Adrian Matus reviews Quinn Slobodian and Benn Tarnoff’s Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Harper Collins, 2026)
Elon Musk makes headlines almost daily. Depending on the audience, people quote his statements and either repeat them as mantras or hold them up as symptoms of global issues. To the left-critique, he became a bogeyman. To the neoliberal and tech establishment, he is an emblem of the entrepreneurial model. Around his figure, book publishers have already developed an industry of biographies which often turn into hagiographies.
Aside from these publications, his rise prompted scholars to question the relationship between the tech elite and government. The timing is hardly accidental. Musk’s role in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in early 2025 made the relationship between the tech elite and state unusually visible. In this context, political scientists, historians and philosophers alike aimed to answer the same daunting question: what might mean Elon Musk’s political project?
In 2026 only, three books approach this question from different angles. The French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky’s L’Odyssée de la surpuissance places Musk within a broader transformation of the state. He argues that power is now not concentrated by the state, but it resides in technoscience and global capitalism. Even though the book focuses on broader economic frameworks, Lipovetsky argues that Musk is one of the most visible examples of this logic. From a more specific angle, Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking explores how the tech elite exert power in their private and public life. Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’ Muskism takes the most historical approach. Rather than presenting Musk as an eccentric billionaire, the authors map the political and economic traditions that made his worldview consequential.
This issue fits Slobodian’s broader intellectual project. He dedicated much of his career to excavating the history of neoliberalism. In Crack-Up Capitalism, Slobodian shared for RevDem the implications of the unusual legal spaces and peculiar jurisdictions that favored rerouting public revenues to the private sector. In Hayek’s Bastards (reviewed for RevDem by Luca Mătăsaru), he mapped the intellectual genealogy of the neoliberal and libertarian roots of modern alt-right movements. His latest book, Muskism: A guide for the Perplexed, continues in the same vein as his broader intellectual project, this time with a specific case study in mind: Elon Musk.
The co-author Ben Tarnoff approaches Musk from a different direction. His focus is the technological infrastructure on which Musk’s world depends. In Internet for the People, Tarnoff traced how the Internet moved from a small, state-funded research network to the „powerhouse of global capitalism”. His conclusion is blunt: if privatization helped the birth of today’s Internet, the solution is to put it back in public hands.
The book, published in April 2026, was already translated into Dutch, German, Spanish, and Polish and will appear in around 15 more languages in the upcoming months. The result is an attempt to explain a figure who is difficult to place ideologically. Musk is not a systematic thinker or has a stable political doctrine. Being aware of this, the two authors unfold his background from two complementary directions. Slobodian shows the political and intellectual traditions that might have produced Muskism. Tarnoff presents the technological infrastructure. To grasp both the genealogy and the tech component, they needed a concept that explains ideas that give technological developments a political meaning.
Three Clues to Muskism
To present this conundrum in a digestible format, Slobodian and Tarnoff use a historical analogy. Soon after the American tycoon Henry Ford wrote his book My Life and Work in 1922, journalists coined the term Fordism to describe a new type of modernizing project. Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff take this very point to propose a new concept:
Muskism, which promises „sovereignty through technology” (viii).
The character of Joshua Halderman is the first clue to understanding what Muskism might mean. As the first chapter presents, Joshua Halderman was a Canadian who belonged to a movement called Technocracy, which in the 1930s envisioned a society run under the dictatorship of engineers. Within this project, they favored technocracy over representative democracy and social engineering. In this utopian project, resources would be allocated according to rational principles. In 1940, this movement was banned, and ten years later, Joshua Halderman, the maternal grandfather of Elon Musk, moved to Pretoria, South Africa.
The second clue of what Muskism means, according to Slobodian and Tarnoff, lies in the society where Musk grew up. Pretoria was not only the administrative capital of apartheid South Africa. It was also the place where the standard of racial separation became the organizing economic principle of a society in development. Companies, including BMW and Ford, benefited from the apartheid rules and the highly segmented labor market:
„The basic principle of Fordism was mass production plus mass consumption; South Africa’s variant preserved mass consumption as a privilege for the white minority. In the 1980s, the political scientist Stephen Gelb gave the South African system a name: racial Fordism” (7)
The connection matters because apartheid depended on an expansion of administrative knowledge about its citizens. The South African state began using early computing technologies to collect and organize personal data, classifying citizens by race and determining their place in society. The point is not that Musk inherited the ideology of apartheid. Instead, it complicates the familiar story of the libertarian entrepreneur.
The third clue for Muskism might lie in his formative teenage readings. As a teenager, Elon Musk’s cultural epiphanies were The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Star Trek, and the American-Japanese production Robotech. These might explain his later appetite for exploring the universe and the fascination to merge man and machine into a single entity(12). Robotech, in particular, featured mechs, which are humanoid robots. Musk, later, gave deeper meanings to these sci-fi characters:
He would grow obsessed with the idea of becoming one with the machine. Later he would describe his company Neuralink as an attempt to create “a cyborg body that is incredibly capable” by means of brain implants. In 2018, Musk tweeted to his more than twenty million followers, “It is time to create a mecha.” (14)
Two Defining Moments for Muskism
None of these clues, taken alone, can explain Muskism. Highly aware of this point, the authors dedicate a large part of the book to Elon Musk’s relationship with Silicon Valley.
At the age of 17, being afraid of conscription, he got a Canadian passport through his mother’s citizenship, and fled to Montreal, never to return. Then, in 1995, Musk moved to California. As Slobodian and Tarnoff emphasize, 1995 marked a crucial moment in the development of Muskism: the internet ceased to operate as a state-dominated network and entered the era of privatization.
This had important implications for Musk. In Silicon Valley, he used state resources, such as the GPS system, under state provisions, in order to create his first internet platform. Then, he quickly realized that the state could become a client. Another key moment in the evolution between Musk and the state was October 29, 2001. Donald Rumsfeld, at that time the Secretary of Defense, and Arthur Cebrowski, a retired vice-admiral, developed a new concept of warfare based on the decentralized structure of the internet. In their view, ships and planes should continuously exchange information to coordinate a quick response. For this, they needed a new generation of satellites. Pentagon increasingly turned to private companies, as they were cheaper. The first contract was given to a company called SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk.
This argument changes the way SpaceX should be perceived. The company’s success was not only the result of entrepreneurial genius. Instead, it depended on the state’s demand and support. Thus, his goal, as Slobodian and Tarnoff argue, was
”not to eliminate the government but to vassalize it, such that it can only exercise its authority by purchasing services from a monopoly provider” (39).
One Reliable Vassal
Muskism means to become indispensable for the state. The War on Terror provided Musk with generous defense contracts: Musk launched firstly small satellites and then engaged in more ambitious projects (59). His move was to put pressure on the regulatory structure of NASA, the Pentagon, or the Federal Aviation Authority and, in return, to deliver cheap products. In this way, the American state ceded its sovereignty and decision-making to a corporation. Here lies the paradox of Muskism: while presenting himself as a critic of government, most of his important businesses received governmental support and used public infrastructure.
Starlink makes this logic even clearer. Its services for high-broadband satellites started in 2021 and by 2025, were available in more than 100 countries. Moreover, Starlink became a governmental contractor (53). This had important implications. During the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Starlink became a geopolitical instrument. The authors bring the example of Musk disabling access to the Internet within a hundred kilometers of the coast of Crimea in September 2022 to prevent an attack by Ukrainian drone submarines on the Russian Navy. Some reports mention that Musk discussed with the Russian ambassador to the US, mentioning that an attack might lead to a nuclear war. For sure, Musk denied this story, but then Reuters revealed that Musk did cut Starlink around that period. This means that a private individual controlled key infrastructure and could technically shape geopolitics.
The strongest insight of the book Muskism is that Musk’s relationship with the state is not an oppositional one. Moreover, Slobodian and Tarnoff offer a clear explanation of a figure whose public interventions often seem incoherent. As the journalist Sam Freedman argued in his review for the Times Literary Supplement, their option is much more robust: to show how Musk’s contradictions become coherent when placed within the longue durée of techno-capitalism and state outsourcing.
The context might also constitute one of the three vulnerable points of Muskism. The discussion related to Pretoria’s formative years remains more asserted than demonstrated. As well, the role of Errol Musk, himself a businessman with shady statements about the war in Ukraine, is absent. The South African context and the role of his father would have deserved more attention. The second weak point is the relationship of Elon Musk with the broader right (e.g., AfD), as Matt McManus argued in his review of the book for Jacobin. Lastly, the book has an inherent structural issue when two authors with different areas of expertise write together. Often, the division of work is extremely productive. Slobodian tackles the political genealogy, and Tarnoff focuses on technological infrastructure. At the same time, at some points the book loses focus. Particularly, the transition between Pretoria and the ”superset” is abrupt and the reader might be confused about why this shift matters.
At the same time, these are limitations of emphasis which do not affect the book’s central insight. For years, scholarship preferred to interpret Musk as an anti-establishment figure. By 2026, this argument is harder to sustain. As the French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky, argued in his L’Odyssée de la surpuissance (Odile Jacob, 2026) : ”c’est une nouvelle oligarchie de tech-bros, une nouvelle oligarchie des magnats de la Tech américaine qui détient le pouvoir à la Maison Blanche et qui, chantre du « moins d’État », s’attache à éliminer les règles existantes, amputer l’appareil fédéral” (211) [it is a new oligarchy of tech bros, a new oligarchy of American tech magnates who hold power in the White House and, championing ‘less government’, seek to eliminate existing rules and cut back the federal apparatus].
Slobodian and Tarnoff’s achievement is to demonstrate this diagnosis with analytical rigor and historical depth. They reveal that the state is not placed in opposition to the logic of Muskism. On the contrary, Musk heavily depended on public infrastructure, subsidies, state contracts, and governmental demand. The daunting question that remains to be answered is whether Muskism will be the project of one powerful individual, or become an economic model, as Fordism once did.
Adrian Matus is an editor at the Review of Democracy.
