Elon Musk is hard to ignore and even harder to understand. Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff therefore do not even try to understand him in „Muskism", at least not as a person. Musk, the thesis goes, is less a person than a symptom. They read him as the embodiment of an ideology with its own logic, one that reaches far beyond a single South African-American billionaire with space ambitions.
It starts strong. The dismantling of the straw-man „Musk-as-libertarian”, which still stubbornly circulates in public discourse, is easy work for the authors: SpaceX took off only on state contracts, Tesla ran for years on subsidies, and the whole Musk empire strategically rests on its embeddedness in the American state economy. The supposed rebel Musk turns out, on closer look, to be a convinced beneficiary of exactly those structures he claims to want to abolish. None of this is new, but in public debates, where Musk counts as a hard-line libertarian, it has not yet landed. Musk’s motives for his various ventures also get unpacked: techno-optimism, but also profit-seeking and a will to dominate; the fight against climate change as well as the utopia of complete sovereignty.
Just as interesting is the conceptual core of the book, which reads Muskism as an ideology of sovereignty through technology: vertical integration, short supply chains, autarky in matters of energy and infrastructure. As a promise, technological self-sufficiency as a path to political independence has considerable selling power. In a world that is just now redrawing its supply chains and reassessing its dependencies, this almost sounds like a serious political programme. All the more frustrating, then, that the book keeps dropping this thread to return to pseudo-psychological readings of Musk’s biography.
Musk’s enthusiasm for technology gets pathologised quickly. The pleasure of creating for the sake of creating seems to the authors to lack any legitimacy. That someone builds rockets because rockets fascinate him, because making something that has never existed before carries an intrinsic value: this possibility is not seriously considered.
Otherwise, the book may be a little too ambitious in what it sets out to do. On one hand, Muskism is supposed to be independent of Musk, an ideology with its own reach and logic. The claimed independence of Muskism from Musk as a person lets the authors draw conclusions for which the biographical details do not really provide a sufficient basis.
On the other hand, the analysis sticks doggedly to Musk’s biography and the political convictions of his grandfather. Elon’s childhood in Apartheid South Africa also plays a role. Rarely, though, are these passages backed up by anything Elon himself has said. That is a problem, because one cannot at the same time claim that Muskism is bigger than Musk and then anchor a great deal of the explanation in Musk’s childhood.
„Muskism” is not a bad book. It asks interesting questions and offers, in part, helpful answers and anecdotes worth telling. But between the analytical claim and the biographical execution lies a gap that psychological speculation can hardly bridge.
