Elon Musk, once the world's first trillionaire and now merely a billionaire again, is a man of exceptions. He has built pioneering technology companies like Tesla and SpaceX, talks seriously about settling humans on Mars, and posts multiple times daily on his own platform, X. In 2025, he gave what appeared to be a Nazi salute in Washington DC and held a senior US government role with no prior political experience. As head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), he tried to turn government into a problem of data synthesis and pattern recognition, often forgetting the real people affected by his decisions.
The Rise of Muskism
Journalist Cory Doctorow and others have asked whether Musk is exceptionally dangerous. To answer this, Canadian political economist Quinn Slobodian and technology journalist Ben Tarnoff have written 'Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed'. The term 'Muskism' references 'Fordism', named after Henry Ford, whose mass production model altered American society from around 1935. While Fordism brought mass employment, decent wages, and social security, Muskism aims to forge a different order: stupendously networked, massively surveilled, anti-liberal, and insular. Under Muskism, oligarchs and governments use advanced technology to weaken democracy, divide the population, impose social hierarchy, and immunise themselves from threats.
South Africa as the Cradle of Muskism
Slobodian and Tarnoff write that to understand the world Musk aims to build, we must understand the worlds that built him. Musk was born and raised in 1970s South Africa during the final years of apartheid. 'South Africa was the cradle of Muskism,' they write. 'It taught the lesson of fortress futurism: the belief that technology can strengthen self-reliance in a hostile world.' Systemic racism organised the society he grew up in, with state and big business conspiring to favour whites. Musk emigrated to Canada in 1989 at age 17 to avoid mandatory military service, taking his beliefs with him. By 1992, he was in the US studying physics and economics at the University of Pennsylvania. By 1995, he was in Palo Alto founding Zip2, then X.com (which merged with PayPal), and by 2002 he was incredibly rich. He set up SpaceX that year, became involved with Tesla in 2004, co-founded OpenAI in 2015, Neuralink in 2016, the Boring Company in 2017, acquired Twitter in late 2022, founded xAI in 2023, and headed DOGE in 2025 before falling out with President Donald Trump. All this before age 55.
From Musk to Muskism
Several biographies of Musk exist, including Walter Isaacson's 'Elon Musk' (2023) and Jacob Silverman's 'Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley' (2025). Slobodian and Tarnoff argue that Musk is different from his big tech peers due to his South African upbringing and beliefs. Musk 'sells the fantasy that, in an increasingly unstable world, both states and individuals can fortify their self-reliance by plugging into his infrastructures,' they write. 'The paradox is that, in doing so, you become reliant on him.' They describe Muskism as a blend of proven technologies, technological promises, relationships between business and the state, and memes that promote 'techno-sovereignty'—where private companies' advanced technology allows governments to project power while reducing vulnerability to external shocks. The system ensures American wealth in a post-free trade era where China, Russia, and Iran are seen as threats.
Space, Electric Vehicles, and Social Media
SpaceX and Tesla are at the heart of Musk's success, along with X. Musk drove innovation relentlessly, raising huge funds through hype and 'future fabulation'. He built vertically integrated firms to reduce reliance on outside suppliers; Tesla now produces vehicles and batteries at large scale, expanding into renewable energy systems. It resembles old-style Fordist conglomerates but without 'the bother' of large unionised workforces, the authors note. Musk's recognition of state power is clearest with SpaceX, a preferred US government supplier with few rivals. The US military uses Starlink, suggesting a more intimate government-business relationship than in Ford's era. 'State symbiosis' is Musk's preference over open market competition. For Tesla, Obama-era concerns about China and climate change allowed massive federal support, giving Tesla an edge over other American vehicle manufacturers.
Extremely Online and Right-Wing Ideas
From 2017, Musk became 'extremely online, an incurable poster' on Twitter, first to promote his companies, then to broadcast increasingly right-wing ideas that keyed into resurgent populism. After taking over Twitter and renaming it X in late 2022, he posted about a 'woke mind virus' and made incendiary comments about immigrants, LGBTQIA+ people, low birth-rates among whites, and the decline of the West. The book's chapters on Neuralink and xAI consider this context. In a 2016 conversation with OpenAI's Sam Altman, Musk said: if we all 'become an AI–human symbiote, we don't have to worry about some sort of evil dictator AI because we are the AI collectively.' He imagines a cyborg future where digital and biological merge, raising questions about who will control the resulting cognitive and informational ecosystem.
Will Muskism Grow?
Musk is seemingly trying to build an encompassing 'superset' of interlocking parts, from energy and transportation to communication. Unlike Bill Gates or Palantir's Alexander Karp and Peter Thiel, Musk has not set out his credo in books or manifestos, but his actions suggest he's on a mission. Critic Nick Srnicek believes Muskism is already a formidable apparatus. The book sheds light on how one man is remaking the world without consulting the rest of us. It makes clear that no society should allow a small number of individuals to possess such power. 'Just as we abhor the idea that millions should be allowed to starve to death, we should oppose the idea that unelected oligarchs get to determine our future,' the authors conclude.
