What Do We Do About Elon Musk?

July 3, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Elon Musk’s SpaceX prospectus reads like a work of science fiction—one that he has “managed to operationalize toward a very concrete material end, which is unlocking this extraordinary amount of money.” That line from historian Quinn Slobodian captures the central paradox of the richest man in the world: Musk is simultaneously a genuine industrialist who cut the cost of launching mass into orbit by over 90% and a fabulist who sells investors on asteroid mining and Martian colonies using technology that does not yet exist. In their new book Muskism, Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff argue that understanding this tension is essential—not just for making sense of Musk, but for grasping the political and economic system that produced him.

What Muskism Is

The book’s core thesis is that Musk is not primarily in the business of selling cars, rockets, or satellites. Instead, he sells a promise: that individuals and nation states can fortify their self-reliance in an unstable world by plugging into his infrastructures—and in doing so, deepen their dependency on those very systems. This is the one-line definition of “Muskism” that Slobodian and Tarnoff offer. It is not a personality diagnosis or a biography. It is an attempt to describe a coherent political-economic project.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:48) **Introducing the Core Question: What Do We Do About Elon Musk?** - Host Charlie Warzel frames Musk as an omnipresent force in the global economy, culture, and politics, whose wealth and power are unprecedented.
2 (03:48) **Introducing "Muskism" as an Ideology** - The hosts argue that Musk is not just a person but an ideology, and grasping "Muskism" is crucial for understanding the man and the world that made him.
3 (07:07) **Defining Muskism: The Core Thesis** - The one-line definition: Musk sells the notion that individuals and nation-states can fortify their self-reliance by plugging into his infrastructures, thereby deepening their dependency on them.
4 (07:42) **Situating Musk Historically: From Ford to the "Cyborg"** - The hosts compare Musk to historical industrialists like Ford and the Robber Barons, but argue his focus on frontier technologies that fuse man and machine is unique.
5 (10:37) **Musk Among His Silicon Valley Peers** - Musk is both of and not of the Valley; he got there first on infrastructure and hard tech, distinguishing himself from the Web 2.0 platform builders.
6 (13:18) **The Roots of Muskism: "Fortress Futurism" and the Mech** - The hosts trace Musk's worldview to his childhood in apartheid South Africa, a high-tech fortified enclave, and the influence of sci-fi like *Robotech*.
7 (16:47) **Silicon Valley as "Primary School": The Art of Financial Fabulism** - Musk learned in Silicon Valley how to secure investor confidence by telling fantastical, plausible stories about the future, a technique called "financial fabulism."

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Show Notes

Elon Musk isn’t just the world’s richest man—he’s one of the most influential people alive. His companies have transformed industries, his wealth has shattered records, and his politics now shape governments and public debate. But how did he become this powerful? And is his dominance really inevitable?

This week on “Galaxy Brain,” Charlie Warzel talks with the historian Quinn Slobodian and the technology writer Ben Tarnoff, the authors of “Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed,” about the ideas driving Musk’s rise. They unpack the mythology of the billionaire genius, the ideology behind his politics, and whether the world’s most powerful CEO is stronger—or more vulnerable—than he appears.

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This episode of “Galaxy Brain" was produced by Renee Klahr and engineered by Miguel Carrascal. Our theme is by Rob Smierciak. Hadley Robinson is our senior supervising producer. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

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