Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff (Harper, 256 pp., $30)
Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s aim in their new book Muskism seems to have been to diminish Elon Musk. The front flap proclaims the book “isn’t about the man, it’s about the machine that made him” (emphasis added). The introduction adds that the authors are interested in the “historical forces that have shaped ”Musk’s actions. The impression is that Musk became the world’s richest man through rhetoric and luck, not skill.
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Slobodian and Tarnoff are leftists in the old sense. They openly seek public ownership of the means of production. Slobodian, a historian at Boston University, is known for his critical works on “neoliberalism.” Tarnoff, a writer based in Boston, is author of Internet for the People, a book that blames the web’s problems on privatized, for-profit business models.
Karl Marx once explained that he examined individuals insofar as they were “personifications of economic categories.” This seems to be Slobodian and Tarnoff’s method for approaching Musk.
To a limited degree, the attempted takedown succeeds. Though Musk may be fond of sharing Milton Friedman content on X, the authors explain that he “built his empire by fusing with the state.” Elsewhere, they call this “state symbiosis”—PayPal exploiting the DARPA-incubated internet, SpaceX selling rocket launches and satellite communications to the Pentagon and foreign nations, Tesla earning billions from tax credits and regulatory programs.
Tesla may be the best example of Musk’s state symbiosis. The Obama administration awarded the electric car manufacturer a “$465 million loan from the Department of Energy.” (Slobodian and Tarnoff observe that Tesla investor and board member Steve Westly “happened to be a major fundraiser for Obama.”) Tesla also successfully lobbied for generous electric vehicle tax credits, first passed into law during the George W. Bush administration. And the company may have gone bankrupt without “regulatory credits,” which, even across the first three quarters of 2024, accounted for 43 percent of Tesla’s net income.
But showing that Musk’s ventures depend on the government is not the same as reducing him to his historical and economic context. Other entrepreneurs and companies bid on those same government contracts, applied for the same loan programs, and lobbied for the same tax credits. Musk’s success is grand enough that one cannot explain it away as mere bureaucratic largesse or lobbying skill.
Indeed, as Slobodian and Tarnoff themselves inform us, SpaceX’s satellites “accounted for two thirds of all active satellites” in 2025. To launch and maintain 10,000 satellites and counting, as of this March, is not within the reach of many men, regardless of how much government support they’re offered.
Nonetheless, the authors link Musk’s ventures to Slobodian’s intellectual hobby horse: “neoliberalism . . . a form of privatization in which not only money but power flowed from public to private hands.” For example, Musk allegedly cut access to Starlink in southern Ukraine in 2022, blocking a Ukrainian counteroffensive. Musk offers nation-states “sovereignty as a service,” but what must the states give up in the bargain?
This is a more nuanced conception of neoliberalism than one often encounters. Rather than “market fundamentalism” or libertarian anarcho-capitalism, Slobodian sees a neoliberalism that is concerned with “reengineering, not discarding, the state.”
To be sure, there is something viscerally unsettling about government making the world’s richest man even richer, but on what basis can Slobodian and Tarnoff object to it? They laud President Joe Biden for pursuing “the most progressive domestic agenda in decades.” That agenda included a heavy dose of “industrial policy,” such as Department of Energy loans to private companies and trillions of dollars in regulatory and tax credits for green technology. The natural consequence of democratically elected representatives awarding large subsidies to private industries is benefits for certain individuals and corporations. This will inevitably have the effect of causing not just dollars but also political power to flow “from public to private hands.”
Is “neoliberalism” just the shape of technologically driven modernity? Are Slobodian and Tarnoff just reactionaries, nostalgic for the politics and technology of the mid-twentieth century?
A case can be made. The digital revolution may have been a “counter-revolution,” the authors suggest. Silicon Valley, they argue, has much in common with “Apartheid South Africa” in that it reinforces hierarchy instead of equality. The people must resist and control such technological progress for the sake of social and environmental justice.
Slobodian and Tarnoff also blanch at AI-driven automation. They assert that Musk’s progress on decarbonization is “mutually exclusive” with “the mass production of robots.” But it’s not clear why this is so. If solar panels and batteries really can surpass fossil fuels, then there is no contradiction between Musk’s green energy agenda and his aspirations for autonomous robots—unless, that is, one prioritizes the reduction of economic output for other, ideological reasons.
Musk is an immigrant from South Africa, which troubles the authors. As they observe, “many who leave home bring part of what they are abandoning with them.” They warn us that Musk brought the culture of his native land with him “like a spore in his luggage.” One struggles to imagine them applying this generalization to any group other than white South Africans.
And how foreign is Muskism, really? Musk describes himself as a “centrist.” He’s certainly no social conservative: Grok, xAI’s chatbot, allows users to generate AI porn. As an advocate for universal basic income (“universal high income,” in fact), Musk is no fiscal conservative. And as a defender of strict climate regulations, he is far out of line with most of the Right. In his grab-bag politics, Musk seems much closer to the average American than to a carrier of a foreign ideological contagion.
Slobodian and Tarnoff scarcely explore Musk’s left-leaning positions. They mention that he co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman but, strangely, not that he filed suit against OpenAI in 2024. This is a telling omission. Musk’s lawsuit concerns whether the company attempting to create Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) should be for-profit or serve the public interest as a nonprofit. Musk would seem to be on the side of Slobodian and Tarnoff in this instance: AGI should serve the people, not shareholders.
The authors are at their most persuasive in their coverage of Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency. For all its bluster, DOGE failed to change the fiscal trajectory of the United States. It ran into an insurmountable obstacle: Americans’ attachment to Social Security and Medicare, which Slobodian and Tarnoff describe as “the fragile biopolitical contract at the core of American life.”
Even the seemingly tireless, supremely competent Elon Musk lacked the will, or skill, to take on these programs, which are the real drivers of America’s debt. The world’s richest man dismantled USAID, but he was no match for the senior citizen lobby. As a result, total U.S. government debt will soon surpass $40 trillion.
Slobodian and Tarnoff celebrate Musk’s DOGE failure, but future Americans may lament it as they descend into a future defined by stagflation and fiscal crisis—that is, unless Musk’s robots save us all.