Speed Up the Breakdown: A Global History of Elon Musk

• In Event: Technocapitalism, Anticommunism, and Technofascism in Late-Stage US Empire and Beyond

Abstract

In early 2025, much of the world stood perplexed by the spectacle of the world’s richest man disemboweling the federal U.S. government and standing shoulder to shoulder with the furthest right parties of the Western world. How did Elon Musk—once hailed as a hero of the green transition, a benevolent genius guiding us to a brighter future—become an agent and avatar of extremism? My talk offers a guide to the perplexed. Musk’s actions may be confusing but they are not beyond comprehension. They are rooted in a worldview—call it Muskism—that draws on a diverse set of influences to produce a new, strange, and unstable compound. One ingredient is the legacy of the industrialist Henry Ford. Others include the science-fiction oeuvre of Isaac Asimov and the racial politics of apartheid South Africa, where Musk grew up. To understand the world that Musk is making, we have to understand the worlds that made Musk. He has channeled some of the most important political, economic, and cultural developments of the past century into a cyborg assemblage known as Elon Musk: a Frankenstein’s monster of twenty-first century capitalism. He is a man-machine of modules, bolted and welded together by stock markets, consumers, guileless politicians, power users, hate followers, and fanboys. The best way to figure out how a machine works is to dismantle it, in order to identify its constituent parts and see how they fit together. My paper will focus on the political geographies and (ir)rationalities of late-stage Muskism, arguing his activism in late 2024 and early 2025 expresses a confluence of three tendencies with the respective (and clashing) mandates to streamline the state, shrink the state, and shatter the state. Through dictatorial managerialism, austerian conservatism, and right-wing accelerationism, we can better understand the intended and unintended consequences of the effort to deconstruct the administrative state and plumb the inner logic of Musk’s actions–even if that very logic may be inscrutable to the man himself.

Author

• Quinn Slobodian, Boston University