“Muskism”: Author Quinn Slobodian on How Apartheid South Africa Inspired Elon Musk’s Worldview & More


Quinnslobodianmuskism

In the new book, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, authors Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff look at the worldview that shaped Elon Musk and the ideology that has coalesced around him. They call Muskism “an operating system for the 21st century.”

Musk runs rocket company SpaceX, AI startup xAI, electric car maker Tesla and the social media platform X, formerly Twitter. Musk’s political influence extends from his use of X to advance controversial ideas, to his political donations, to the role he played leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. “He’s not just building a rocket company or a satellite company — but what we see is a vertically integrated ideological stack where he can kind of build an echo chamber from low Earth orbit all the way back to Earth and create a kind of closed loop for the ideology that he wants to push out,” says Slobodian, professor of international history at Boston University.


This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.