Elon Musk. A troubled dreamer. A power-hungry, vengeful bungler. A hero who became a villain; a villain who became a hero. What if he isn’t any of these things? What if he was more like an idea? An avatar for a world view, the master code for an operating system. This is the topic of Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s new book, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.

In this book launch event, the authors will be joined in conversation by Stanford professor Adrian Daub, author of What Tech Calls Thinking.

Please RSVP at this link to attend. 

To understand Elon Musk and the world he intends to make, Slobodian and Tarnoff argue, we have to understand the worlds that made him. From his early years in apartheid South Africa come a deep commitment to racial hierarchy, industrial self-reliance, and fortress futurism. From Silicon Valley we get the idea to finance moonshot projects with public money. And online we see Musk use the tools of virality, repetition and provocation to undermine legacy institutions in pursuit of a kind of techno-state. Not dissimilar to the world of his beloved video games.

The worlds that made Musk are now making ours. Into a de-globalizing world comes a promise of sovereignty through technology. But not for everyone. The techno-maximalism of the political and business elite sees a cyborg future and signs us all up.

To say that Muskism is worth taking seriously is not to say that its success is guaranteed. But the institutional breakdown of our era offers an opening. At some point, society will stabilize on a new basis. Muskism could provide the foundation. In this book launch event, the authors will help us all understand the ground taking shape beneath us.

Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at Boston University, and the author or editor of seven books translated into ten languages including, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy, and Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. In 2024, the Prospect Magazine (UK) named him one of the World’s 25 Top Thinkers

Ben Tarnoff is a writer and technologist based in Massachusetts and is the author of Internet for the People and the co-author of Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do—And How They Do It. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and has also written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the New Republic, among other publications.

Adrian Daub is an academic and critic based in San Francisco and Berlin. He is the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor in the Humanities in the Departments of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Stanford University. Since 2019, he has also served as the Faculty Director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research. He is the author of six academic books as well as several works of cultural and political criticism. His writing regularly appears in magazines and newspapers across the German-speaking and Anglophone worlds.