What is an 'Elon Musk'?

About this episode

Elon Musk is not the richest man in the world merely because he’s good at selling cars or rockets at a profitable margin. That might have sufficed for richest men in the world of decades past. But Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, however briefly, for a lot of reasons, and being good at moving a particular product is not chief among them. Musk sells a vision. Musk harnesses the state to implement his corporate goals, to secure his companies’ foundations beyond the vicissitudes of common capitalism. Musk mediates his message on social platforms, which he owns and controls, and uses to bend politics to his will. The list goes on. This formula has been emulated by the most recent crop of tech titans; your Sam Altmans and Dario Amodeis, whose path to power lies in selling a vision over simple goods, who work the state to buffet their businesses, and who paint a bleak picture of the future through which their products will help you survive. To understand what’s going on here, not just with Tesla or SpaceX or OpenAI or Anthropic, but the modern American economy itself, I sat down with the historian and author Quinn Slobodian, who has put a name to this tendency: Muskism. Slob