Muskism
A Guide for the Perplexed
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Apr 21, 2026
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A Financial Times Most Anticipated Nonfiction Book of the Year • A Kirkus Most Anticipated Nonfiction Book of Spring 2026• A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year
A pyrotechnic examination of Elon Musk as a symptom and avatar of our postliberal age
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. His worldview promises sovereignty through technology: plug in, power up, and become self-reliant. But the more you connect, the more he owns you.
If Fordism defined the capitalism of the twentieth century, Muskism may define the twenty-first. Fordism helped build the welfare state. Musk undoes it. He thrives on dependence while preaching freedom. His cars run on subsidies; his satellites run the battlefield; his social networks train the AI that trains us.
Muskism sells itself as the future but entrenches age-old hierarchies. It offers autonomy for some and exclusion for others. It’s pro-natalist but anti-immigrant, futurist but reactionary. It speaks of humanity but warns against empathy.
Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff cut through the hype and the hate to reveal what Musk really represents: a new political economy, where to be “free” means to serve a Technoking. Muskism isn’t about the man. It’s about the machine that made him—and the world he’s making next.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this searing analysis of Elon Musk, historian Slobodian (Hayek's Bastards) and tech journalist Tarnoff (Internet for the People) argue that, just as Fordism "was the operating system" of the 20th century, "Muskism" is that of the 21st. While Henry Ford sold the promise of "rising living standards for all," Musk sells "sovereignty through technology," according to the authors, a vision of "a purified community defined by cultural and genetic membership in a white, European West, garrisoned by superior technology" and maintained through "purged social networks, ideologically cleansed AI models, and mass deportation of ethnic outsiders." Slobodian and Tarnoff track the "feedback loop of man and moment" that shaped Musk, following him from apartheid-era South Africa, where he learned "the lesson of fortress futurism" and militarized isolationism; to 1990s Silicon Valley, where techno-utopianism mingled with reactionary politics, particularly in the thinking of Musk's PayPal cofounder, Peter Thiel, who espoused that "extreme concentrations of power benefit humanity"; to SpaceX and Tesla, where "war-on-terror" era military-industrial contracts fueled plans for "tactical satellites" and energy storage systems that promised autonomy and sovereignty for both the nation but also for individuals; and finally to the second Trump administration and DOGE, a kind of end-stage of Muskism, wherein "the hunt for ‘waste, fraud, and abuse' blurred seamlessly into the hunt for illegitimate people." Muskism, the authors unsettlingly conclude, is ultimately about "purging those deemed out of place." Impressive and unrelenting, this grapples with a destructive ideology that seems poised to consume everything.
