Is that like talk to me about just first that first part.

Yeah, I mean, one of the ways that gold is often described is as a place that you fly to safety under conditions of volatility or crisis.

So if you have some concern that the stock market is going to tank or that the global economy is going to be mismanaged by the central economic power for whatever reason, leave that one open.

then you might want to shift some of your money into gold, which is not something that really rises usually that much, but it tends to be a fairly stable and slowly increasing place to put money.

So that's the way that individuals have been looking at it.

But the kind of more interesting side is the way that governments have been treating gold, because it's not only people that have been at an individual level sort of acquiring gold stocks or gold ETFs, but countries, too, are increasing their gold reserves from places like Poland and to Italy, to the UK, they're not only increasing the amount of gold they have in their central bank holdings, but in some cases, most interestingly, they're repatriating gold that had been held abroad in other places.

And why? Well, the United States and the UK have long been places where countries have trusted with their gold reserves.

Do you find this rise of the kind of like reality show influencer part of it to be surprising? Or do you feel like it fits into the kind of history, the veins of history that you previously identified?

How has that played out over the last few years, and how has their relationship changed the connections between Silicon Valley and Washington?

Well, the relationship between Musk and Trump is really fascinating because if it's the case, and we lay out the set of evidence to show that it is, that Musk has always relied on being backed up by Uncle Sam and has never really been ashamed about it, that he's always sought to see what service he can give to the American government at the time, then the question is, you know, what changed, if anything, in Trump's relationship to Musk? I think a couple things changed.

I mean, one thing is that by going in so hard with Trump in 2024, he really, uh, bolted himself onto one side of the political spectrum in such a way that it seriously alienated a lot of his past customer base.

That means that the economic costs of that alliance pushes Musk evermore to his reliance on government contracts, right? If, if he's not going to be mostly consumer facing because he's just you know, alienated half of his potential consumer base, then he's going to need even more of the big contracts to do Golden Dome, to do Star Shield, to do all of the Starfall, all of the new forms of backing up and beefing up the military industry that he has announced in the meantime.

But more interestingly was the Doge experiment itself, because up until that moment, Musk had been always pretty happy to, let's say, outsource the problem of government to governments and to not try to govern directly.

And yet Musk did that.

And we see it in the book as a real attempt by him to change the balance of that state symbiosis, to sort of ask, what would happen if I ruled directly, I as Elon Musk? And the effects were pretty catastrophic, right? I mean, I think he found out something from that effort, which is that he wasn't good at governing directly.

Can you kind of lay those four out for me?

Yeah

... looting the public purse or ripping off the taxpayer or, you know, sucking the teat of the government, however you wanna phrase it.

And we're actually resistant to that description too because crony capitalism, which of course exists and there's certainly a lot of it going around right now, is about finding, you know, inefficient choke points in political economy that you can gather rents from because of your relationship to the government.

So by definition it can't be innovation creating, it can't be capacity expanding.

You need to be, you know, making things worse for both customers, the government, uh, for everyone except yourself.

And there's certainly been moments when Musk has, you know, taken wealth from the, from the public purse and not produced something useful or, you know, failed in his efforts, but there have been also times when he's succeeded and, and I think it's really important for us to give him his due in a way when he actually did deliver on creating new markets that maybe hadn't existed before like the consumer EV market, um, like satellite internet, like affordable launch.

These are things that were not described well as crony capitalism, right? Actually, in the case of the Tesla example that Ben just mentioned in the Obama administration, it's really industrial policy.

He should keep his trillion dollars." We're really trying to make an analytic case about understanding the sources of his power.

Let's talk a little bit about, you know, how that came about and how that scored a muskism.

Yeah.

I mean, the idea that Musk or Silicon Valley operators in general are libertarians at heart is really a kind of red herring that we were dead set on disabusing people of by the end of this book.

I mean, especially if you use Musk as a standard argument.

I have no clear memory of him even calling himself a libertarian, so much less acting consistently as one.

And that's not to like save the glory and honor of libertarianism.

It's just to point out that from his very first ventures, so even ones people haven't probably heard of, Zip2, the sort of city directory service that he launches in the 90s with his brother, Kimball relies on free access to the GPS constellation that just went online.

I wonder if we can extrapolate and then if muskism is this hostility towards workforces and the sovereignty over them, does it stand to reason that the next sort of step in the evolution of Muskism or the, I guess the expansion of Muskism is the AI moment in which there's a complete, almost a rasher of the worker in place or a speculative kind of world in which mass, what we hear Dario Amadei from Anthropic or Sam Altman saying all the time that millions of workers are gonna be gone and this is the tacit promise to their business partners.

What is that that you think? What is that relationship?

Yeah, I mean, there's for a while now, you know, people have been writing books about, say, the history of Silicon Valley or the history of digital capitalism.

And often the kind of like revelation is like, hey, Silicon Valley relied on state funding.

Therefore, their libertarianism is bunk or suspect or whatever.

And that's kind of sometimes the big revelatory move.

Which by now is like, we know, like we have that magic trick figured out.

Nobody's surprised anymore.

Yeah.

So it'll be interesting to see what kinds of environmental standards will be incorporated and applied along the value chains of lithium and other strategic value chains, for example.

I am completely, you know, on board in broad strokes with the whole frame that Isabel is presenting.

But I think it's also good to like look at some of these surprising twists.

So let's take ISDS in the USMCA.

Why did it stay in? Because Mexico wanted it.

Why did Mexico want it? Because they wanted to ensure stability with U.S.

investment in the petroleum sector.

And maybe Quinn, do you want to just start because you're kind of continuing that thought and then we'll go to you as well.

So it'll be interesting to see what kinds of environmental standards will be incorporated and applied along the value chains of lithium and other strategic value chains, for example.

I am completely, you know, on board in broad strokes with the whole frame that Isabel is presenting.

But I think it's also good to like look at some of these surprising twists.

So let's take ISDS in the USMCA.

Why did it stay in? Because Mexico wanted it.

Why did Mexico want it? Because they wanted to ensure stability with U.S.

investment in the petroleum sector.

And maybe Quinn, do you want to just start because you're kind of continuing that thought and then we'll go to you as well.

So I think SpaceX i- is a real beneficiary of a, of a world that is fragmenting, that is remilitarizing.

Adding onto that, I mean, I think that the very, um, zenith of Muskism that we've witnessed now with the biggest IPO in history, briefly over two trillion dollar valuation, launching him as a trillionaire, would suggest a kind of triumphant climax in a way, right? If there is a kind of grim steel manning of Musk that we perform in the book, then one could see it as the natural, um, conclusion of that.

But I would actually, if given the chance to add an epilogue with, uh, attention to this, write it in the inverse because actually, I have found this IPO as more revelatory of Musk's many vulnerabilities as it is of his kind of omnipotence.

Ben mentioned before the risk factors that are spelled out in the SpaceX IPO, right? Not only the incredible key person risk of everything hinging on Musk himself, which seems and has raised many eyebrows across corporate governance circles, but the many ways that his wish casting is gonna hit a wall very quickly if he actually tries to realize it.

So you recall that the, the one million satellites in orbit in the prospectus is spoken of as a kind of a fait accompli.

It's nowhere close to a fait accompli, right? That still would need to go through the FCC.

They haven't approved it.

How should people view Musk right now? Like, how do you view him and how-- and how do you-- what do you want readers to, to take away from what kind of person this guy is?

I began by asking Quinn and Ben about the acquisition of Twitter, and whether Musk anticipated what was going to happen when he bought the company.

Yeah, I mean, we're in a uniquely well-informed position to kind of evaluate the thought process that he was going through because of the release of the chat logs, for example, around the time of his decision to make the purchase, and then all the way to the time at which a Delaware court enforced the acquisition in October of 2022.

And it's interesting to read through those chat transcripts, because indeed it does seem like a rather impulsive decision on his part.

And clearly from an economic point of view, there were loud voices in the financial press criticizing the recklessness of the price point that he bought it at, at a time when usage seemed to be falling already, and so on.

But what you can also see in those chat logs is the number of his kind of compatriots and supporters who were cheerleading his decision to make that purchase.

So this included, for example, a figure who's not that well known in the US but is very well known in Germany, Mathias Döpfner, who runs Politico and is also at the head of the Springer tabloid empire in Germany, who was very insistent that Musk go through with the purchase or was cheering him on.

This included the person who usually there's too much attention given to, but Curtis Yarvin does have his insightful moments, and one of the things that he said at the time was that he doesn't think anything is important, but he thought that this was important.

So the

... what convinces you that that is such a driving force in the way he sees the world, that that life experience was the way, i- is such, is so dominant in his thinking?

Well, yeah, he sold his first computer game when he was just a teenager, and so he was certainly imbued with a sense of what we call fortress futurism.

So South Africa, we think of as a backward place, and it was certainly politically very reactionary, still built on the principle of white supremacy when that had been outdated pretty much everywhere else in the world formally.

But it was also importing high tech.

So they had IBM computers that were using to carry out apartheid.

They built out their own nuclear weapons and their nuclear energy program.

They built out their own auto sector.

Does Musk have a concept of what he wants for humanity?

So which, which way is it?

Well, I think that, you know, you need to talk a little bit about how his thinking progressed after his big breakthroughs that you just described.

So the article and work for which he received a Nobel, uh, Prize, Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974 were things written, you know, before the end of the Second World War.

So the economics and knowledge stuff dates back to there, and you're right that that's still seen as his biggest contribution.

So there are decades and decades, there are actually 50 years of production that follow that, and it's sometimes not, um, looked at carefully enough about w- what was he writing for those remaining 50 years of his life.

We all know about The Road to Serfdom, but that came out also in 1944, and again, decades and decades later, um, he dies.

What has he been...

So what happened there?

Um, so, I mean, I guess the, to channel the, the, the critiques of people who criticize Musk, uh, why the hate? Why the hate?

Well, I think the defense of him kind of comes in two main varieties, and one is, as you say, he has managed somehow to create these engineering breakthroughs, and they aren't infinite, but they are significant, mainstreaming the consumer EV, as you said.

I think I've already given him his flowers regarding Tesla's abil- uh, ac- accomplishments there.

Um, bringing the cost of putting material into orbit down by over ninety percent across two decades at SpaceX, thus making a space economy possible in a way that it had been basically fantasy for decades.

Um, innovating the whole space of low Earth orbit satellite connectivity, as you say.

Now Starlink has ten million subscribers, and indeed for people, friends of mine, for example, in Puerto Rico on occasion are making use of Starlink and having internet where they wouldn't have it otherwise.

So indeed, I think it is necessary to set that set of sort of engineering, um, accolades aside.

Um, how should countries now think about checks and balances or any form of regulation on a company like SpaceX?

So in this instance, how did thinking through these contradictions help you understand the world Musk is building?

Yeah, I mean, I would actually think about crack up capitalism as an almost more interesting point of comparison for what we're trying to assemble with Musk.

Because another thing that people tend to propose about Musk's political geography or his kind of end goal is that He seems to be shooting for the possibility of a kind of fracturing of existing territories or polities into smaller fortified enclaves, you know, from which he can govern and rule.

Similar to what he's set up, in fact, in Texas, the Starbase company town.

which has become a kind of private polity in which decisions are made by a group of sort of yes-men who are all employees of Musk himself.

And the normal services right down to things like shopping malls are not even available to people who live one municipality over.

So it's possible to think about him as this kind of accelerationist radical dropout libertarian in some way who seems to be just preparing the way for the ultimate exit right the ultimate exit of course being the colonization of mars but on second look what's actually the secret of his success i think is not the wager that that's the way in a unidirectional way that politics is going or political economy is going that actually the genius of musk is being able to game the scales simultaneously so to be able to build out these sites of private power and individual monopolized control while still tapping into central or federal power, and more importantly, budgets and spending lines.

Why does that fantasy keep returning? And what do you think it tells us about the political moment we're living through right now?

I mean, I just, from where you sit sort of outside the country and, you know, What do you make of it? It just seems very puzzling that he spends so much time on this, I guess.

Yeah.

I mean, I think one could even phrase it even more strongly than you had.

He endorsed a call to quote-unquote... to deport the invaders and imprison the government.

It's further sign that he's really breaking the mold of what we assumed a CEO would have to conduct themselves like to preserve the possibility of good relations and market access to as many overseas commercial spaces as he could.

So part of our book's undertaking, I would say, is to try to explain how he did that.

And part of it, in fact, all of it, you could say, is to do with the new communications medium opened up by social media.

So do we see that and say, well, we will look back on that and say that was the moment when the mold got broken and others then went the same way? Or do you think he's a bit of a one-off on that front?

Well, if you, if you down-- like downgrade slightly from robots to agents, which is of course all the discussion now, like what Liz was saying about the SpaceX prospectus is that, you know, it's this, this dream weaving like fantasy document.

Yeah.

But it is interesting to sort of ask of it like, what could make this more realistic? And one of the things that Ben has been talking about, maybe he can pick up on it, which I find really interesting, is like we're kind of working with a bit of an outdated idea of what social media looks like.

So how important would you say that South African matrix is for what Musk ended up becoming today?

Well, I think insofar as we're trying to understand not just kind of Musk's personality, but also Muskism as a system that can help explain broader shifts in political economy, we've tended in our discussions of this and in the book to avoid an attempt of a kind of psychogram of Musk's innermost motivations and socializations, right? So rather than sort of assessing his racism on a scale of one to 10, especially because there are many readers, as we've discovered, who will be dissatisfied with anything but an 11, we've actually found it more interesting in a way to look at the political economic formation that late apartheid South Africa represented and how that might intersect with what we're calling muskism so what we mean by that is that often people might think of south africa as simply a backward dusty slightly agricultural hinterland in a time of increasing globalization in the 1980s and 1990s But in fact, interestingly enough, South Africa was also taking advantage of high-tech developments.

They built out their own nuclear program and indeed nuclear bomb by the 1980s in partnership with the US and Israel.

They were using IBM mainframes to conduct the business of apartheid, so sorting out and arranging populations according to racial hierarchies.

And they also built out a rather large auto sector.

So licensing from foreign companies to build cars domestically in a way that is still reflected by the fact that South Africa dominates auto production in the sub-Saharan Africa.

So what does that mean? It means that when Musk was growing up, he was being inculcated, yes, with ideas of racial hierarchy, but also with this idea of the need to fortify the enclave state, internalize production as much as possible, and rearrange populations internally in a way to optimize the security of an endangered homeland, which is what their white boer state was.

Can we say what percent of Musk and Muskism at that point is composed of him genuinely being an innovator, a visionary? whatever label you want to attach to it? What percent of it is him being a particularly canny businessman who especially has an eye for getting hold of public funds, not least from the US government? And what percent of it is him being a very articulate showman for plans that may or may not materialize in the real world? The Hyperloop is perhaps the best example of that, but we could think of others as well.

Why does Wall Street love this guy whose public persona is of, you know, some sick South African fascist who does the Hitler salute and and relishes in, as Bill Gates said, relishes in the notion that the world's richest man is killing the world's poorest children.

Well, that is certainly, you know, the darkest portrayal, I suppose, of Musk and his businesses.

And it's one that I myself feel a lot of sympathy for to a great extent.

But to play devil's advocate or to sort of help explain why, nevertheless, he is given this confidence by the investing class, I think it's necessary to, you know, recall a few other sort of countervailing facts.

And one of them is that he has been indeed sort of plateauing.

and his dominance of the consumer electric vehicle market globally.

He's lost that edge now to the Chinese brand BYD.

So again, excuse my perplexity.

First off, what is Fordism?

Well, that's really the entry point for myself and Ben in this book because when social scientists think about Ford, they don't just think about the guy himself, what his childhood was like, you know, how much of an anti-Semite he was, et cetera, but they also ask what kind of social world was necessary outside of the factory to complement the world inside the factory where he made his money.

So Fordism isn't just the assembly line, it's also cradle to grave social protections that employees got through his companies, it's collective bargaining agreements through trade unions.

So it's a whole cluster of social settlements that stabilized a world that could be upended by industrialization.

What's interesting about Musk for us, and the reason we framed it as Muskism, is there are a lot of those settlements and social contracts that really seem to be missing or absent in what Musk is doing.

He is making innovations.

He is making things cheaper than they had been before.

Well, then, what does his rise and the kind of Muskism you're describing, what does that say about how business, big business, maybe even big tech, how, how that kind of business is done in the 21st century?

Right.

Because, um, one of the more outré parts of that, uh, effective altruism, longtermism moment was this thing called the simulation theory, which was proposed by Nick Bostrom, who's someone who Musk blurbed his book, um, very important in that community, kind of spawned the whole field of AI safety or AI, uh, alignment.

And one, one of the things Bostrom said was, "Hey, if we take for granted that computers have gotten as good as they've gotten up 'til now and will continue to get better as they go forward, then it's almost inevitable that there will be capacity in some deep future where they could recreate a world so convincing that people wouldn't know they were in a simulated realityFurthermore, they might create that engineered, uh, simulation so they could do kind of experiments on it to test different theories.

Actually, William Gibson wrote a whole book, The Peripheral, that was sort of based on this premise.

And that there's no way for us as participants in said simulation to disprove that that's actually the position that we're in.

So Musk said, has said many times over the years that he is almost certain that this is true.

And it's helpful to know that one of the offshoots of Bostrom's argument is that there may be a variation of this where a small number of participants in the simulation will be conscious, you know, full humans, and the rest of the people will be so-called shadow people-

Yeah

Um, what concerns you most about this IPO offering and Musk being on the brink of becoming a trillionaire, Professor Slobodian?

Well, there's a whole lot of things that concern me about it, but one of the things I find most striking is the way his, uh, relabeling of himself as the techno king of Tesla in 2021 is now becoming somewhat more of a reality at a larger scale through the SpaceX IPO.

What I mean there specifically is he's really bending and reshaping corporate governance as a whole around his individual personality.

The movement of his companies from Delaware to Texas means that he's not held accountable to shareholders in the way he would've been before.

The creation of a whole share structure so that he has 85% of the shares that would be required to vote him out of a leadership position means that he's produced a kind of ironclad, almost monarchical position inside of this company that actually completely short-circuits the whole idea of the public company, which is that they're supposed to be a kind of a shareholder democracy, quote-unquote, "that can hold leadership accountable." In this case, if you look at that SpaceX IPO, it says that the key person risk, meaning everything hangs on Musk's shoulders, is so great that even if he dies, there actually isn't even a succession plan.

It would be in a completely unprecedented zone.

So the degree of, uh, influence being centralized in one, uh, extremely, uh, erratic and often dangerous personality is something that seems to be of great concern.

Uh, and, uh, the, the immense power that it has, not just in terms of e- e- economy, but in terms of warfare and, and state power ar- around the world.

Um, what concerns you most about this IPO offering and Musk being on the brink of becoming a trillionaire? Professor Slobodian.

Well, there's a whole lot of things that concern me about it, but one of the things I find most striking is the way his, uh, relabeling of himself as the techno king of Tesla in 2021 is now becoming somewhat more of a reality at a larger scale through the SpaceX IPO.

What I mean there specifically is he's really bending and reshaping corporate governance as a whole around his individual personality.

The movement of his companies from Delaware to Texas means that he's not held accountable to shareholders in the way he would've been before.

The creation of a whole share structure so that he has 85% of the shares that would be required to vote him out of a leadership position means that he's produced a kind of ironclad, almost monarchical position inside of this company that actually completely short-circuits the whole idea of the public company, which is that they're supposed to be a kind of a shareholder democracy, quote unquote, that can hold leadership accountable.

In this case, if you look at that SpaceX IPO, it says that the key person risk, meaning everything hangs on Musk's shoulders, is so great that even if he dies, there actually isn't even a succession plan.

It would be in an completely unprecedented zone.

Uh, and, uh, the, the immense power that it has, not just in terms of e- e- economy, but in terms of warfare and, and state power ar- around the world.

Um, what concerns you most about this IPO offering and Musk being on the brink of becoming a trillionaire? Professor Slobodian.

Well, there's a whole lot of things that concern me about it, but one of the things I find most striking is the way his, uh, relabeling of himself as the techno king of Tesla in 2021 is now becoming somewhat more of a reality at a larger scale through the SpaceX IPO.

What I mean there specifically is he's really bending and reshaping corporate governance as a whole around his individual personality.

The movement of his companies from Delaware to Texas means that he's not held accountable to shareholders in the way he would've been before.

The creation of a whole share structure so that he has 85% of the shares that would be required to vote him out of a leadership position means that he's produced a kind of ironclad, almost monarchical position inside of this company that actually completely short-circuits the whole idea of the public company, which is that they're supposed to be a kind of a shareholder democracy, quote unquote, that can hold leadership accountable.

In this case, if you look at that SpaceX IPO, it says that the key person risk, meaning everything hangs on Musk's shoulders, is so great that even if he dies, there actually isn't even a succession plan.

It would be in an completely unprecedented zone.

Uh, and, uh, the, the immense power that it has, not just in terms of e- e- economy, but in terms of warfare and, and state power ar- around the world.

Um, what concerns you most about this IPO offering and Musk being on the brink of becoming a trillionaire? Professor Slobodian.

Well, there's a whole lot of things that concern me about it, but one of the things I find most striking is the way his, uh, relabeling of himself as the techno king of Tesla in 2021 is now becoming somewhat more of a reality at a larger scale through the SpaceX IPO.

What I mean there specifically is he's really bending and reshaping corporate governance as a whole around his individual personality.

The movement of his companies from Delaware to Texas means that he's not held accountable to shareholders in the way he would've been before.

The creation of a whole share structure so that he has 85% of the shares that would be required to vote him out of a leadership position means that he's produced a kind of ironclad, almost monarchical position inside of this company that actually completely short-circuits the whole idea of the public company, which is that they're supposed to be a kind of a shareholder democracy, quote, unquote, "that can hold leadership accountable." In this case, if you look at that SpaceX IPO, it says that the key person risk, meaning everything hangs on Musk's shoulders, is so great that even if he dies, there actually isn't even a succession plan.

It would be in an completely unprecedented zone.

So the degree of, uh, influence being centralized in one, uh, extremely, uh, erratic and often dangerous personality is something that seems to be of great concern.

Uh, and, uh, the, the immense power that it has, not just in terms of e- e- economy, but in terms of warfare and, and state power ar- around the world.

Musk is generally above the law and at the heart of the most important political entanglements on the planet at the moment.

Yeah, I mean, I would probably stop short of the idea that our point is that he's above the law.

I think that one of the things we did want to do with the book is to switch up the conversation a bit away from what we think are kind of distracting and maybe unhelpful categories like techno-feudalism or certainly net by now cyber libertarianism as being supposedly like the magic, you know, keys that would unlock the understanding of Silicon Valley leadership class and their motivations.

Musk certainly did rename himself Techno King of Tesla in twenty twenty-one.

But what we found so interesting, especially in the Doge experience, which was also so well unpacked in the pieces with the tech policy press, was that it actually showed the limitations of his ability to simply float above the law and act, you know, unfettered.

In fact, when Musk tried to kind of become the sovereign and become the government, he kind of face planted by one way of looking at it, right? He actually couldn't do the legitimacy work and the consent creation work that governments have spent hundreds of years figuring out how to do in the period of, you know, Republican nationalism.

So it-- so in, in, in that sense, you know, we don't see him as someone who just like exists above the law and above the state.

So those are a couple not entirely mutually exclusive future paths that Musk could take.

So how significant is this, do you think?

Well, I think the most interesting thing about it, sort of if you take a step back, is how much this shows how the story of Silicon Valley and the tech sector has changed, right? Far away from this idea of libertarianism, right? The idea that Silicon Valley is a place of either actual or would-be libertarians.

It's actually a story, as we describe it, of state symbiosis.

So why is it that Musk can muster these kind of values? Why is it that OpenAI or Anthropic can be expected to have such high profitability? It's not really because they're gonna provide a great product for average users.

It's really because they're going to be so deeply integrated into the functioning of the government and into large firms that it will be impossible to function without them.

How you make yourself that valuable is you make yourself indispensable to the everyday practice of government, what we think of as the sovereignty capacities of governments in particular, and then also the, the big enterprises.

Because if you look at that SpaceX IPO again, it says that they're gonna be, you know, providing 80% of their services not to individuals, but toenterprises and firms.

Can he actually pull it off, do you think?