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Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed
A pyrotechnic examination of Elon Musk as a symptom and avatar of our postliberal age
'A searing analysis of Elon Musk… Impressive and unrelenting, this grapples with a destructive ideology that seems poised to consume everything' - Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)
'Impeccably researched and splendidly written, Muskism introduces us to a world full of promise and fear' - Branko Milanovic, author of The Great Global Transformation
Who on earth is Elon Musk and what is he doing? Is he a hero, a villain, or does he swing constantly between those two poles? According to the constant media gush driven by his every act and pronouncement, Musk is best understood in personal terms. This book argues differently. Rather than seeing Musk as an individual, it sees him as an avatar of something called a playbook for our new postliberal age.
It’s not that Musk himself holds a coherent set of beliefs; you could say his life is one long improvisation. And he’s certainly never used the word Muskism – just as, a century ago, Henry Ford never used Fordism to define his own postliberal modernity. In exploring the forces that have shaped Musk, from South Africa to Silicon Valley, Space X to DOGE, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff outline the motifs and practices that have come to dominate our own crisis-ridden world.
Muskism, they show, speaks the language of crisis and emergency to invoke a less human where humans are purged from the productive process and, through social media and video games, merged with the machine. This is a worldview in which the technocrat is king; which piggybacks on the state to achieve supremacy; and in which only a select few deserve salvation. If you enter, this book warns you, you will grind and you will live in the shadow of one man – but the rewards could be priceless and the alternative might be extinction.
'A searing analysis of Elon Musk… Impressive and unrelenting, this grapples with a destructive ideology that seems poised to consume everything' - Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)
'Impeccably researched and splendidly written, Muskism introduces us to a world full of promise and fear' - Branko Milanovic, author of The Great Global Transformation
Who on earth is Elon Musk and what is he doing? Is he a hero, a villain, or does he swing constantly between those two poles? According to the constant media gush driven by his every act and pronouncement, Musk is best understood in personal terms. This book argues differently. Rather than seeing Musk as an individual, it sees him as an avatar of something called a playbook for our new postliberal age.
It’s not that Musk himself holds a coherent set of beliefs; you could say his life is one long improvisation. And he’s certainly never used the word Muskism – just as, a century ago, Henry Ford never used Fordism to define his own postliberal modernity. In exploring the forces that have shaped Musk, from South Africa to Silicon Valley, Space X to DOGE, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff outline the motifs and practices that have come to dominate our own crisis-ridden world.
Muskism, they show, speaks the language of crisis and emergency to invoke a less human where humans are purged from the productive process and, through social media and video games, merged with the machine. This is a worldview in which the technocrat is king; which piggybacks on the state to achieve supremacy; and in which only a select few deserve salvation. If you enter, this book warns you, you will grind and you will live in the shadow of one man – but the rewards could be priceless and the alternative might be extinction.
247 pages, Kindle Edition
Expected publication April 21, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
March 19, 2026
Ist eine gute Aufarbeitung des Phänomens Muskismus. Zeichnet mit Beispielen und Zitaten seine persönlich-ideologisch-unternehmerische Entwicklung von der Kindheit in Südafrika, über die verschiedenen Phasen des Internets bis hin zu DOGE & heute nach. Für mich waren einige interessante neue Fakten und Interpretationen dabei. Seine Radikalisierung wird behandelt, ich denke da wäre aber noch Potential für tiefere Beschäftigungen (war aber auch nicht ausgewiesener Fokus). Mein größter Kritikpunkt ist, dass es sich sowohl inhaltlich als auch sprachlich etwas auf Krampf zusammengeschustert anfühlt. Gerade die abschließenden Sätze in den Kapiteln versuchen oft zu gewollt das behandelte Thema (oder Ausblick auf das nächste) mit einem dazu passenden sprachlichen Bild zusammenzufassen (z.B. "[...] Arm in Arm mit den erschöpften Riesen aus Fleisch und Stahl."). Diese Bilder hätte es mMn nicht unbedingt gebraucht. Inhaltlich fand ich das "Zusammenschustern" bspw. als argumentiert wurde, dass Musks Problem mit Transgender-Personen u.A. darin bestehen könnte, dass man sich diese als eine Art "Cyborg" vorstellen könne, die mit Technologie & Chirurgie die Grenze zwischen Natürlichem und Künstlichen aufhebt (was Musk an sich ja ebenfalls will), aber quasi progressiv und damit entgegen Musks Ideologie (oder so... wie gesagt, fand ich etwas weit hergeholt).
March 24, 2026
Slobodian und Tarnoff versuchen hier etwas ziemlich Ambitioniertes. Sie behandeln Elon Musk nicht einfach als exzentrischen Unternehmer oder genialen Tech-Visionär, sondern als Symptom einer größeren politischen und ökonomischen Entwicklung. „Muskismus“ nennen sie dieses Phänomen und stellen es damit in eine Reihe mit Begriffen wie Fordismus oder Thatcherismus.
Das Buch liest Musk also weniger als Person, sondern als eine Art Ideologie. Eine Mischung aus Tech-Kapitalismus, radikalem Staatsmisstrauen bei gleichzeitig massiver staatlicher Förderung, transhumanistischen Zukunftsphantasien und einem Kulturkampf, der heute nicht mehr in Zeitungen, sondern auf Plattformen, in Algorithmen und Memes geführt wird.
Besonders spannend fand ich den historischen Blick des Buches. Die Autoren versuchen zu zeigen, wie Figuren wie Musk aus bestimmten politischen und kulturellen Konstellationen hervorgehen. Von libertären Silicon-Valley-Ideologien über die PayPal-Generation bis hin zu einer neuen Verbindung von Tech-Kapital, Staat und geopolitischer Macht. Plötzlich erscheint vieles, was sonst wie eine Reihe isolierter Ereignisse wirkt, als Teil eines größeren Musters.
Ganz frei von politischer Schlagseite ist das Buch allerdings nicht. Der kritische Ton ist deutlich spürbar und manchmal kippt die Analyse ein wenig in polemische Rhetorik. Außerdem bleibt eine wichtige Frage offen. Wenn die Diagnose stimmt, wie könnte eine gesellschaftliche Antwort darauf aussehen? Hier bleibt das Buch eher vage.
Trotzdem ist „Muskismus“ ein äußerst interessantes Buch. Vor allem deshalb, weil es Musk nicht einfach als verrückten Milliardär oder als einsames Genie darstellt, sondern als Ausdruck einer größeren Verschiebung unserer Zeit. Der engen Verbindung von Technologie, Kapital, Plattformmacht und Politik.
Ein unbequemes, streitbares Buch und genau deshalb ein wichtiges, wenn man verstehen möchte, in welche Richtung sich unsere digitale Gegenwart gerade entwickelt.
Das Buch liest Musk also weniger als Person, sondern als eine Art Ideologie. Eine Mischung aus Tech-Kapitalismus, radikalem Staatsmisstrauen bei gleichzeitig massiver staatlicher Förderung, transhumanistischen Zukunftsphantasien und einem Kulturkampf, der heute nicht mehr in Zeitungen, sondern auf Plattformen, in Algorithmen und Memes geführt wird.
Besonders spannend fand ich den historischen Blick des Buches. Die Autoren versuchen zu zeigen, wie Figuren wie Musk aus bestimmten politischen und kulturellen Konstellationen hervorgehen. Von libertären Silicon-Valley-Ideologien über die PayPal-Generation bis hin zu einer neuen Verbindung von Tech-Kapital, Staat und geopolitischer Macht. Plötzlich erscheint vieles, was sonst wie eine Reihe isolierter Ereignisse wirkt, als Teil eines größeren Musters.
Ganz frei von politischer Schlagseite ist das Buch allerdings nicht. Der kritische Ton ist deutlich spürbar und manchmal kippt die Analyse ein wenig in polemische Rhetorik. Außerdem bleibt eine wichtige Frage offen. Wenn die Diagnose stimmt, wie könnte eine gesellschaftliche Antwort darauf aussehen? Hier bleibt das Buch eher vage.
Trotzdem ist „Muskismus“ ein äußerst interessantes Buch. Vor allem deshalb, weil es Musk nicht einfach als verrückten Milliardär oder als einsames Genie darstellt, sondern als Ausdruck einer größeren Verschiebung unserer Zeit. Der engen Verbindung von Technologie, Kapital, Plattformmacht und Politik.
Ein unbequemes, streitbares Buch und genau deshalb ein wichtiges, wenn man verstehen möchte, in welche Richtung sich unsere digitale Gegenwart gerade entwickelt.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Like everyone, I had of course heard a great deal about Elon Musk, but after reading this book I found that I hadn't really understood what his guiding principles were. Unexpectedly, it turns out that Musk does have principles, though they are odd ones: he literally views life as a game, and he wants to win. He plays video games a lot, that is the kind of game he has in mind. His goal to maximize his score. He is evidently intelligent and creative, and he is doing well.
Musk is upfront about being completely amoral. He has said many times that he views empathy as a system vulnerability; he likes to use coding metaphors. He is now the richest man in the world, but he does not in any way feel satisfied. He is sure he can get more, and that he can do it by exploiting other people's system vulnerabilities. As he puts it, most of them have weak firewalls, which makes it easy to inject mind viruses and reprogram them. He appears most often in the news because of his involvement with various high-profile business ventures (SpaceX, Tesla, xAI) but now those are secondary to his real interest, dominating the world by spreading memes through the web.
He is evidently doing this together with Donald Trump, though the book doesn't make clear what the relationship between them is. Presumably no one knows, maybe not even Trump or Musk. Trump could be using Musk, or Musk could be using Trump, or they could have some kind of de facto partnership. Whatever it is, they have developed the meme technology very quickly and effectively. I have felt for some time that an important aspect of Trump's policies is like a scientific experiment; they have a way to control large masses of people, and they're testing it on more and more extreme scenarios to find out where the boundaries are. (Latest example: why would you try to make Casey Means the Surgeon General, except to find out whether it's possible?) This book presents a lot of evidence suggesting that my suspicions were not just a paranoid fantasy. Musk is upfront about his interest in the power of memes: one of the most memorable quotes is when he says "I am become meme", a reference to Oppenheimer's famous "I am become Death".
Musk is hinting that he thinks the meme technology is as powerful as atomic bombs. Maybe he's right; he likes science-fiction (Asimov, Heinlein, Douglas Adams are frequently mentioned), and here I'm reminded of the less well known Arthur C. Clarke short story "Second Dawn". An alien species which has no technology but telepathic powers is in the middle of a terrible war, where one faction looks like they are encircled and about to lose. But they develop a mind weapon which can be deployed to turn their enemies, en masse, into helpless idiots; the process is irreversible. The aliens vow never again to use the deadly mind weapon and instead to collaborate with another race, who have figured out ways to make tools; right at the end, we understand that they have just discovered radioactivity. Both alien races are puzzled and slightly alarmed, but it evidently can't be as dangerous as the thing they've just banned. I wonder if Musk knows about this story, and if so whether it influenced him.
Musk is fascinatingly, other-worldly evil. Taking a first sip from the glass, the dominant notes are Bond villain and superintelligence, though Musk wants to turn the universe into money rather than paperclips. But a second sip reveals hidden complexity. Maybe a hint of Milton's Satan, recast as a Transformers Decepticon? Even more exotic things suggest themselves: Bobby Fischer, Marcel Proust. Fischer wanted to become the greatest chess player of all time, Proust wanted to write the greatest novel of all time. Both of them were willing to sacrifice anything to achieve their dreams, and arguably succeeded. I have a great admiration for Fischer and Proust, but they weren't experimenting on the whole human race, just on chess players and litterateurs who were willing subjects. If only Musk had had their restraint. It's not clear why he's doing it: the book notes briefly that he was bullied at school. Kids, don't be bullies. You may live to regret it.
More and more, I feel the world is turning into a largely incomprehensible postmodern science-fiction novel. Muskism might help you extract some sense from it.
Musk is upfront about being completely amoral. He has said many times that he views empathy as a system vulnerability; he likes to use coding metaphors. He is now the richest man in the world, but he does not in any way feel satisfied. He is sure he can get more, and that he can do it by exploiting other people's system vulnerabilities. As he puts it, most of them have weak firewalls, which makes it easy to inject mind viruses and reprogram them. He appears most often in the news because of his involvement with various high-profile business ventures (SpaceX, Tesla, xAI) but now those are secondary to his real interest, dominating the world by spreading memes through the web.
He is evidently doing this together with Donald Trump, though the book doesn't make clear what the relationship between them is. Presumably no one knows, maybe not even Trump or Musk. Trump could be using Musk, or Musk could be using Trump, or they could have some kind of de facto partnership. Whatever it is, they have developed the meme technology very quickly and effectively. I have felt for some time that an important aspect of Trump's policies is like a scientific experiment; they have a way to control large masses of people, and they're testing it on more and more extreme scenarios to find out where the boundaries are. (Latest example: why would you try to make Casey Means the Surgeon General, except to find out whether it's possible?) This book presents a lot of evidence suggesting that my suspicions were not just a paranoid fantasy. Musk is upfront about his interest in the power of memes: one of the most memorable quotes is when he says "I am become meme", a reference to Oppenheimer's famous "I am become Death".
Musk is hinting that he thinks the meme technology is as powerful as atomic bombs. Maybe he's right; he likes science-fiction (Asimov, Heinlein, Douglas Adams are frequently mentioned), and here I'm reminded of the less well known Arthur C. Clarke short story "Second Dawn". An alien species which has no technology but telepathic powers is in the middle of a terrible war, where one faction looks like they are encircled and about to lose. But they develop a mind weapon which can be deployed to turn their enemies, en masse, into helpless idiots; the process is irreversible. The aliens vow never again to use the deadly mind weapon and instead to collaborate with another race, who have figured out ways to make tools; right at the end, we understand that they have just discovered radioactivity. Both alien races are puzzled and slightly alarmed, but it evidently can't be as dangerous as the thing they've just banned. I wonder if Musk knows about this story, and if so whether it influenced him.
Musk is fascinatingly, other-worldly evil. Taking a first sip from the glass, the dominant notes are Bond villain and superintelligence, though Musk wants to turn the universe into money rather than paperclips. But a second sip reveals hidden complexity. Maybe a hint of Milton's Satan, recast as a Transformers Decepticon? Even more exotic things suggest themselves: Bobby Fischer, Marcel Proust. Fischer wanted to become the greatest chess player of all time, Proust wanted to write the greatest novel of all time. Both of them were willing to sacrifice anything to achieve their dreams, and arguably succeeded. I have a great admiration for Fischer and Proust, but they weren't experimenting on the whole human race, just on chess players and litterateurs who were willing subjects. If only Musk had had their restraint. It's not clear why he's doing it: the book notes briefly that he was bullied at school. Kids, don't be bullies. You may live to regret it.
More and more, I feel the world is turning into a largely incomprehensible postmodern science-fiction novel. Muskism might help you extract some sense from it.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
What Fordism was to the twentieth century, Muskism is to the twenty-first
Elon Musk is a polarising figure: idol to some, memelord to many, and evil in the eyes of countless others. A single tweet from him can move markets, and the media hangs on to his every word. Yet, as Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff argue, he is best understood neither in terms of his personality, nor his ever-changing beliefs. Instead, he is, like Ford in his time, the figurehead of a doctrine that has come to define our new postliberal age.
Muskism draws a clear link between Musk's rise to the top and the principles of this mission of economic and political domination. Like his grandfather Joshua Haldeman – a leader of the technocracy movement in 1940s Canada who emigrated to South Africa to support the data-driven Apartheid regime – Musk too would come to see the world as something that could be engineered into efficiency. He would ride the dot-com boom into Silicon Valley success by using government assets for profit, buy out Tesla at the head of Obama's Green New Deal, build fortress factories in the US as well as in China, and leverage the growing geopolitical trend of national self-sufficiency by selling sovereignty through supply chains and autonomy through electrification to all sides.
Just as climate change turned to climate crisis came SpaceX. But Muskism would first need, ironically, to create the conditions for the civilisational implosion that would necessitate colonies in space (an idea inspired by gross misreadings of sci-fi authors like Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams). SpaceX would become a defence contractor and a high-speed internet provider, anticipating the privatisation of the national security state on the one hand and the bipartisan consensus towards digitising economies and everyday lives on the other. Unlike other tech founders, Musk approached the ascendance of social media by integrating himself into the meme economy, and Muskism took a cyborg turn as our devices began to manifest into extensions of our selves. Enter OpenAI, which Musk co-founded with Sam Altman, and Neuralink, which aims at achieving AI-human symbiosis. Now a billionaire, the hitherto liberal-ish Musk began to wither at the Biden government's proposition of a wealth tax, its (relative) support for labour unions, and its imposition of Covid-19 regulations that, above all, hurt his profits. Enter the 'Woke Mind Virus', which Musk – like his new buddy Trump – sought to eradicate at the root:
. And who owns that superset?
To emphasise: though he best typefies it, Musk alone does not make Muskism. Those perplexed by the wholesale and only seemingly sudden rise of technofascism will benefit from this accessible work of political economy and its fine weaving together of the small ways in which the memeworld, the manosphere, the Republicans / Tories / Reformists of the world and the Asimov/Adams-toting white supremacists converge into a terrifying reality. One wonders if things may have been different if they could only comprehend the sci-fi they read, but the time for wishful thinking is far gone.
Elon Musk is a polarising figure: idol to some, memelord to many, and evil in the eyes of countless others. A single tweet from him can move markets, and the media hangs on to his every word. Yet, as Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff argue, he is best understood neither in terms of his personality, nor his ever-changing beliefs. Instead, he is, like Ford in his time, the figurehead of a doctrine that has come to define our new postliberal age.
Muskism draws a clear link between Musk's rise to the top and the principles of this mission of economic and political domination. Like his grandfather Joshua Haldeman – a leader of the technocracy movement in 1940s Canada who emigrated to South Africa to support the data-driven Apartheid regime – Musk too would come to see the world as something that could be engineered into efficiency. He would ride the dot-com boom into Silicon Valley success by using government assets for profit, buy out Tesla at the head of Obama's Green New Deal, build fortress factories in the US as well as in China, and leverage the growing geopolitical trend of national self-sufficiency by selling sovereignty through supply chains and autonomy through electrification to all sides.
Just as climate change turned to climate crisis came SpaceX. But Muskism would first need, ironically, to create the conditions for the civilisational implosion that would necessitate colonies in space (an idea inspired by gross misreadings of sci-fi authors like Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams). SpaceX would become a defence contractor and a high-speed internet provider, anticipating the privatisation of the national security state on the one hand and the bipartisan consensus towards digitising economies and everyday lives on the other. Unlike other tech founders, Musk approached the ascendance of social media by integrating himself into the meme economy, and Muskism took a cyborg turn as our devices began to manifest into extensions of our selves. Enter OpenAI, which Musk co-founded with Sam Altman, and Neuralink, which aims at achieving AI-human symbiosis. Now a billionaire, the hitherto liberal-ish Musk began to wither at the Biden government's proposition of a wealth tax, its (relative) support for labour unions, and its imposition of Covid-19 regulations that, above all, hurt his profits. Enter the 'Woke Mind Virus', which Musk – like his new buddy Trump – sought to eradicate at the root:
Eradicating contagion can mean disinfeting the body – or, if you believe in cyborgs, building a new one. Yet the future that Musk was creating through X and Grok wasn't one where humans transcended their limitations by merging with machines. It was one where the worst human impulses were automated, scaled, and distributed at the speed of light.DOGE was launched by an executive order of the US government in January 2025, allowing Musk to move from feeding on public subsidies and contracts to stepping inside the state itself. If people were the bugs in the system, everyone suspect must go; AI integration into governance was – is – only the start of governance by AI and the horrors beyond and beneath
... To succeed, he would need "God mode," an overview of the whole, root access to the stack.
. And who owns that superset?
To emphasise: though he best typefies it, Musk alone does not make Muskism. Those perplexed by the wholesale and only seemingly sudden rise of technofascism will benefit from this accessible work of political economy and its fine weaving together of the small ways in which the memeworld, the manosphere, the Republicans / Tories / Reformists of the world and the Asimov/Adams-toting white supremacists converge into a terrifying reality. One wonders if things may have been different if they could only comprehend the sci-fi they read, but the time for wishful thinking is far gone.
March 30, 2026
This is a great, informative book about Elon Musk and I found it to be fascinating. The majority of this was new information for me and I really enjoyed learning about Musk’s childhood in South Africa. It was really interesting to see where some of Musk’s ideas come from such as the link between tanks in South Africa during Apartheid and the Tesla Cybertruck. This is written well and I found this to be a very compelling read. I really enjoyed this and how this breaks down the absurd ideas and lies Musk has come out with in the last few years regarding his turn to the right.
Review of advance copy
Excellently written and scrupulously edited. Resisted the temptation to get into tabloid sphere but not left any corners exposed.
Let's hope for the scenario 1 in the end to unfold!
Let's hope for the scenario 1 in the end to unfold!
Review of advance copy
will never not pick up Quinn Slobodian
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