and at other times lagging behind. The idea of cybernetic collectives is one area where he is somewhat behind the trend. Around 2016, especially in the context of the Brexit vote and the first election of Donald Trump, there was already widespread discourse suggesting that social media had transformed the nature of politics. It was argued that digital platforms were reshaping political behavior and identities, and that people were collectively subject to forms of mental manipulation. Individuals could be influenced by overwhelming flows of online messaging, targeted advertising, and so-called bot networks or trolls that undermined rational deliberation. This was a narrative that appeared regularly in mainstream outlets like The New York Times. In this sense, Musk was a relatively late adopter of this language. While he was early in recognizing the growing significance of AI and the expansion of online life, his claim that digital technologies were reformatting politics had already become fairly mainstream.
Rather than treating misinformation and disinformation as problems requiring regulation or a restoration of civil society and deliberation, however, Musk advocates for an intensification of the fusion between humans and technology. The best response, in his view, is not withdrawal or moderation, but a deepening of this integration—what he frames as a more direct engagement with the affective or “limbic” dimensions of political behavior as shaped by digital platforms.
What is noteworthy is his belief that the means of digital communication—and the terrain of mimetic or informational warfare—can be seized and redirected toward specific political ends. The acquisition of Twitter and the subsequent development of xAI can be understood as efforts to construct a platform capable of organizing a transnational, right-leaning information ecosystem that could displace more traditional forms of political organization, such as parties and representative institutions. This is clearly concerning. But it is also important to note that these developments build on anxieties that were already widely circulating about digitization. In that sense, Muskism did not simply invent these dynamics. It accelerates and amplifies tendencies that were already present in contemporary political life.
Zhang: The final chapter of the book outlines several possible futures of Muskism, all of which seem to deepen people’s reliance on these privately owned infrastructures. For ordinary citizens, is there any real way out of Muskism? Are there any meaningful ways to resist or reduce this kind of dependence and to reshape these dynamics in everyday life?
Tarnoff: We were in Europe for 10 days discussing this book, and many people are thinking about this question for obvious reasons. The current Trump administration has pushed European governments to look seriously at their dependencies on American companies, in particular Silicon Valley firms, and recognise these as a new source of vulnerability, given how closely these firms are aligned with Trump and how erratic and aggressive Trump’s behavior has become. In response, there are two broad approaches. One is to “clone” these capacities in a European form: Get off of Outlook, reduce their reliance on SpaceX, and develop a European alternative. These are active initiatives with billions of euros being invested under the banner of digital sovereignty.
Where the conversation becomes more interesting is in treating this moment not simply as an opportunity to replicate existing capacities but to reimagine those technologies and the systems sustaining them in the first place. In particular, what could really use reimagining is the relationship between the public and the private sector. A less desirable future would be one in which the Europeans reduce their reliance on Musk, only to produce a few European Musks to which they become enthralled. A more promising, though more difficult, path is to revisit the political choices made over the last several decades that have caused the public sector to fuse with the private sector. This is not the neoliberal tendency toward a shrinking, hollowed-out state with diminished capacity. As we argue, Muskism entails increasing state capacity but through private means. The result is that the state’s capacity becomes dependent on, and in some sense held hostage by, private firms. Sovereignty is effectively sold back to the state as a service.
These arrangements are the product of political choices, and they can be changed. How to restore independent state capacity is a complex question without easy answers, but there are emerging examples. In New York City, for instance, Zohran Mamdani has taken steps to cancel contracts with consulting firms previously relied upon for IT services and to bring those functions in-house. This can generate cost savings, but it also has a political rationale: It restores direct oversight over technological infrastructure that would otherwise be controlled by third-party contractors. While this may seem like a small intervention, it illustrates that these arrangements are contingent and different choices could be made.
Slobodian: Adding to the Mamdani case, many people point to his campaign as an example of the progressive use of social media or micro-messaging platforms—he used TikTok, he used Twitter, he used YouTube—and take this as evidence that these digital platforms can be deployed for more progressive ends. But the key point is that a TikTok video is only the tip of the iceberg, beneath which sits a vast infrastructure of face-to-face interaction, more traditional forms of organizing, and capacity-building that has little to do with the technological interface at the surface. Similarly, one should not look for a kind of “Muskism of the Left” without considering forms of person-to-person encounter, transformations in ownership relations, and the reinsertion of organized labor—forces that are fundamentally antagonistic to Muskism. What is required is not simply a different interface but a different political content.
