00:00What is Muskism and how important is it to all of us in the way in which we lead our
00:03lives today?
00:05So we define Muskism as the promise of sovereignty through technology.
00:10And the case we make throughout our book is that Musk is not so much in the business of selling
00:14cars, rockets, or satellites,
00:17so much as he sells the idea that in an increasingly unstable world,
00:21both individuals and nation states can fortify their self-reliance and resilience by plugging into his infrastructures.
00:30But of course, in doing so, they become even more dependent on his infrastructures.
00:35And you can really see this as a through line throughout his career.
00:38Take the example of SpaceX, which gets its start in the early years of the war on terror as a
00:43key government contractor,
00:45helping Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon put satellites into space.
00:48Now, 20 years later, Starlink is the main revenue model for SpaceX.
00:53And when you look at Starlink's major use cases, it's military.
00:57It's also first responders, public safety who need to be operating in remote environments and also in times of conventional
01:06grid failure.
01:08So we really see this as a through line throughout Musk's career.
01:12When you guys also compare Musk to Fordism, Henry Ford, assembly line techniques, standardization, absolutely change manufacturing and ushered in
01:21the system of mass production,
01:22that still kind of defines American capitalism and especially define the 20th century capitalism.
01:28When you compare that to Elon Musk, where are they similar?
01:33Where are they separate?
01:34And is Elon Musk the Henry Ford of the 21st century?
01:39Yeah, thanks for having us.
01:41Fordism is a term that was coined about exactly 100 years ago.
01:45And people were not just talking about the factory, but they're talking about the world outside the factory, right?
01:50So it was a world of mass production plus mass consumption in which doing things on the assembly line was
01:56also about the nuclear family.
01:58It was about intergenerational upward mobility.
02:00It was about collective bargaining agreements.
02:02So there's a kind of social contract inside of Fordism that was very interesting to us because we wanted to
02:08ask, if you look at Musk, what's his social contract, right?
02:11We know that he has his group of reply guys who can even monetize their feed.
02:16We know he has investors who are very interested in his businesses.
02:20But how do you scale that?
02:22Is it possible to build something as stable as the 20th century model in which there was a kind of
02:27a virtuous cycle of workers being able to afford the products?
02:31When, as Musk is doing, you're kind of promising to make a lot of those workers obsolete.
02:36And you seem to have a very selective idea of who gets to be in the social contract and who
02:41gets to be out.
02:43So the way that Fordism has been described as a kind of philosophy of social peace, we think of one
02:49of the strange things about Musk is he seems to be preaching a kind of ideology of social war.
02:54He almost seems to be drumming up kind of antagonisms and frictions as a way to better sell those insulating
03:00technologies to make you safe inside of your Tesla or SpaceX dome, you know, when the social unrest begins, when
03:06climate breakdown begins.
03:08So it's a very tenuous kind of social contract we see.
03:11And in the last chapter of the book, we talk about Doge and state acts as a kind of way
03:17to test the theory.
03:19Like, can Musk become a real techno king, as he is officially described at Tesla?
03:24Or do normal politicians like Trump actually still have an important role to play in the model?
03:31How far can Silicon Valley govern directly?
03:35Well, let me stay with that, because I think there's been a lot of fascination about Elon Musk's engagement with
03:39politics.
03:40And you write about state symbiosis in the book.
03:42That is, we have Elon Musk presenting himself as a real libertarian, doing things outside the realm of government.
03:48And yet we've seen him obviously cozy up to this president.
03:52I don't know what the state of the relationship is, what their state of the relationship is today.
03:55But drill in on that, if you could, the way that he sees his companies, his empire interfacing with government.
04:04Yeah, I mean, if there's anything we were trying to do with the book was to really change the conversation
04:07specifically around this.
04:09So we really think that the notion that Musk, or really anyone in Silicon Valley in the leadership class, is
04:16a libertarian, is really kind of a misleading, almost a red herring.
04:20Certainly someone like Peter Thiel had his moment when he preached that kind of ideology.
04:24But Musk actually never did.
04:26What's actually fascinating about following Musk's career, from the 90s, when he starts a company called Zip2, few people remember,
04:33which relies on what?
04:35The new government-developed service of GPS that was military technology.
04:40And he taps into that and makes that a commercial-facing product.
04:44SpaceX, Tesla, Department of Energy loans, zero-emission vehicle credits.
04:50He's always actually been happy and open about using the backstop of the state, thinking about the government as a
04:57primary client.
04:58And in this era of generative AI becoming really the investment story and the growth story for the tax sector,
05:06you can't live without the government, right?
05:08You need a friendly state.
05:09You need someone who's going to open up federal land for data center construction, who's going to clear the path
05:15in regulatory terms for you to get your way.
05:18So, in fact, we don't see a contradiction when Musk enters government.
05:21We see it as a kind of a test of how far the state symbiotic relationship can go without becoming
05:28a parasitic one.
05:29So, Musk works when he works because he actually increases the capacity of states to do things.
05:35When it tips over into parasitism, then it becomes a kind of obstructing crony-style capitalism.
05:41And it stops working for both partners, as we've seen, indeed, many times in the Musk-Trump relationship.
05:47Ben, we've only got a little over a minute left.
05:49But I also want to ask you about the cults of the Musk personality and the whole ethos around him
05:55and how that's folded in with the political climate and how that's impacted everything we've just talked about.
06:00Can Elon Musk, the businessman, exist without the other half of that?
06:04Do they feed each other or do they conflict with each other?
06:07Well, one way to think about this question is Musk's relationship to science fiction.
06:11I think a lot of commentators, observers of Musk have noticed that he often cites science fiction as a major
06:16influence.
06:16We actually see Musk as a science fiction author or narrator of a sort because from the beginning, from the
06:241990s, when he makes his first fortune as a dot-com entrepreneur, he's very good at securing investor confidence by
06:31telling stories about the future.
06:33And these future stories are, on the one hand, fantastical, but on the other hand, have a kernel of plausibility
06:42such that investors are willing to help give him the money to go build that future.
06:47We actually describe this dynamic as financial fabulism.
06:50And over the years, he finds new venues, new forums for this financial fabulism.
06:57Social media arguably supercharges it, where he can speak to not just institutional investors, but he can move markets with
07:05memes.
07:06He can post about Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency, and the price of Dogecoin goes up.
07:10He can post about Tesla and the price of Tesla goes up.
07:13So that has become so integral to his business that it's infrastructure, essentially.
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