Elon Musk Archives - Public Seminar

Philosophy

Philosophy in the Time of Techno-Fascism

Longtermism’s story is about how money gives immensely damaging ideas a foothold with philosophers and the public

April 8, 2026 • by Alice Crary

This is an inaugural lecture, delivered at an intense, precarious moment. Staff and faculty at the New School for Social Research, including legacy Schools of Public Engagement, and staff and faculty at parts of Lang and Parsons, have been told many will soon be fired. We are members of a ...

Philosophy in the Time of Techno-Fascism

Art & Design

Joanna Walsh’s E-Elegy

Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters offers a remembrance of posts past

December 10, 2025 • by Eva Szilardi-Tierney

Here’s a theory: The posts, tags, and profiles that constitute the internet are all works of art, produced by amateur artists. Whether or not these amateurs recognize their work’s “artiness” is irrelevant; participation on the internet requires acts of intentional creation and studied self-representation, with the express purpose of display, ...

Democracy

Naked Oligarchy

How billionaires captured power and hollowed out democracy

June 19, 2025 • by Salvador Santino Regilme

The choice is stark: rule by the many, or rule by the billionaires who already act as if they own the world. Across the globe, extreme wealth has overpowered democracy. The world’s billionaires no longer merely influence politics; they dominate it. Behind the rhetoric of innovation and market efficiency lies a ...

Capitalism

We’re Going to Fort Knox to Touch the Real

If somebody really hasn’t already raided the loot, maybe the administration will show us how it’s done

May 20, 2025 • by Justin Joque

The Trump-Musk right repeatedly insists on revealing the true state of the world and of digging this true world out from under the distortions of liberal modernity. From Pizzagate to attacks on DEI, there exists a constant insistence on revealing what is hidden, mediated, and obfuscated. But nowhere is the ...

We’re Going to Fort Knox to Touch the Real

North America

Elon Musk’s Cruel Moral Sentiments

What the world’s richest man has yet to learn from his study of the Bible

April 3, 2025 • by David Lay Williams

Elon Musk may or may not be “the world’s richest man” these days, depending on the wildly fluctuating value of his Tesla car company, a target for those protesting Musk’s “move fast, break stuff” approach to downsizing the federal bureaucracy through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk’s savage cuts ...

Democracy

The Dictatorship of the Tech Bros—or, What Is to Be Done?

A conversation about DOGE and Trump and Musk’s attempt to smash the state

February 7, 2025 • by Forrest Deacon and James Miller

Editor’s note: In December 2024, Forrest Deacon, a Humanities lecturer at Villanova University who is also completing a dissertation in politics at the New School for Social Research, approached Public Seminar, offering to write a piece about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). At the time, this seemed like a ...

The Dictatorship of the Tech Bros—or, What Is to Be Done?

Body & Mind

Driven Mad by a Marxist Daughter

Two billionaire fathers undergo a peculiar, public psychosis

March 25, 2024 • by Justin Joque

What defines Musk and Ackman’s psychosis is no longer their relation to their symbolic fathers, but their relation to that of their daughters’....

Film

Nihilism for the Whole Family!

How Evelyn misinterpreted Waymond’s rebellion in Everything Everywhere All At Once

April 18, 2023 • by Ken Hu

Evelyn’s response to the multiverse reflects an existentialist resolution that builds upon a particular version of nihilism: if the universe is inherently meaningless, then we are at liberty to create our own meanings within it....

The Internet

Why I Joined Twitter Blue

And why so many people are quietly doing it too

February 2, 2023 • by Claire Potter

Twitter Blue is essentially a different Twitter—and the other, nonsubscription one is not neglected or "broken"—it got broke....

Past Present

Elon Musk, Twitter, and the History of Media Oligarchs

Past Present Podcast, Episode 324

May 3, 2022 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Billionaire Elon Musk made a successful $44 billion bid to acquire Twitter. Niki referred to this Los Angeles Times article about the limits of Elon Musk’s “free speech absolutism.” Natalia referenced this New York Times article about billionaire investors in ...