Muskism: How Elon Musk’s Tech Empire Shapes Politics, Power And Public Discourse

Elon Musk is more than an eccentric entrepreneur.
In “Muskism”,
journalist Ben Tarnoff and historian Quinn Slobodian
describe him as a political actor and a symbol of a new
ideology: the fusion of technology, capital and power. In an
interview with
Kontrast, they
explain how Musk, through platforms like X, not only
dominates markets but also radicalises public debate. Their
argument: he promises “independence” through technology
but in reality creates new dependencies and undermines
democracy. With AI tools like Grok, Musk seeks to shape what
we know, write and read – yet he may be more vulnerable
than he appears.

Kontrast:
In your latest work, you dive into the world of tech
billionaire Elon Musk. You explore his visions for the
future and the risks he poses, raising questions about
monopolisation, AI and democracy in a tech-driven world. To
begin with, what kind of world does Elon Musk intend to
build?

Ben Tarnoff: Well, I think our
approach with Musk is to try to think about him less as an
individual and more as an avatar for a worldview that we
call „Muskism“. The centerpiece of that worldview is the
promise of sovereignty through technology. What Musk is
promising is that in an increasingly unstable world, both
individuals and nation states can fortify their
self-reliance by plugging into his infrastructures. But what
that does is it introduces a dependency on him and his
companies. And I think in a European context that’s become
particularly evident, for instance, in his control of
Starlink, which has played such a crucial role in the
Ukrainian conflict. But it is also expressed in many of his
other ventures as well.

Quinn
Slobodian: If we start from the future he imagines,
Musk is building companies whose enormous valuations are
based on promises. Within ten years, he envisions 100
billion humanoid robots, one million low-Earth-orbit
satellites giving him a near monopoly on global
connectivity; and X as a platform for a new kind of
far-right internationalism. In many ways, he is already
partway there. Our book is meant as a kind of wake-up call.
An argument for putting as many obstacles as possible in the
way of these ambitions.

Kontrast: You
mentioned X as an example of Musk’s influence on
communication. Is it fair to say that he, as an individual,
is trying to control what can be said and thought
online?

Ben Tarnoff: Since Musk
acquired Twitter in 2022 and turned it into X, the platform
has changed dramatically. Research shows a clear rightward
shift in content. He has boosted his own posts
algorithmically, so users are often confronted with his
content. He has also cultivated a network of allies who
receive similar amplification. In this way, X has
increasingly become a megaphone for his political views,
while many others have left the platform. So it has become,
I think, a much more monolithic place
ideologically.

Quinn Slobodian: With
xAI and the chatbot Grok, he is going further. Grok is
trained with certain principles that reflect Musk’s
worldview. It is presented as „rational“ but it is
actually a more distorted right wing perspective on things,
on everything from the Black Lives Matter protests to the
supposed white genocide of words in current to South
Africa.

At the same time, Musk is not simply censoring
in the traditional sense. He operates within the medium,
amplifying certain narratives. For example, figures like the
German far-right influencer Naomi Seibt have shaped his
views, which he then amplifies to a global audience. He
allowed Seibt to basically spoon-feed him a set of far right
talking points about the influence of Muslims on order in
Germany, about the problems of immigration, the lack of
democratic freedom etc.. It is not a one-way model of
control but a more complex, algorithmic amplification
process. This is one of our questions going into the book:
How does a billionaire mogul control opinion in an era of
digital capitalism? It’s not actually quite the same model
as the early 20th century.

Kontrast:
Reading your book, one might conclude that AI is becoming a
tool for enforcing authoritarian politics. Why do AI and
far-right politics seem to align?

Ben
Tarnoff: Well, if we return to his acquisition and
transformation of Twitter, one of the reasons that Musk
undertakes this project is to purge the social network of
what he calls „wokeness“, and in particular, the
so-called „woke mind virus“. Musk comes to the
conclusion that social media in general, but Twitter in
particular, has become „infected“ with a kind of mental
disease which he associates with the viewpoints of the left.
In his view, companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are
producing „woke“ chat bots because their AI models have
been influenced by a training set that is drawn from an
overly progressive internet sources like Wikipedia, which he
deeply distrusts, for
instance.

Founding xAI was part of an
attempt to counter this. Projects like “Grokipedia”, a
right-wing alternative to Wikipedia, show how he is trying
to reshape not only platforms but also the knowledge base
that AI systems rely on. In that sense, influencing human
behaviour and reshaping technology go hand in
hand.

What’s interesting about
Grokipedia? To dwell on that just for a moment. So when
you’re on X and you ask a question either directly in the
chat bot or through a reply thread, grok is referring to
Grokipedia when it provides that response. So if you ask
“what was Black Lives Matter?” or “Is white genocide
real?”, it will use Grokipedia as a knowledge base and so
further. Grokipedia is expected to help form the training
data for the next iteration of the AI model. You have to
understand Musk’s motivations as much geared toward
influencing human behavior as they are about re-engineering
the machines.

Quinn Slobodian:
There’s also a political-economic dimension. Large-scale
AI development requires massive resources like computing
power, data, and energy – and therefore close ties to the
state. This creates a tendency towards more centralised,
even authoritarian structures, because democratic processes
can slow down this kind of expansion.

So in the case
of the United States, it kind of lends itself to
authoritarianism in the sense that you need to be able to
chain yourself to an authority that is willing to bulldoze
over public dissatisfaction with the build out of data
centers or public skepticism about the effects of AI on
their own everyday lives or their own workplaces. The Trump
administration would brush aside what would be seen as the
normal democratic guardrails that would usually slow down
this kind of a rapid deployment of capital in a one way back
on it, ultimately untested
technology.

But even more moderate
people like Sam Altman at OpenAI could be seen as becoming
cozy with an authoritarian power, because there’s a kind
of need for antidemocratic control in order to realize this
colossal build
out.

Kontrast:
Beyond Musk, what do tech elites like him and figures such
as Peter Thiel share with the far right?

Ben
Tarnoff: Well, I think what we’ve seen in this
new Trump administration is really the unprecedented role of
Silicon Valley in the federal government. I mean, there’s
always been a relationship between the industry and
government. The Obama white House famously had a close
relationship with Google. So it’s not to say that Silicon
Valley and Washington were completely apart before. But the
extent of the integration I think we’ve seen in this
administration is unprecedented.

To some extent,
it’s about the convergence around shared material
interests. AI is the organizing imperative for the industry
and in particular the need to build out data center capacity
and in turn, to obtain sources of energy to sustain that
buildout. That requires a very different relationship to the
state than, say, in the consumer tech era and the social
media era. The Trump administration has wholeheartedly
embraced AI as a national priority and has helped the
industry, to fast track the construction of data centers by
rolling back environmental review, by offering up federal
land for data centers, by promising broker deals around
energy provision and so forth.

I think we have to
start with the political economic layer. But when we think
about worldview and ideology, there are certain figures in
the Silicon Valley leadership class with the Trumpist
worldview. In the case of Musk, we could see one
particularly strong convergence around anti-immigrant
rhetoric around the perception that there are people out of
place that need to be identified, detained and purged from
the body politic.

And further, the belief that
technology can help the state control and secure society.
Firms like those owned by Musk, but also other firms like
Palantir, co-founded by Peter Thiel, can provision services
to the state, in its exercise of those
functions.

Quinn Slobodian: I think
it’s also worth kind of differentiating someone like Musk
from someone like Zuckerberg. I don’t think we want to
paint everyone in Silicon Valley with the same
brush.

There is something about Musk. He is
distinctive and ahead of its time in certain ways. He
anticipated arguably some of the politics of more recent
years. While Apple was producing an iPhone that was designed
in California but assembled in China, and Zuckerberg was
trying his very best to get Facebook into China to kind of
globalize his medium as much as possible, Musk was already
thinking in more national and narrow terms. So he was trying
to figure out how to vertically integrate the production of
cars and rockets to make himself less dependent on global
supply chains, and was actually successfully selling that
more economically contained model to China, to Germany, as
ways to fortify themselves against global dependency. He
already had a kind of re nationalizing frame when other tech
leaders were still thinking in more global terms.

When
it comes to the immigrant question, one of the things we
want to emphasize about how Musk thinks is that he thinks of
immigrants as basically embodied computer viruses. We call
it „digital native“ nativism. So if you have a master
metaphor of the software engineer, you think of a network as
something that is need to be cleansed of intrusions, that
has vulnerabilities, that need to be contained.

When
Musk thinks about governance or society, he blows up the
image of the computer network into the real world. He sees
those illegal immigrants basically as computer viruses that
need to be located and purged. It is the anti immigrant and
nativism of the far right, but from the internet back to
reality.

If we compare Muskism to
Fordism, the difference is striking. Fordism promised social
peace; Muskism promises social conflict. Says Ben
Tarnoff

Kontrast:
Given the appeal of technologies like electric cars or
Starlink, what can societies do? What would be the
equivalent of regulation in the 21st
century?

Ben Tarnoff: Well, I think
it’s worth dwelling on the Fordism comparison for a
moment. If we compare Muskism to Fordism, the difference is
striking. Fordism promised social peace; Muskism promises
social conflict. That is actually a much darker and more
destructive view of how to organize society. One of its
strengths is how Muskism has managed to implant itself is
that it’s particularly attuned to the new politics of
globalization, where countries are more than ever eager to
reduce their reliance on global integration, to harden their
borders, to renationalize their industrial base and so
forth. But once again, we’re kind of interested in
thinking about him symptomatically as someone who is
responding to absorbing, remixing, radicalizing currents in
society, in political economy.

One response, in my
view, is a renewed form of internationalism. Not integrated
on the model of free market globalization of the neoliberal
era, but integrated around principles of
solidarity.

We saw this recently in Minneapolis, where
you had communities coming out to protect their immigrant
neighbors. Where solidarity was being constructed across
many lines of difference and being channeled into a very
effective political organization that did manage to counter
incursion by federal agents. I mean, these federal agents
are very much in line with „Muskism“. They are heavily
armed, relying on high technology, in particular databases
and facial recognition software to conduct their
campaigns.

So I think, we can look at the existing
sources of resistance in society and identify the impulses
that point toward a very different kind of world than the
one envisioned by Musk.

Quinn Slobodian:
It’s good to remember that Musk is also a bit
more vulnerable than he appears. He knows that his entire
worth is wound up in the success of a small number of
businesses that he holds. He’s not a diversified man, so
part of the hyperactive activity of people like himself and
the other people in Silicon Valley could be interpreted as a
sign of urgency, because they know that they’re vulnerable
to their plans being thwarted.

In the
US, the next midterm elections could be decisive. Voters may
reject the plans of a small group of very wealthy people
that offer little benefit for most of
society.

If you take Musk’s empire
apart, you can see it’s facing very serious competition in
each of its sectors. We know that last year, the sales of
Tesla fell off by 30% in EU. They’re falling worldwide.
BYD now sells more cars in the EU than Musk does. Catl, a
Chinese company, is now the world’s biggest battery
manufacturer, long outpacing Tesla for a niche it previously
had. Yes, the EU and other places are still dependent on
SpaceX to get things like satellites into orbit. But now
there are startups that are using the same technology to do
cheap reusable, launch provision with, very well-made
effective satellites.

So he has lots of points of
vulnerability that he compensates for by overpromising
what’s going to come next. So to those investors who ask
about falling Tesla sales, he’ll say: “but now I’m
building robots”. To those people who say, “but what
about competition on satellite launch?” He’ll say “Now
I’m going to be providing cellular service to every last
human on planet Earth. I’m going to be putting data
centers in space.”

Think of the pedagogical virtues
of his outrageous behavior: he’s forcing people into
realizing the repercussions of being dependent on a small
number of people. Hopfully soon, people will seek
alternatives and unplugging themselves from the Musk
machine.

Kontrast: Are European
regulations sufficient to counter these
developments?

Ben Tarnoff: Well, I
think actually, European policymakers are thinking about
this and are attuned to this question. There is a renewed
attention of how to achieve so-called digital sovereignty.
The difficulty is that this dependency on Silicon Valley
technology firms is decades in the making.

We’re not
just talking about Musk, we’re talking about Google.
We’re talking about Facebook. We’re talking about, the
technology sector as a whole. Those software services are
absolutely integral to the provision of the EU’s daily
government services. I think that’s a much more ambitious
project than simply trying to get more satellites into
low-Earth orbit.

Quinn Slobodian:
Hopefully, that kind of ambition can motivate European
policymakers and European social movements, because I think
it has been increasingly evident under the second Trump
administration: the stakes are quite existential. It’s not
simply an inconvenience. It could very well be a matter of
life and death. So it does require investment. It requires
coordination of political will, and it will take time. You
know, it’s not an overnight solution to unplug from those
infrastructures.

There’s probably signs that Musk is
overplaying his hand. I mean, the decision earlier this year
to boost user usage on grok by allowing it to produce
non-consensual sexual imagery, at a rate of tens of
thousands of images was, I think, crossing a red line for
some European governments. It’s one of the reasons why the
offices were raided in Paris by the attorney general there.
It’s one of the reasons why the UK and Spain are reopening
an investigation, thus turning those places into targets for
Musk’s anger.

If Musk is taking time out of his day
to insult Pedro Sanchez in Spain, it must be because they
have identified something of the vulnerabilities and
weaknesses in his profit model.I think that can be a
starting point to start to crack open what has become far
too naturalized kind of reliance on these
services.

This work is licensed under the Creative
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/ Kathrin Glösel and link to the English article
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