The myths that made Elon Musk
In the early hours of November 6, as the result of the US presidential election was called, Elon Musk posted a picture of himself walking into the Oval Office carrying a heavy porcelain.
The image showed him standing on the iconic plush blue carpet with the presidential seal, gold curtains in the background. The chair behind the Resolute desk was conspicuously vacant. The post read: “Let that sink in.” A dad-joke, ha ha, from a man who has had 12 children and accumulated the largest pile of fuck-you money on the planet
The picture was in fact a Photoshopped screengrab from a video Musk had posted two years previously, in October 2022, when he bought Twitter and walked into the company’s HQ carrying the sink. In the spirit of bad puns, there were many who said he would sink Twitter by sacking 80 per cent of the workforce and reinstating legions of far-right conspiracy theorists.
Musk became the object of mockery and scorn. They called him “Space Karen”, a buffoon with grandiose ideas about colonising Mars, who had squandered $44bn on a social media vanity project that was haemorrhaging users, value and advertising revenue.
They were wrong. Musk used his money and his social media platform (now renamed X) to help Donald Trump execute a spectacular political comeback. But when Trump moves back into the White House in January, will Musk be the real power behind the throne? And if so, how does he intend to wield that power?
On one level, the answer to this question is a simple four-letter word: Doge — the acronym for the proposed Department of Government Efficiency. Musk, who is to head the new department, has promised to cut $2tn worth of spending (a little under a third of the total federal budget).
The question is: is the vision for the US government more Twitter or more SpaceX?
Even Musk’s many critics might agree with his contention that the federal government is sprawling, bloated and riddled with inefficiency. But almost every president since Ronald Reagan has attempted to streamline the administrative state (including Trump 1.0 — remember “drain the swamp”?) with limited success. Doge — the planned government department whose acronym brings to mind a (Musk-endorsed) cryptocurrency — will in fact not be a government department at all, but more of an advisory committee.
Musk will face significant administrative and legislative hurdles. But the biggest obstacle to success might be maintaining his current reformist zeal. The business of government is mind-numbingly dull compared to launching rockets, a not insignificant consideration for a man who hates bureaucracy and has a famously short attention span.
Still, if anyone can do it, perhaps it’s Elon. In 2017, after a series of statewide power failures in South Australia, Musk swooped in saying his electric car company Tesla could solve the problem by building the world’s largest lithium-ion battery. If the job wasn’t done within 100 days, he pledged, Tesla would do the work for free. He comfortably beat his own deadline — in 63 days.
Elon Musk is a legendary workaholic and control freak. His biographer, Walter Isaacson, recounts how he runs his companies with brutal drive and determination. He sends his employees emails telling them that “a maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle”. He now promises to bring that maniacal energy to bear on ensuring that “small-government revolutionaries join this administration!” The question is: is Musk’s vision for the US government more Twitter or more SpaceX? Is he going to slash and burn and fill the place with toxic trolls and conspiracy theorists?
Or is he going to reduce costs by a factor of 10 and halve delivery times while producing a genuinely breathtaking breakthrough in engineering that many doubted could be achieved? In the oceans of newsprint that have been splurged on Musk since he officially endorsed Trump, the narrative of how an entrepreneur who once backed the Democrats and worried about climate change morphed into a conspiracy-theorising Trump supporter has coalesced into a single origin story.
In the summer of 2021, President Joe Biden hosted a summit at the White House for manufacturers of electric vehicles. Executives from Ford and General Motors were there, companies that sell only a tiny percentage of electric cars. Tesla however, by far the biggest producer of EVs in the world, was conspicuously absent from the invite list. Elon had been snubbed.
The reason seemed to have less to do with any personal animus between the Biden administration and the Tesla chief executive, and more to do with the sensitivities of the United Auto Workers union, which was also invited to the White House ceremony and had been battling, unsuccessfully, to unionise workers at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California.
But Musk stewed on it. “Biden is a damp [sock-emoji] puppet in human form,” he tweeted in 2022. Two years later, at a rally in Pennsylvania, Musk was to be heard musing about the “crossover between the Epstein client list and Kamala’s puppet masters”.
I’m not convinced that Musk’s rapid slide into conspiracy theory land and his all-in embrace of ‘dark Maga’ is the result of a fragile ego scorned at a White House summit
The puppets/Epstein narrative is a variation on the QAnon conspiracy theory, which emerged in 2017 and helped drive the mob into the Capitol on January 6 2021.
Adherents believed Hillary Clinton was the leader of a cabal of satanic paedophiles who secretly controlled the US government. Since endorsing Trump, Musk has also repeatedly suggested that the situation on America’s southern border, which saw record numbers of illegal crossings under the Biden administration, was a plot on the part of the Democrats, who had “imported massive numbers of illegals to swing states”.
These immigrants would, Musk said, reliably vote Democrat, and “America would then become a one-party, deep blue socialist state”.
Leaving aside the fact that immigrants aren’t automatons who are programmed to vote blue (as Kamala Harris found to her detriment), this narrative about importing voters to wipe out a certain political party bears an uncanny resemblance to a well-worn far-right conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement”.
The phrase was coined by the French writer, Renaud Camus (no relation to Albert), whose 2011 book, Le Grand Remplacement spoke of an elite plot to replace France’s white, Christian population with non-white immigrants, especially from the Muslim world. The theory has since gained traction in other countries, especially among white nationalists in America.
Marchers at the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 chanted “you will not replace us”, a direct reference to Camus.
Whether or not such echoes are conscious on Musk’s part, the highly online rightwing movement that was energised by Trump is now being energised by Musk too. Take Curtis Yarvin, a computer programmer-turned-blogger whose lengthy posts under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug are credited with helping articulate an intellectual framework for a movement known as the Dark Enlightenment.
Yarvin says the US is effectively an oligarchy, run by an amorphous blob he calls “The Cathedral”, a nexus of liberal elites in academia and the media who control the operations of the administrative state. The solution to this problem, Yarvin proposes, is an American Caesar — a dictator or monarch — to take over the reins of power and run the US like a start-up. (JD Vance, the vice-president-elect, has talked about his interest in Yarvin’s ideas.)
Is he going to slash and burn and fill the place with toxic trolls and conspiracy theorists?
In 2012 Yarvin proposed an acronym: Rage, or Retire All Government Employees. Which sounds like an idea not entirely dissimilar to Doge. On that subject, Yarvin says that he hopes Musk never gets to Mars. “Elon is much more useful here on Earth,” he writes, adding that the acronym for Musk’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency “recalls the doges of the Most Serene Republic of Venice, but few are familiar with the etymology of ‘doge’.
It is just the Venetian dialect spelling of ‘duke’, from the Latin dux — or, in standard Italian — duce. Just sayin’.” Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Just don’t call them fascists. But I’m not convinced that Musk’s rapid slide into conspiracy theory land and his all-in embrace of “dark Maga” is just the result of a fragile ego scorned at a White House summit. This narrative ignores a deeply strange and ideological strain in Musk’s own thinking that stretches much further back.
Elon Musk was born in South Africa in 1971. The son of an overbearing father, he was mercilessly bullied at school. Little Elon took refuge in Dungeons & Dragons, in computers and video games, and in books. In an interview in 2013, he talked about how, as a teenager in the grip of an existential crisis, he discovered Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, “which you should not read at age 14. It is bad, it’s really negative.”
Burnt by German philosophy, he buried himself in science fiction: Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series books were formative texts, a sprawling epic about a Galactic Empire on the verge of collapse, and a hero — Hari Seldon — who leads his followers to a hidden location at the edge of the galaxy in a battle to preserve the sum of human knowledge from annihilation.
But the book that Musk keeps returning to is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In Douglas Adams’ cult classic, a supercomputer takes 7.5mn years to calculate the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything”, which turns out to be 42. The point of this meaningless response, Musk told the same interviewer in 2013, is that “a lot of times the question is harder than the answer.
And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part.” The question that The Hitchhiker’s Guide prompted Musk to ask is: how to “expand the scope and scale of consciousness and knowledge”.
And Musk’s answer? Become a “multiplanetary species”. During the past few years, Elon has placed less emphasis on the need to combat climate change, and more on the idea that the planet we currently inhabit is doomed. “One of these days, a large comet will hit Earth and destroy almost all life, as has happened many times in the past,” he posted earlier this year, before summing up humanity’s options: “Either become a spacefaring civilisation or die.” To that end, Musk says SpaceX will carry the first crewed missions to Mars by 2028, and build a self-sustaining colony on the planet in “about 20 years”. The Harvard historian, Jill Lepore, herself a connoisseur of science fiction, suggests that Musk has fundamentally misunderstood the message of The Hitchhiker’s Guide. It is, she writes, a “razor-sharp satiric indictment of imperialism”, pointing out that the wealthy interplanetary characters of Adams’ imagination are not bold visionaries saving humanity from extinction but rather restless wanderers in search of a home that can never quite satisfy them.
“Either the climate wasn’t quite right in the later part of the afternoon,” she quotes from The Hitchhiker’s Guide, “or the day was half an hour too long or the sea was just the wrong shade of pink. And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of industry: custom-made, luxury planet building.”
Musk is not the only powerful Silicon Valley figure whose world view has been shaped by science fiction. Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor whose support for Trump in 2016 prefigured that of Musk, is a fan of Neal Stephenson. Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, which coined the term metaverse, envisages a post-federal America where cryptocurrencies have sapped the state of its ability to collect taxes.
The federal government has been reduced to an impotent rump; sovereignty has devolved into a series of franchised “burbclaves”, private statelets ruled by CEO-kings who provide their citizens, or customers, with the basic infrastructure of society. In 2000, when Thiel and Musk merged their rival start-ups to form PayPal (copies of Snow Crash dotted around the office), they had a piece of software installed on the company computer system.
Every time a new customer signed up for a PayPal account, it played the sound of a ringing bell. It was known as the “World Domination Index”. The friendships and rivalries that were forged in those heady days coalesced into a loose fraternity known as the “PayPal mafia”, powerful people who hold sway in Silicon Valley to this day.
Their visions of an intergalactic future populated by super-powerful, superintelligent beings unencumbered by governments came out of a fringe movement called extropianism. Founded in California in the late 1980s by Tom Bell and Max O’Connor (who later changed their names to TO Morrow and Max More), extropianism was techno-optimism on
The inaugural issue of the Extropy magazine, published in the autumn of 1988 (they printed off 50 copies on an early Mac) was subtitled: Vaccine for future shock. It included articles on artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and cryonic freezing, as well as memetics and “mindfucking”.
They believed humanity was on the cusp of a new technological revolution, driven by advances in computer technology, that would radically change human existence for the better. What is still holding humanity back? Why regulation, of course. Government. Enter Musk The extropians were a motley collection of philosophers and scientists, coders and writers. They would gather in cafés and on university campuses.
There was a strong libertarian, anarcho-capitalist flavour to their politics. When a journalist from Wired magazine attended an extropian party in 1994 he encountered a software engineer named Mistress Romana dressed as the State in a black vinyl dominatrix outfit, dragging along a companion on a leash, representing the Taxpayer.
Never large in numbers, the extropians had an outsized influence on the culture of Silicon Valley. They included pioneers in artificial intelligence such as Marvin Minsky, and science fiction writers such as Vernor Vinge, who posited a technological singularity, the point at which machines would become more intelligent than humans.
Along with space colonisation and AI, their interests included cryptocurrencies (they were figuring out how to create digital money a decade and a half before Bitcoin appeared), transhumanism (merging humans with machines), and radical life extension. The extropians wanted to turn science fiction into science fact, and they believed that progress was best achieved through the mechanism of pure market forces unencumbered by government.
As far as I know, Musk was never an active participant in this little-known movement that flourished at the dawn of the internet age. He may not even be aware of its existence. But whether he knows it or not, Musk has become the ultimate embodiment of extropianism: SpaceX to take us to Mars; Neuralink to implant chips in our brains; xAI to develop superintelligence.
Through a combination of ruthless business acumen and maniacal urgency, Musk and a handful of other tech entrepreneurs have pushed technology to a point where some of the sci-fi dreams of their childhood look almost possible.
What, in their view, is still holding humanity back? Why regulation, of course. Government.
Enter Musk with his porcelain basin and his mandate to radically reduce the size of government. Let that sink in. Let’s take a breath and assume for a moment that Musk’s efforts at Doge do not result in a full merger of man with machine and a mass migration to Mars. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Musk might get something out of the deal anyway.
As reported on the front page of last weekend’s edition of this newspaper, his close association with the president-elect has already seen the value of his personal wealth increase by billions of dollars.
Musk could strip away the “Kafkaesque” government regulations he says are holding his businesses back. (He has complained about being “forced by the government to kidnap seals, put earphones on them and play sonic boom sounds to see if they seemed upset”.)
SpaceX already has contracts worth billions of dollars with Nasa and the Pentagon. No one will be surprised if he gets a lot more business from the federal government in the next four years.
Compared with all the sci-fi weirdness, there is something reassuringly transactional about all this. Donald Trump, long an implacable opponent of electric vehicles, has recently changed his tune. “I’m for electric cars,” he said at a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, in August, adding with exemplary candour: “I have to be because Elon endorsed me very strongly, so I have no choice.”
Well, if you spend $200mn on a candidate’s campaign you’re going to expect some return on your investment. Since the election, Musk has been hanging out in Mar-a-Lago, posing for pictures with the Trump family, his four-year-old son, X, on his lap. “I’m happy to be the first buddy!” he tweeted.
Let’s see what happens. Two men with massive egos but otherwise really quite divergent world views sharing an oval office? What could possibly go wrong?
Personally, I give the Trump-Musk bromance a less than 50-50 chance of surviving its first 100 days.
Gabriel Gatehouse is the former international editor of BBC Newsnight and author of ‘The Coming Storm: A Journey into the Heart of the Conspiracy Machine’
