Everyone’s got an Elon take. He’s a messiah. A menace; a genius; a clown. The verdicts differ, but they share one theme: they treat him as an individual. Muskism argues otherwise. Elon Musk isn’t a glitch in the system—he is the system.
Slobodian and Tarnoff skillfully guide us through ... The book brings us through the Muskian upheavals of last year, when Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency descended on federal agencies ... The account of those events is surreal, until you remember that they actually happened ... Striking.
Confident and brisk without ever feeling hurried ... It’s a well-written, sharp book ... Enlightening but ultimately limited in its approach to understanding the pathologies of the present. It would benefit from situating Musk in the broader nest of institutions and practices that have allowed him to flourish and discussing his relationship to the broader right. Given all that, I found Muskism more suggestive than revelatory and was left feeling the definitive left-wing critique has yet to be written ... Muskism makes for bracing reading, and its brevity and subject matter ought to earn it a wide audience. This would be a good thing since, as Slobodian and Tarnoff show, his philosophy and its impact are corrosive.
In their new book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, historian Quinn Slobodian and tech writer Ben Tarnoff dig into the mindset of Silicon Valley’s most gauche tycoon and touch on science fiction more tangentially, but their firmer grasp of just what flavor of capitalism Musk and his cohort represent sheds a brighter light on the topic.
