What’s Driving Elon Musk?

If Republicans keep the Senate, if they perform better in the House than people expect, a lot is going to come down to one man, and that man is not Donald Trump. It's Elon Musk. At this point, Musk has given around $450 million to the Republican campaign effort. That makes him the single largest donor in any election cycle ever. It is a quarter of all campaign donations Republicans have received. And yet, the size of this, I think what it throws into relief is how hard it is to conception how much money Elon Musk really has. Because for Musk, with his net worth of around a trillion dollars, for him to give $300 million, $400 million, it's like the median American household giving like $100 bucks. It is, for him, nothing. And yet, it is reality-warping for the rest of us. And it's not even Musk's only source of power, all this money. There's his control of X, his control of Starlink, of SpaceX, of Neuralink, of Tesla. He has power over wealth, attention, and critical infrastructure that no human being has ever combined at this level. At least once you're outside the range of, say, a Donald Trump or a Xi Jinping, somebody who controls a superpower as a state. That's not what Musk has. And yet, he has this almost state-like thing that is completely pursuant to his whims. So what does he want to do with it? What is he doing with it? What is this world that he is flexing his power and taking on real risk to build? Quint Sablodian is a professor of international history at Boston University. He's the author of several books, including Globalist, Hayek's Bastards, but relevant for here, Muskism, which he co-authored with Ben Tarnoff. He joins me now. Quint Sablodian, welcome to the show. Very happy to be here. So, Elon Musk is flexing a lot of power right now. He's made the largest ever set of campaign donations from one person in one cycle. It's now $450 million, all of it to Republican groups. He's alone a quarter of all GOP donations this cycle. What is he trying to buy? Well, I think he's trying to entrench the dependency that he already enjoys. One is through his financial role, in the U.S. political economy, by extension, the global economy. SpaceX now as one of the world's top tech companies, Tesla as a large part of the tech portfolio that people hold in their pension funds and their individual investor accounts, means that if you attack Musk, you're also kind of attacking one of the pillars of U.S. political economy. So that's kind of the money side. On the machine side, he's trying to make the world ever more dependent on his infrastructure. And the use of SpaceX as the really monopoly launch provider, put things into low-Earth orbit, the rolling out of low-Earth orbit satellites as Starlink, as kind of the default communications medium for battlefield operations and for rural consumers and so on. But then further to that, there's what I would think of as kind of the messaging piece of that or the media piece. And there he's much more targeted trying to produce kind of communicative ecosystems in which his way of framing social problems and solutions to social problems is uncontested and uncontestable. So his purchase of Twitter in October 2022, long described as kind of one of the biggest business failures in American history, has proven to be actually probably quite effective, I would say, so that people are caught in kind of an echo chamber of his creation. And his targeting of the midterms and his production of a flexing of his own power to make or break candidates, as he hopes, is a way to, he hopes to kind of fine-tune that control over the media and messaging ecosystem and get out ahead of what he worries will be a kind of regulatory wave that would accompany a democratic majority. What's funny to me or interesting to me about the description you give there is you could imagine someone with Musk's portfolio of interests seeing a very different strategy as optimal. Because the work he does is so intertwined with the government. Being highly, highly associated with one partisan side of the fight in America, in Europe, if the sort of right-wing parties he's been boosting, it creates risk. I mean, you talked about entrenching dependents, but he's also creating a situation where if you have in 2029, you know, President John Alsa for President Gavin Newsom or President AOC and the Democratic Congress, reliance on, you know, SpaceX on Starlink, you know, on Grok, maybe in the Pentagon can be seen as a huge risk. And so from that side, this doesn't all look purely rational, like a master businessman, just entrenching. Like it looks like a man who believes things and is actually risking quite a lot to push those beliefs upon the world. Yeah, I mean, it's an unusual approach, right? I mean, the way that corporate leaders have usually tried to exercise their influence on the political landscape in the past has been slightly more from behind the scenes. Of course, right? But I would say then he's, again, working on two tracks. One is deepen that financial and structural dependency such that even if a President Ossoff or a President AOC comes into power, they have a limited ability to rein in his, you know, fulcrum central role in the American health of the stock market and its dominance in certain key frontier sectors. Their hands would be tied still, I think. But at the same time, he can use this tactic, kind of hyperpolarization, which he's obviously taken as his own kind of trademark, even amongst his own Silicon Valley leadership class, to potentially become the favored partner for a future ruling administration. And that's also the way he's approaching the relationship to far-right parties in Europe, right? A rational person would try to come up with some kind of compromise with the ruling parties in Western Europe, make peace with the EU in some way, to gain market access. He's taken an opposite approach, gone on a full frontal attack against Brussels and the existing legacy centrist parties and tried to ally, which what I've long thought of, as he sees as the kind of Teslas of politics, the AFDs, the Restore Britons, that he hopes will come from marginality and nowhere to completely disrupt and destroy the legacy institutional parties of social democracy and Christian democracy. So it's high risk, but potentially also high reward. If you find yourself then in a kind of a pole position for a changing model of governance across the board. I do think Musk is somebody who works backwards from visions of possible futures. And I want to play a clip from an interview he recently gave The Economist where he describes how things are going to play out over, this was just over the five to 10 year timeframe. It would be an exercise in vanity for me to think that I would be controlling the super genius AI that is vastly smarter than me. What my biological neural net tells me is that the most important thing for the AI safety is to be maximally truth-seeking and curious. If that's the case, I think it will foster humanity. So let's unpack that. You're sure that humans will no longer be in control in 10 years time? I think it is unlikely in the same way that if the difference in intelligence between AI and humans is vastly greater than the difference in intelligence between AI and chimpanzees, it's hard to imagine that the chimpanzees would be in charge. The whole first half of this Economist interview he gave is sort of like this, where he's very casually just describing a world war within a decade. Money wouldn't exist. Money won't exist. Human beings have lost control of the entire world. He is not even really in control of his own companies anymore. Yeah. So what does truth-seeking and curious mean to Musk? To Musk, the curious part in his own terms means that given the fact that the likelihood of superintelligence exceeding human intelligence at some time in the near future, then we would need to make sure that it wants to keep humans around for its own interest and either its own entertainment or its own. Yeah, I've heard him describe this sort of as he wants an AI that would find it more entertaining to have us in the world than to not have us in the world. And the even more extreme version of that is like in line with simulation theory, which is that if we are just existing in a digital simulation that has been created by a future alien race or a hyper-advanced human race, then we want to keep things entertaining enough here in this kind of reality show of the present such that they wouldn't terminate the programming. So that's, I mean, in his own terms, that's how he describes the goal there. I think it really tracks what have been pretty substantial changes in his attitude towards AI even across the last 10 years, right? And we know that in 2015, he started opening up with Sam Altman, really at that time under the influence of the Swedish philosopher, Nick Bostrom, whose book, Superintelligence, had come out the year before. And the overwhelming threat at that point was the possibility of a runaway digital superintelligence, which in the most famous example, might turn us all into paperclips if it got the wrong kind of a prompt. So at that time, he seemed to have one big message, which is, let's hit the brakes, slow it down, and make sure that we're aligning the values of the AI with our own. But at the same time, he's starting Neuralink. And as he starts Neuralink, the way he describes it, in fact, directly to Altman, as well as in other cases, is that Neuralink is designed to accelerate our fusion with network technologies so that a human-machine symbiote, as he calls it, will be able to sort of stay out ahead of that Skynet digital superintelligence. So that's the first phase of Musk's AI thinking, is actually, we need to augment the technology that we're using. And that's the first phase of Musk's AI thinking, is actually, we need to augment human consciousness to make sure that we are accelerating a better version of the AI against the evil. It must become the robots to not be destroyed by the robots. Exactly. This attitude changes almost overnight in November 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT. With the launch of ChatGPT and the realization by him and the entire Silicon Valley entrepreneurial and leadership class that LLMs and generative AI was the new growth story that changed. Instead of it being the digital superintelligence that was a concern, now it was the woke LLM, which had been trained on the progressive posts and internet discourse of the era of Black Lives Matter, Defend Trans Kids, Me Too. And iconically, the image of Google Gemini's generated image of the black founding fathers kind of stood in for people like Musk and Andreessen as the danger of this new phase of AI, which in the most recent years has been a very, very memorable description. Musk said he feared would turn him into a woman of color. So if that's your new fear, then what do you do in response? You create an anti-woke AI. And that is precisely what XAI is and what Grok was. The truth-seeking part is really his market proposition against what he sees as the alternative models of open AI and anthropic, which have been shot through, as he describes it, and contaminated with the woke mind virus. And the shift in his politics, I think, predates actually, in some ways, his shift on AI. So how do you understand what that shift was? Yeah. So when the Obama administration wanted to do a big push into renewables to reduce dependency on fossil fuels, and thus also help to get out of the Middle East, then Musk was able to profit from that, getting this nearly half billion dollar loan from the Department of Energy. Into the Biden administration, that demand for a lot of energy, that demand for a lot of energy, that demand for electric autonomy, as we call it, still existed. But now it was part of also a kind of pro-worker, pro-union push, which meant that Musk wasn't one of the favored companies for the Biden White House. Famously, does not get invited to the electric vehicle summit. Get snubbed in a way that is kind of like roughly equivalent to the Trump roast at the White House correspondence dinner as the sort of initiating incident of a feeling of being, you know, if you don't like me, then forget you. I'm going to create my own club. One of the forms it took, was, of course, the upswell of social movements, making demands around racial justice, gender justice, that were, of course, entering the workplaces of Silicon Valley, too, that were producing new pressures, open letters, walkouts. This became a site of real combative anger for the CEO class, which felt that this labor class was now exercising power over them, the management, in a way that was repellent. But also the COVID containment measures become something that really both triggers Musk's anger at his inability to shape the regulatory world around his own needs, and also a time where he gets a lot of validation for his opposition to the containment measures. So his tweet where he says the coronavirus panic is dumb is his first one million like tweet. And as a response to it, Trump responds, you know, this is outrageous. You know, reopen the Fremont factory. And then he goes ahead and just does it anyway, actually, against California orders and gets away with it. So this also points to something else I think is relevant in his rightward turn, which is his immersion into the world of social media and Twitter in particular, which we think of as less a kind of corrupting process of his rationality and more as sort of his iterative attempt to figure out how to trigger processes that end up actually enriching the world. So I think that's a really good point. Rather than being a kind of handicap for his accumulation model is actually real accelerant for it. Well, you're saying polarization, and that is part of it. But polarization also is a method of getting attention, right? And this is a way in which Trump and Musk, I think, have very similar psychologies. But it's so interesting with him the way all the parts are always connected. But I don't think people, I don't think I had a really good sense of how rapidly his fortune has expanded. So in 2020, he has, according to estimates, $39 billion. Now, it's a lot of money. If I had $39 billion, I'd be stoked. He now has a trillion dollars. Six years. In 2020, he had 4% of the wealth he has now. And what has happened inside those years is not that his company's made a lot of money. He does not have highly profit generating. I mean, I'm not saying there are no profits, but what happened with SpaceX, what happened with Tesla, it's not that they began showing profits that shifted, you know, Musk's net worth. What did happen? How do you go from $40 billion to a trillion dollars in six years? But the promise of being able to open up perhaps infinite future revenues, he becomes, you know, the most iconic example of that. And Tesla, as something that's able to plausibly present itself as the future of motorization, and then maybe also the future of humanoid robots, and SpaceX's ability to say, listen, we delivered on a drop in over 90% of the cost of putting matter into orbit, internet, we're not going to do that. With over 11,000 satellites in space, with over 12 million subscribers, tangibly changing the ability to win wars in places like Ukraine. These things are real things you can point to if you want to persuade yourself that if you're going to make a bet, you make it on this man. Well, let me hold you on that for a second, because one thing I often see, and I think of it as a genuine kind of intellectual mistake, people want the people they don't like to not be impressive. Of course. Like, Musk really did do that. Not relying on subcontractors, not relying on kind of lengthy procurement models, but speeding everything up and bringing it all in-house. Tesla famously did this as well. When they built the gigafactories, they were trying to bring as much of the supply chain as they could under the roof of one factory, which meant that exactly in 2020, when automakers got absolutely slammed by the closing of borders, Tesla got hit, but they bounced up much more quickly. It was really one of the things that gave them the possibility to bounce back. So before those big supply shocks, before COVID, before Ukraine. actually, Musk was already using a partially kind of decoupled model of production. I completely agree with you that it's a real stumbling block for many critics who simply want to short circuit to this idea he's just a liar and a grifter, or even simply a crony capitalist. In fact, he's not just a crony capitalist because he's pushing out often the kind of technological frontier for economies that do business with him. If you're not a subscriber to the New York Times, we have some news for you. You can now explore the Times for free without any paywalls at all during your first month in the New York Times app. I think that brings together a couple of interesting things here, because as you mentioned, to justify the valuations, Musk is not just selling a vision of the world that he has already achieved. He's selling a different vision of the future. And he sort of described what it was to the economists. So I want to play that here. What will your companies be doing in 10 years? And how will they make money? Well, you can really think of the economy as digital and physical intelligence. You need the end effectors in the form of humanoid robotics. You need basically lots of bots in a nutshell. You need lots of bots. And then you can go from intelligence manifesting itself only digitally to shaping atoms. And you say, what is an economy? An economy is the production of goods and provision of services. And if you have vast numbers of robots with vast amounts of digital intelligence, you have a quasi-infinite economy. So the future is going to be very, very different from the past. So this is currently the promise of what I would call Musk Industries, which is not necessarily that he is going to individually dominate AI. It's that they are going to be the company that takes AI, the kind of conglomerate of companies, that takes AI out of bits and into atoms, that they will dominate the AI robotics intersection. I think whether they will or not is obviously something we can't know, but I think there's something worth getting at at a deeper level of the world being envisioned and promoted here, which is what is the role that human beings play in this future? I mean, it's a very difficult one to sell, right? And one of the strange things about that interview is that he says, you know, economically, civilizationally, we're moving to a situation of kind of, if not subordination, then simply marginalization by superintelligence. So for that to be the goal to which you're working is, first of all, very difficult to build consent for and legitimacy for, obviously. But it also requires a huge amount of synergies between neighboring technologies. And one of the things that I think is really important is that one of the ways he's actually unlocked the level of fortune he has this year is by making progress towards bringing together that vertically integrated Musk Industries model under one kind of label. It's only been recently that XAI absorbed X.com, and then SpaceX in turn absorbed XAI. And now he's vocally calling for the merger of Tesla and SpaceX, which would be the largest merger in history. And would precisely bring together the part of his empire that does atoms in the form of humanoid robots with the part that does the AI under the umbrella of SpaceX. But then I think one aspect of Muskism, which we need to keep our eye on, is that he's actually propelled by the need to create an impression of invulnerability, which is actually belied by the truth. So if you think about what he's trying to do, he's trying to make sure that there's a lot of risk factors. Number one risk factor is national legislation. These are the things that actually keep Musk up at night, right, is the moves being made by national governments to throw sand in the treads of the tank that he's trying to drive towards his goal. So that's, I think, something to bear in mind, too, is like his impression of invulnerability is actually part of his political project. And beneath the sort of mechanism of legislation, and the risk of legislation to him, is also what populations believe, what they believe about the world, what they believe about him, what they want. And this, I think, brings together like both a near term and a long term obsession. Musk has, and you've written about this, a sort of more specific conception of what he calls a woke mind virus. When he is describing it, the metaphor is more like computer virus than I think people quite realize. So what is to him the woke mind virus? Because I think it's a little bit different than what people think of as wokeness. Yes. So the term viruses of the mind was coined by Richard Dawkins in the early 1990s, and a well-respected, if sort of incendiary, conservative evolutionary biologist, and not coincidentally, the same guy who coined the term meme in his book, The Selfish Gene, from 1976. And the two arguments work together, the meme and the mind virus. Both suggest that ideology and belief are nothing more than these kind of discrete units that move between individuals mediated through, by the 1990s, network technologies. And he is using a direct analogy between the computer virus and the religious belief. And Musk has absolutely swallowed this notion whole, to the point that I think, if you want to understand how he understands politics, or the problem of consent, or indeed the problem of truth, it's inseparable from this idea of humans and machines being networked together into what he calls cybernetics. He's using a direct analogy between the computer virus and the mind virus. And Musk has absolutely swallowed this notion whole, to the point that I think, if you want to understand how he understands politics, or the problem of consent, or the problem of truth, it's inseparable from this idea of humans and machines being networked together into what he calls cybernetics. defeat those, which seems like an outrageous way of thinking about politics. But this is where I think what I talked about at the beginning as a kind of communicative dependency becomes really important because what SpaceX now is, is a kind of extraordinary end-to-end vertically integrated communicative space. What does that mean when you say communicative space? I mean, it reaches from chatbots to satellites. And what he's trying to do there and what he's selling the comparative advantage of SpaceX is having is access to the real world emotions of the humans who are posting on X.com. So he says you have a kind of real time news engine, opinion engine, update and feelings engine, meaning that your LLM is also more, you know, au courant and up to date. And of course, the implication is that if you can create that as a kind of hermetically sealed silo, then you can also become the controller of that space of discourse. So the way that he's transformed X since his acquisition of Twitter is designed to boost exactly the kind of messages that come in closest proximity to his through actual monetization of the accounts involved. There's extraordinary news story about the British far-right politician Rupert Lowe, who made a tweet about the incompatibility of Muslims with British civilization. And there was a follow-on report of how many thousands of pounds he'd actually earned through memes through x.com. So in Musk's mind, He's producing a kind of mind virus engine, which he could also call truth. And if he can, you know, absolutely control the algorithms within which that is magnified or contained, then he will have domination over the media. I want you to hold on the sort of more ideological dimension of this belief. So when he understands the quote unquote woke mind virus as a threat to truth seeking, as a creation of a kind of corrupted Western civilization that is lost, that will have lost some of the values that drove it forward before. He talks a lot now about Western civilization. Yeah. What is he saying specifically? Yeah. Well, here I think it's actually helpful to come in through the back door through some of his science fiction obsessions, right? I mean, the Foundation series from Isaac Asimov is something he refers to constantly. His most recent child is named Selden after the Harry Selden figure in the Foundation series, who is described as a kind of a brilliant mathematician, really, who introduces a discipline called psychohistory, which through kind of manipulation of the present will ensure the survival of civilization. And it's relevant because it's kind of a mixture of rationality and attention to mass emotion and the way that Crap. And the way crowds operate and the way mobs work. And the problem with Selden's plan is that it's confronted with someone who's even better at controlling emotions, which is someone called the mule. And Musk's understanding of communications is always this combination of a world of rationality and then a world of what he calls the limbic instinct or the kind of animal impulses that drive us. He sees, and there I don't think he's totally incorrect, the success of social networks as being the way that they draw on both of those kind of resources. And he understands his own interventions as skillfully manipulating two of those simultaneously. So that, I think, helps to explain how he understands his role. It's quite fascinating, actually, that the richest man in the world sees himself in kind of a transitional function to really hand over human history to post-human history. I mean, the vision of superintelligence as reducing us to the role of chimpanzees is not actually something anyone with any level of influence has tried to persuade the mass of people to go along with before. And that alone means that he plays with, you know, these categories of truth, curiosity, and emotion in ways that I think can sometimes be jarring and unfamiliar. A lot of it is unfamiliar. And when you hear Musk talk, for a person who. Operates with such a high sense of agency, when he begins talking about this, he abandons agency. But you might imagine a person who felt that way, like not being that interested in day-to-day politics at the moment, but he is. And this is where these twin obsessions, I think, come together. Maybe a way to get into this is to play this clip from Rogan, which I think connects some of what you're talking about with the woke mind virus and truth-seeking to this idea he has that there is like a central security vulnerability in Western civilization. So that we've got civilizational, suicidal empathy going on. And it's like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide. Also, don't let someone use your empathy against you so they can completely control your state and then do an insanely bad job of managing it and never get removed. The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, and I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot. When he says we've got civilizational, suicidal empathy going on, when he says that our civilization might be committing suicide, what is he saying is happening? I mean, concretely, when he says something like that, he's echoing a very common point of discussion on the European far right to the far right and to Musk. The real problem with where society is going is not that there are a lot of people trying to or coming to Europe or the United States. But the problem is that the liberals have decided it's a good idea to allow people from radically different cultures and radically different religions to come to the heart of Western civilization. So that notion, that precise notion of suicidal empathy is all about refugee policy and immigration policy and is at the heart of his demands for what he calls re-migration. But I think at a deeper level, it comes to his unwillingness to kind of tarry with the traditional concepts of modern political thought. So if you think about what every previous political thinker has been forced to contend with. Over the last 250 years, certainly in this country, is categories like democracy, popular sovereignty, some idea eventually of like a care for the people, extended sort of political versions of what you might call empathy, the ways in which communities are imagined as being composed of people who are relative peers or equals at some level. That whole legacy, Musk, I think, would see as part of the contamination of Western civilization by empathy. So social. Social order becomes a programming problem. And in programming, attempts to kind of transform the core code that you're working on are not interpreted as a possibility for consensus building or compromise, but simply sites of contamination that need to be programmed away. When I have heard Musk defend this view, the argument he makes, the argument I think he's getting at here to sort of extend what you're saying, is that Europe and the United States, primarily who he's talking about. I think that's what he's getting at here to sort of extend what you're saying, is that Europe and the United States, primarily who he's talking about. Have been through empathy for individuals, allowing mass numbers of people to come into their countries who do not fundamentally share their values and their premises. When he says here that you need to be careful not to have so much empathy for the individual, you don't have empathy for a civilization as a whole. That's, I think, what he's describing. And I think it raises maybe a number of questions here. But one of the core ones. One of the core ones to me is how his upbringing in apartheid South Africa has influenced or shaped this set of concerns. One doesn't have a lot of kind of documentary evidence to work with. So there's a certain leap of interpretation that's necessary. But it's not a very big leap of interpretation. And one of the things we describe in the book is the way that being a minority privileged population. Racially marked in South Africa, that drifted through everyday life and one's whole life course in a way that drifted past sort of faceless, colored masses of the African population helps to reinforce in very obvious ways, a sort of sense of the non-player characters and the playing characters and South Africa itself is not a traditional kind of modern nation state in the sense that it's built on a kind of. And South Africa itself is not a traditional kind of modern nation state in the sense that it's built on a kind of asymmetrical logic where the majority of the residents are actually just there insofar as they're useful to the minority of residents. So those old problems of what is popular sovereignty, what is national self-determination, how can you get a group of people who live next to each other to see each other and sort of bonds of reciprocal attention or minimal care simply didn't apply in late apartheid South Africa, right? It's like as effectively one of the last decolonizing sites in the world, it lived on with that imperial two-tier logic much longer than the rest of the world did. So I think it's easier for him to just set aside what to most political thinkers are things that need to be considered seriously. I think it's worth looking at how that breaks down concretely as well. So how have previous oligarchs, how have previous titans of industry secured popular consent, right? This is actually where the comparison to Fordism is helpful. Ford himself, virulent anti-Semite, violently anti-union. And yet Fordism is something we associate with collective bargaining agreements, upward generational mobility, the construction of the single family breadwinner model, the welfare state even. How did that happen? Well, it happened because through social struggle, through enlightened legislation, and through democratic pressure, a compromise or a social contract emerged in which people were minimally willing to go along with the way that this guy was going to design the factory and the way he was going to make his money. What's the equivalent for Musk, right? What is the social contract that people like Musk are proposing? Where is the equivalent of Carnegie's libraries in the case of Musk? You can look concretely at the Musk Foundation, which few people have heard of, but is one of the top 10 endowed philanthropic foundations in the United States. Why have few people heard of it? Because they routinely don't spend the 5% of their assets that they're required to do as a 501c3 philanthropic foundation in the United States. And when they do, who do they give it to? As in the recent example, they gave it to a school called Ad Astra that is next to SpaceX in Texas that was designed pretty much exclusively for employees of Musk. So that vision of kind of outward facing social purpose, his complete reneging of that is itself quite extraordinary, right? And sets him apart, actually, from others in his class, right? The Gates Foundation, arguably, if empathy at a basic level is a woke mind virus, then the Gates Foundation is thoroughly infected with it, right? I mean, they have a vision of saving as many lives as possible, no matter where they are on the planet. Tons of critiques associated with that, of course, but a pretty standard way of trying to buy consent under conditions of grotesque inequality. So it's an extraordinarily bold, I think, affront to all of the normal ways we historians have thought about how instability is stabilized in moments of extreme change. And what's amazing, really, for me, is to see how resilient he's been despite the depth of his provocations. One of the reasons I wanted to have you on was because you wrote a book before the book you did with Ben Tarnoff on Muskism that I think is important to Musk, to understanding Musk, maybe to understand some of the modern right. The book is called Hayek's Bastards, which is, if you don't mind, just tell me about the main argument of that. The main argument of that is that there were a group of people who called themselves neoliberals, right? Coined it in 1938. And when they called themselves neoliberals, they meant that they needed to figure out how to protect the principles of market freedom in a time when that was under challenge from as they saw the left and the right. So some of these people became quite famous. The Milton Friedmans, Friedrich Hayek, Gary Becker, George Stigler. And through the Cold War, of course, they exercised their political influence as well they could, became favorites of Thatcher and Reagan. And come the end of the Cold War, one would think that they had reached their ultimate victory, right? And yet, and this is what was so fascinating, when I went back to look at transcripts of the meetings that they were having, the papers they were publishing, as the Berlin Wall fell, as the Soviet Union fell apart, they were actually panicked about a new set of threats. That's right. The red enemy, as they often put it, had turned into a green one. Remember, this was an early high point of activism against greenhouse gases and the dangers of what was then more often called the greenhouse effect and global warming than climate change. They were worried about the resurgent demands for affirmative action and equality of representation in the workplace, equal pay. They were worried about minority sexual demands from the gay right. So this becomes important because it creates the conditions for an alliance, which would only really come to full fruition years later, between people who wanted to defend free market freedoms as best they could, with people who seem to have opposition to those same progressive politics, but for different reasons. So this is the moment of the paleo-conservative alliance, for example, between a radical libertarian like Murray Rothbard with someone who is mostly interested in cultural nationalism like Pat Buchanan. Alternative for Germany is a perfect example of this as well, founded by neoliberal economists who thought the euro was being mismanaged, creating alliances with ethno-nationalists and opponents of Muslim immigration. How these two things ended up getting linked together seems to be like an important question to figure out about our politics. Well, one of the ways that I understand you as making the argument is that they're linked together in a view that very fundamental categories and hierarchies of persistent society are natural, that they reflect IQ differentials, cultural differentials, you know, people who are more or less fit either at the individual level, at the group level, etc. And what I thought was interesting about this book in conversation with your Musk book is that to me, when I see sort of the way Musk talks about the woke mind virus, to me, there's a lot of this in it, this sort of sense that there are important hierarchies, categories in society, and that the danger comes from a kind of constant progressive push or a woke push to dissolve them. And that you can't have Western civilization without the sort of hierarchies upon which Western civilization was built. And I just sort of interpret a lot of Musk's political activity as not about free markets or any of these other things, but about this. Yeah, I mean, the subtitle to that book is Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. And in all of those cases, there was expressed belief that nature was an unequal place, and it distributed gains unequally, either through birth or, you know, territorial endowments. And that to deny that basic natural inequality was to, you know, pave the road to serfdom as Hayek described it in a new way. Now it would be paved with green bricks and pink bricks instead of red bricks. And someone like Musk, I think absolutely falls into that category where I think the 90s conversation gets updated and kind of transformed in our present moment is especially around a category like IQ. So IQ is fascinating because in the 1990s, it came surging back for a few different reasons. The arguments that put it back on the table were especially those of Charles Murray, the think tanker, and Richard Hernstein, the Harvard psychologist, in their enormous bestseller, The Bell Curve, from 1994. And that book said two things. It said at the one end of the bell curve, we're going to get people whose IQ is going to be ever more determinative of economic success because of the knowledge economy we're in. And at the low end of that bell curve, we're going to have people who are going to be less and less able to perform in this knowledge economy. and they're going to be a social problem. And the incendiary part, of course, that there are group differences in racial intelligence such that we can assume that there will be disproportionately large number of Black people at that bottom end of the bell curve. So the era of the knowledge economy is also the era of mass incarceration and the real turn towards more punitive police law and order policies. And the way that this was mapped onto an idea of who is equipped and who isn't for the big transition in how money will be made and jobs will look ends up being a pretty good kind of way to read that. Why that's different now is that by their own statements, the tech leadership now assumes that almost all of those knowledge jobs are going to be automated away, right? So if IQ was predicting even at the far 10% of the curve for the people who would thrive and the coming internet world, then what happens if that's now been reduced to like 0.1%? Because all those other jobs, the coders, the project managers, the copywriters, the technical writers are all going to be done by LLMs and agents, which is what they of course are banking on. Then you have a question where AI has actually eaten IQ and now you've gone from just a cognitive elite, which is what Herenstein and Murray called it, to a kind of hyper, hyper small, cognitive super aristocracy i want to stay on this point because to me this kind of coheres a lot of things in musk that are puzzling from the outside which is you know you've got this guy for a long time the long-term vision is the most important thing is expanding the light cone of human consciousness through the stars now there's a sort of you know it kind of seems like bending of the psychic knee to the ai superiority musk is at the same time very worried about falling birth rates yeah as he is destroying like foreign aid which certainly help people thrive and be alive and you know live long lives and reproduce at the same time that he is virulently anti at least the immigration policies of many of these countries and it's like where does this sort of guy who on the one hand appears to believe in just like maximizing the quantity of consciousness fit with this guy who seems to not really like a lot of humanity where does this guy who believes in humanity fit with this guy who seems to be accelerating you know the ai turnover but if your sort of fundamental view of the world is about a kind of cognitive hierarchy and you have certain views about you know where ai will sit in that where different cultures sit in that it's not like one-to-one with any individual thing not one-to-one with race not even one-to-one with silicon versus flesh it's just one-to-one with a certain vision of who or what qualifies as having like the capacity to be a main character in this performance then a lot of it i think begins to fall into a an unsettling but a kind of coherent coherent yeah space yeah no i mean i think there's a couple ways to look at it. One is to draw back on his grandfather's ideology, which I hesitate to do too much because there's no evidence that Musk himself was influenced by his maternal grandfather. His maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was a very active member of something called Technocracy Incorporated in Canada in the 1930s. And what Technocracy Incorporated was proposing was something very similar to what we're talking about here. It was about the disillusion of the existing price system, the dissolution of democracy altogether, the reduction of the unit of exchange, and I guess store of value to something called an erg, which was the unit of energy that each human is able to produce in their life. And the rational allocation of those ergs would be overseen by a very, very small but elite cast of engineers. And that is extremely far-fetched But very radical vision that actually, from the menu of existing political ideologies, probably comes the closest to what it seems like Musk is describing. But I think to get there, there are a few steps involved, right? Sorry, that had a lot of understatement to it. So there is the problem of the transition right now for Musk. I think it's a central problem, which is how do we get even from where we are now to this 10-year mile marker to the end of his life, right? Actually, he has no real plans for his succession. It's one of the extraordinary things about SpaceX from a corporate law point of view is that he has 85% of the voting shares. If he dies tomorrow and you'd simply have to wait for those shares to be allotted. So that, I think he's really banking on that transition having taken place in his own lifetime. And how do you get there, right? And this is where the relationship to the Hayek's Bastards discourse is actually relevant again. Because one of the arguments I make in that book is that under these, an atmosphere of uncertainty, times of unrest, then there is a need. atmosphere of uncertainty, times of unrest, then there is a tendency, as within the investor world, to do a flight to safety. And what these far-right thinkers, in association with neoliberal thinkers, were doing was offering different forms of refuge and safety where a certain kind of value would be protected and more durable. So those were things, you know, your whiteness will save you. Your access to a gold hoard will save you. Your citizenship value, which was one of Bannon's talking points in the first Trump campaign, will save you. The problem with Musk now is if he's saying that the people who will get through the filter are such a small minority, that how do you sell this vision to enough people to let you realize your goals in the medium term, except, I think, defaulting to very shopworn scripts of ethno-nationalism and social war? So his decision to say, the way I'm going to win consent is simply to make you frightened of outsiders. And make you believe you need my technology to save your lives of yourself and your family is a way that politicians have used to justify lack of material redistribution for, you know, over a hundred years. There's actually nothing new about that. And it's actually one of his, I would say, less innovative sort of interventions is this belief that simply memeing the fear of the invader will be enough to get you through that transitional moment until you get to, quite literally, you know, liftoff. Escape velocity. I always thought the reason the Musk-Trump alliance was so potent, particularly in its early moments before Musk kind of discredited himself as a direct actor through Doge, but was that, one, they recognized in each other, and particularly Musk recognized in Trump, I think he endorsed him after the assassination attempt when Trump raised the bloody fist, that what Trump in his third campaign for president began to represent was a return of masculine will to politics. Like, out of this era of, you know, woke, feminized, consensus-oriented politics. And for a lot of people, like this idea of the builder, the industrialist, right, the Ayn Randian Superman. The world spirit on horseback. Yeah. That, you know, Trump began to embody some of that. I don't think he does now, but there's this way in which I think what to Musk's many, many, many, many fans, I'm pretty like, I think, young to middle-aged male fans, what he represents is this kind of like masculine conquering impulse. It's why I think some of the kind of scary visions of the future he presents, at the level, not of content, but of texture, they don't always scare people. Because to, like, hear a person saying this is to hear a person saying, like, we will sally boldly forth and try to forge a glorious and unknown future for humanity, even if it's one that on the face of it barely seems like a future for humanity at all. But at least, at least it is not afraid of the future. Yeah. And I think it also sets up a kind of, you know, Pascal's wager or kind of Rocco's basilisk dynamic, which is like, the closer you are to him, the closer you adhere to his vision, then the more likely is that you'll be one of the ones who gets through the filter, right? So if he's the one who is making the future, then to deny him would basically be to doom yourself to obsolescence. And that's, you know, not an exchange that a lot of people are willing to make. But I think the important thing to see, you know, just not so as not to give him too much credit in this, is to see how he's actually managed to monopolize a lot of things that were the product of collective will creation and collective intelligence, right? That, I think, directs attention to the task of reform, which is like, how can you dethrone Musk, not in the sense of throwing away all of the technology that he produced by often piggybacking on other people's innovations, but how can you create a different story whereby it's, you know, the people, the nation who decide this and not just one man and his posts? Well, that I think brings us maybe back into the more material realm. And I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. Because one of the things that strikes me about what we are seeing now is that it is a fundamentally unstable equilibrium. So you have Elon Musk, who, as you have described, his companies are inextricably intertwined with politics. It would be hard to unwind the state from them. But also, by that very same token, if you're a Democrat, right, the idea that you're going to be in a position where you're going to be dependent on Musk and he can turn off Starlink when, you know, if Ukraine or some other country or ally or even America is doing something he doesn't like, that's very, very dangerous. You know, one thing that that intertwining with the state creates is both like a vulnerability. And so it becomes very, very, very dangerous for him. The more he becomes allied with a kind of more extreme version of the right to have any left wing or centrist candidates win, really, like anywhere in the world, and the countries are dependent on him, and that just at some point, either you end up in a situation where, like, Musk needs to break the opposition to him, or it's like the state needs to contain the threat. It just seems fundamentally unstable. It's not like he gave $10 million. He just dropped about $450 million. Like, it's nothing because to him, it is nothing. Right? Yeah. I mean, the way that my co-author and I were talking about this, and we had, interestingly, I would say more pragmatic conversations about in the book in Europe than we've had in the United States. I think the proximity of Musk and the problems you're describing to Americans makes it very hard to deal with it rationally, because there's such a desire to lash out at this level of kind of cathexis, like the suturing together of the future of the American economy with Musk and his products, that sometimes there's a will to kind of moralize and psychologize and just bat him away and denounce him without further reflection. Whereas in Europe, we found that there was a kind of a three-R strategy that we were discussing and people were discussing. One is regulation, of course, is one model, right? And that's, you could say, the route that the EU is taking. The other model, though, is replacement. So you look at what Musk has made and you say, how much would it cost to make substitutes? And often the cost is very, very high. But the third model is really to kind of reimagine what the heck this tech is even for. And that's where I think looking at the range of Musk's history of business creation is actually helpful, because we alluded to this before, but the kind of promise of electric autonomy, for example, that he was holding out when Tesla was mostly making EVs, but also when it was making solar panels and, you know, battery storage units was actually much more socially useful and potentially inspiring than what he has done with his businesses ever since. So I think that one attitude there is to start from first principles and just say, like, what are we even, you know, investing in any of this for in the first place? What do we want? What do we want? And actually, one of the pedagogic virtues of Musk and his very monstrousness is he's made that question impossible not to ask, right? Because if the answer to that question is what we want is continued level of being completely fused with this man, then I think a lot of people on reflection would not want that. So he's made us ask that question. And he knows that he's put himself into a kind of a difficult situation with people asking that question, hence the impression of inevitability. So in the Economist interview, he said, it's not like we can stop AI right now. There's no red button that says stop. Actually, of course there is, right? Generative AI on its current model requires enormous amount of build out of compute infrastructure that actually right now is being slowed down to the point of even stopping through hundreds of moratoria across the country. So it's actually not true that there's inevitability to the world that he's imagining. It actually is true that we have options. And breaking out of that kind of cosmic vector that he's produced through the uses of the attention economy is the first step in that. But I think it gets even more pragmatic than that. I'll give you an example. On his newsletter this week, Paul Krugman, centrist liberal economist, has talked in two segments about nationalizing Starlink. Paul's only a centrist to you. But this is actually not something that you would have expected him to talk about a few years ago, right? I mean, the use of the Defense Production Act, the comparisons to the nationalization of Montgomery Ward. A pragmatic economist until recently would have said, if you nationalize a company that's in the top 10 on the NASDAQ, you're going to trigger a recession. There'll be cascading effects of loss of competence, repricing of risk. Loss of incentives for future companies to build this kind of capacity. Absolutely. But the very fact that this kind of controlled demolition of the very muscous dependencies you're describing is now being brought onto the agenda, I think is very encouraging. But this is what I actually mean by an unstable equilibrium. I saw those pieces from Paul. I thought they were very, very interesting. And as you say, it's interesting that Paul, who, you know, I call him like sort of a progressive economist, but not a communist, right? Not someone prone to nationalization. Exactly. The fact that he was, you know, talking about this, I think speaks to a world where it's you could really imagine a situation with a democratic president and Musk turns off Starlink. critical moment and the defense production act is like immediately engaged and like you do have this like moment of genuine showdown right this both i think from musk's perspective needs to be understood as a risk of like what he is doing in the way he's acting and from the other perspective because you are getting to this position and we should say one reason i haven't focused on the ukraine starling question is right now the reporting is contested in a way i cannot untangle as to whether or not orders came from somewhere inside the trump administration or were implied by somewhere in the trump administration or you know the activity was from musk and i just don't know the answer and i can see it also being a miscommunication right you know these things happen too so i don't want to say confidently what happened there but i think it is one can say relatively confidently that you could imagine a series of things happening where for instance you know musk and look i don't love michael bloomberg dropping 80 million dollars at the end of the campaign either right i don't think this is the way campaigns should work you know you begin having much more serious efforts at you know restricting the ability of like mega billionaires to drop this much money um and musk is a billionaire on a scale that somebody like bloomberg you know cannot even touch it is just rare for an individual person to have so much power that they they they're not a state unto themselves but they are some kind of like state capacity sized entity yeah right right operating you know it's like the vatican of technology that he's got over there yeah but i think it's also important to then keep in mind one of the things that i started this conversation talking about which is the financial dependency right spacex is in the top 10 in the stock market indices more than 50 of americans hold some kind of equities or stocks most of those are directly or indirectly mostly indirectly through passive funds connected to the health of musk's businesses so let's say 20 to 30 percent of americans hold some kind of equities or stocks most of those are 30 to 30 percent of americans have some kind of stake there indirectly so one of the things that musk has proposed recently is that he'd give one stock in spacex to every american child and the proposal is that would happen through the trump accounts which are you know automatically made accessible to children in the united states if he goes through with his plan then that number of american citizens goes up to about 50 so there you're approaching a way of kind of mailing you could say the american population away from following someone like krugman's plans by saying do you really want to hurt yourself are you going to hurt your child like that by punishing me musk the person who's keeping the stock market afloat and if you get into the granular questions of who owns the stock it gets even more interesting who are top 10 investors the ontario teacher's pension huge amount of spacex stock the primary educational target of the trump administration and musk often himself harvard university huge holdings and a lot of money huge holder of spacex university of north carolina so when you see that you know in a way these though high profile and superficially startling moments of turning on and off drone connectivity in the battlefield are the sharp edge of the wedge you could say but the base of really what anchors the dominance of the silicon valley digital sector in the united states is really in the stock market itself and the fact that that's how we do redistribution that's how we do the social contract is say you pay in to this you know market determined pension fund and you will be paid out of it and whoever's keeping that thing propped up actually arguably has the real power of saying what the social contract looks like so then i think sitting in that that bi-directional dependency but that real dependency is it's maybe worth ending in a strange place but i actually do think it's an important one you mentioned that the conversations in europe are maybe a little less prone to the psychologizing than the conversations in america the problem though is that musk's psychology is very important yeah and there's something that he says a lot i was there in 2016 at the recode conference i was actually i think one of the first people to write about this when he was talking about how you know he believed it was very likely we lived in a computer simulation this is a sort of idea that nick bostrom that philosopher you you mentioned is is very associated with but he's kept saying it and actually in some way he's been saying it for a long time and he's been saying it for a long time and he's put stronger terms yes so i don't play this clip this is elon musk on walter isaacson's show how convinced are you that we might be in the simulation you know i once had a dinner at my house with a physicist and a computer scientist and they're both like leaders in their field and i asked the question what i think the probabilities that were in a simulation and the physicist said zero percent and the computer scientist said 100 simultaneously so i guess maybe i should go 50 then i don't know it's it's i mean there there there's odd things that happen in the simulation where especially if you're me i mean think about it like if you're me and you're like should should all these things really be happening should i really be making spaceships to go to the moon and mars like what the that doesn't seem real the simulation theory is that if you just imagine advanced society would create lots of simulations right the way we make maybe make lots of video games and then we'd be able to make a lot of video games and then we'd be able to make a lot of video games you just shouldn't assume that we are living in the base reality that's sort of the the argument in a nutshell but he goes further and and and i get in a psychological way why right i've heard him say this now repeatedly that well what really seems unlikely is to be elon musk what really seems unlikely is to be building starships and influencing global politics and having 250 million x followers or whatever it is and being the first trillionaire and that the mixture of a life that is so unlikely and also not like grounded in some other ontology right not some religion or some other way of imagining the world plus a sort of attraction to the simulation hypothesis and of course to be a lifelong gamer and i just think that you know for a person with as much power as he has to kind of have that kind of psychology to suspect this is a game where like your role in it is making big moves i don't really know how to describe that situation but it is a distinctive one that we all now have a lot of exposure to yeah i mean there's a couple of varieties of the simulation theory too right one is like we are all simply just artifacts of this future civilizations um computer video game but the other is that there's a most people are shadow people and a small number of people are actually playing characters and it seems like that's the one that orients him most and in the kind of libertarian community that reflected a lot on these things one of the people's robin hansen the george mason university economist who said what kind of ways would we conduct ourselves if this were true and he says you know if this were true then it would make sense to first care nothing about other people so things like foreign he says foreign aid and the welfare state would be frivolous things to spend time on to be as entertaining as possible to accumulate as much wealth as possible and i think that's a really good point and i think that's a really good point and to try to simply organize the world around you in as a successful way as you can so there's like this radical reneging on anything like social responsibility that is only possible if you embrace this incredibly kind of nihilistic reaffirmation of your megalomania and the question is how to remove the props and struts that hold him up in that delusion because it is not true and he needs to be somehow persuaded from the outside that it's not true if he continues to be incentivized to indulge in those ways of thinking then he will be uh never required to kind of be uh divested of that i think that's a place to end what was the final question what are three books you recommend to the audience well there's so much amazing work happening right now in the world of tech criticism and political economy so i wanted to draw attention to three exceptional recent books that kind of i would say move up the line and i think that's a really good point and i think that's a really good the first book would be thea rio francos's book extraction the frontiers of green capitalism which is about something that we've kind of put out of our minds for the last 18 months or so which is really the challenges of climate combined with a world that still operates according to the price mechanism and where the state can fit in none of these machines certainly none of the data centers would work without the raw materials being extracted somewhere from the earth and put into their uh circuitry and thea gives a wonderful kind of description of the political settlements intentions and struggles that emerge in the process of doing so the second book would be a book by nick cernichak called silicon empires i think one of the handicaps we have right now in talking about tech ideology and tech political economy is a lot of things get jumbled together so when you talk about semiconductors somehow also a discussion of frontier labs is also a discussion of you know neoclouds and data centers but these individual market sectors actually operate under very different dynamics and i haven't read anything yet better than nick cernichak as a kind of a calm guided tour up the stack of what ai actually is as a built entity the third book is one i think is really special it's called against tech oligarchy by js tan and clarissa radwine and both of them were organizers within tech companies in silicon valley so clarissa red wine led the successful organization of kickstarter and both of them were in Twitter trying to organize employees at the time of the Musk takeover. So what they just draw attention to is the fact that class struggle and class politics exists in Silicon Valley inside of tech companies. And they give the insiders view of how you practice class power inside of the tech sector. And it's interestingly not always, as they see it, through the old-fashioned model of getting recognition for a union. That can sometimes slow down some of the dynamics that draw people into social activism. So it's a very clear-eyed and wonderfully written kind of insight into something that I think most people know very little about. Quince O'Bloodian, thank you very much. It's my pleasure. you