What is Muskism, and how important is it to all of us in the way in

which we we lead our lives today?

So we define Muskism as the promise of sovereignty through technology. And the case we make

throughout our book is that Musk is not so much in the business of selling cars,

rockets, or satellites so much as he sells the idea that in an increasingly unstable world,

both individuals and nation states can fortify their self reliance and resilience by plugging into his

infrastructures. But, of course, in doing so, they become even more dependent on his infrastructures. And

you can really see this as a through line throughout his career. Take the example of

SpaceX, which gets its start in the early years of the war on terror as a

key government contractor helping Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon put satellites into space. Now twenty years later, Starlink

is the main revenue model for SpaceX. And when you look at Starlink's major use cases,

it's military, it's also first responders, public safety who need to be operating in remote environments

and also in times of conventional grid failure. So we really see this as a through

line throughout Musk's career.

When you guys also compare Musk to Fordism, Henry Ford assembly line techniques, standardization absolutely changed

manufacturing and ushered in the system of mass production that that still kind of defines, American

capitalism and especially defined the twentieth century capitalism. When you compare that to Elon Musk, where

are they similar? Where are they separate? And is Elon Musk the Henry Ford of the

twenty first century?

Yeah. Thanks for having us. Fordism is a term that was coined about exactly one hundred

years ago, and people were not just talking about the factory, but they're talking about the

world outside the factory. Right? So it was a world of mass production plus mass consumption

in which doing things on the assembly line was also about the nuclear family. It was

about intergenerational upward mobility. It was about collective bargaining agreements. So there's a kind of social

contract inside of Fordism that was very interesting to us because we wanted to ask, if

you look at Musk, what's his social contract? Right? We know that he has his group

of reply guys who can even monetize their feed. We know he has investors who are

very interested in his businesses. But how do you scale that? Is it possible to build

something as stable as the twentieth century model, in which there was a kind of a

virtuous cycle of workers being able to afford the products when, as Musk is doing, you're

kind of promising to make a lot of those workers obsolete. And you seem to have

a very selective idea of who gets to be in the social contract and who gets

to be out. So the way that Fordism has been described as a kind of philosophy

of social peace, we think of one of the strange things about Musk is he seems

to be preaching a kind of ideology of social war. He almost seems to be drumming

up kind of antagonisms and frictions as a way to better sell those insulating technologies to

make you safe inside of your Tesla or SpaceX dome, you know, when the social unrest

begins, when climate breakdown begins. So it's a very tenuous kind of social contract we see.

And in the last chapter of the book, we talk about Doge and state acts as

a kind of way to, test the theory. Like, can Musk become a real techno king

as he has officially described at Tesla? Or do normal politicians like Trump actually still have

an important role to play in the model? How far can Silicon Valley govern directly?

Quinn, let me stay with that because I think there's been a lot of fascination about

Elon Musk's engagement with politics, and you write about state symbiosis in in the book. That

is we have Elon Musk presenting himself as a real, libertarian, doing things outside the realm

of of government, and yet we've seen him obviously cozy up to to this president. I

don't know what the state of the relationship is, what their state of the relationship is

today, but but drill in on that if you could, the the way that he sees

his companies, his empire interfacing with with government.

Yeah. I mean, there's anything we were trying to do with the book was to really

change the conversation specifically around this. So we really think that the notion that Musk or

really anyone in Silicon Valley in the leadership class is a libertarian is really kind of

a misleading, almost a red herring. Certainly, someone like Peter Thiel had his moment when he

preached that kind of ideology, but Musk actually never did. What's actually fascinating about following Musk's

career from the nineties when he starts a company called Zip two, few people remember, which

relies on what? The new government developed service of GPS that was military technology, and he

taps into that and makes that a commercial facing product. SpaceX, Tesla, Department of Energy loans,

zero mission vehicle credits. He's always actually been happy and open about using the backstop of

the state, thinking about the government as a primary client. And in this era of generative

AI becoming really the investment story and the growth story for the tech sector, you can't

live without the government. Right? You need a friendly state. You need someone who's gonna open

up federal land for data center construction, who's gonna clear the path in regulatory terms for

you to get your way. So in fact, we don't see a contradiction when Musk enters

government. We see it as a kind of a test of how far the state symbiotic

relationship can go without becoming a parasitic one. So Musk works when he works because he

actually increases the capacity of states to do things. When it tips over into parasitism, then

it becomes a kind of obstructing crony style capitalism, and, it stops working for both partners

as we've seen indeed many times in the Musk Trump relationship.

Ben, we've only got a little over a minute left, but I also wanna ask you

about the cults of the Musk personality and the whole ethos around him and how that's

folded in with political climate and how that's impacted everything we've just talked about. Can Elon

Musk, the businessman, exist without the other half of that? Do they feed each other, or

do they conflict with each other?

Well, one way to think about this question is Musk's relationship to science fiction. I think

a lot of commentators, observers of Musk have noticed that he often cite science fiction as

a major influence. We actually see Musk as a science fiction author or narrator of a

sort because from the beginning, from the nineteen nineties when he makes his first fortune as

a dot com entrepreneur, he's very good at securing investor confidence by telling stories about the

future. And these future future stories are on the one hand fantastical, but on the other

hand have a kernel of plausibility such that investors are willing to help give him the

money to go build that future. We actually describe this dynamic as financial fabulism. And over

the years, he finds new venues, new forums for this financial fabulism. Social media arguably supercharges

it, where he can speak to not just, you know, institutional investors, but he can move

markets with memes. He can post about Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency, and the price of Dogecoin goes

up. He can post about Tesla, the price of Tesla goes up. So that has become

so integral to his business that it's infrastructure, essentially.