It’s Elon Musk’s world - but we don’t have to live in it

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff on Musk, the far right, and the AI future being built without our consent

Elon Musk and I share something in common. We both tweeted for the first time in 2010. For the next few years, it seems I was far more hooked on Twitter than he was.

While I spent hours a day on the baby-blue platform pumping out hot takes and minor scoops, Musk barely tweeted at all. In 2014, he sent fewer than 300 tweets. I shudder to think how many I sent.

Then something changed. It’s not that I used Twitter less - although I did - but Musk started using it more. A lot more. By 2024, the year I basically stopped tweeting, the world’s richest man was posting an average of 60 times a day, and sometimes as often as 40 times an hour.

And the more Musk tweets, the more radicalised he becomes. He’s gone from putative Democrat to rabid Trumpist. He’s appeared at rallies for Tommy Robinson and the far-right German AfD. He talked of giving $100 million to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Now he uses his X platform to boost the dark ethno-nationalism of Rupert Lowe and Ben Habib.

So what happened? How did Musk become this?

It’s tempting to rake over his biography - the grandfather who emigrated from Canada to apartheid South Africa, the strange racialised modernity of life in Pretoria Boys High School, the slings and arrows of Silicon Valley. But what if we try to understand Musk not as an individual, but as an avatar for a worldview that wants to radically reshape politics, culture and society?

That’s the premise of a fascinating new book, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff. The echo with Fordism - the era of assembly-line mass production defined by Henry Ford - is intentional.

“We thought it might be interesting to ask whether Musk is a new Ford,” Slobodian told me in today’s video discussion. “It’s the idea that Musk is a kind of stand-in for the rewriting of the social contract.”

Musk has often been characterised as a libertarian and a free speech absolutist. Slobodian and Tarnoff paint a very different - and far more compelling - picture.

The Tesla founder, they argue, speaks the language of crisis and emergency to invoke a tech-driven vision of the future, where the vast bulk of the world’s population are superfluous - ‘non-player characters’ in a story driven by a handful of largely white men.

“In the most extreme version of Muskism, the human is no longer the subject of history, but its discarded scaffolding. The product is not a car, or even a robot. The product is a self-regulating infrastructure in which the world - the factory - runs on its own.”

It is easy to mistake this for a vision in which government is swept aside entirely. But nothing could be further from Musk’s mind. His companies get billions every year in government contracts. Federal support was critical to Tesla’s survival.

Musk doesn’t want to end all that - he just wants to control it. “For Musk, government isn’t something to be minimised or eliminated. Rather, it can be instrumentalised as a source of power and profit.”

Politics, too, is a source of power - and profit. Slobodian explains Musk’s move to the far right as the product of two entwined forces: his increasing intoxication with Great Replacement Theory visions of ‘white genocide’, and a belief that he can use outsider politicians for his own ends.

“He’s looking for the Tesla of politics,” Slobodian told me. “He’s trying to find these outsiders that seem like they have limited prospects but who are nonetheless going to completely change the game and leave the legacy parties in their dust - the same way Ford and Chevrolet aren’t worth anything compared to Tesla.”

At the same time, Musk has been radicalised by his own platform, interacting with and amplifying ever more extreme far-right viewpoints. Like Donald Trump, this is politics by meme - continuously flooding the zone with shit, as Steve Bannon infamously put it.

For Musk, artificial intelligence isn’t a tool to improve productivity or manage tasks; it’s the gateway to a fully-fledged cyborg future. “His belief is that we’re becoming fused with our machines and our networks,” says Slobodian, “so controlling the future and controlling politics is about controlling what he calls ‘the cybernetic collective’.”

This might all sound like a nightmarish vision of the future - or even the present, if you’ve seen the Trump White House’s social media posts depicting the Iran war as a mix of Hollywood clips and video game imagery while AI-driven systems rain down missiles on the Middle East.

But we don’t have to accept it.

I asked the authors what the answer to Muskism is. They were unequivocal: democracy.

“There are possibilities for good old-fashioned elections and regulation to put a brake on this,” says Slobodian. “What we are trying to get across is that it’s not an attractive world that Musk is offering. It’s one that by design is only available to the select few.”

Tarnoff sees hope in grassroots mobilisation - things like the popular resistance to ICE in Minneapolis. “We can resist a world of ethno-nationalism, where human beings are marked for exclusion and extermination.”

That’s the positive vision. And for my money, this is one of the most interesting, intellectually stimulating conversations we’ve had on Democracy for Sale. I hope you enjoy it, too.

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff are in London next week and have an event on Tuesday 17^th March at Waterstones Gower Street, in conversation with Amelia Horgan. If you’re interested in going, tickets are available here.