Come for Elon Musk, best not miss: The problem with ‘Muskism’

There’s a nameless kind of capitalism in our culture, and it’s been creeping up on us for years. The executives and engineering whiz-kids at the top of Amazon, Apple, Google, SpaceX, Tesla, and Virgin Galactic are its exemplars. Its brand is extraterrestrial (it cares about getting at least some of us off-planet), existential (it seems to care about saving this one), extravagant (so many tax-free billions of dollars sloshing around!), extreme in its goals (in the best Silicon Valley tradition), with an “X” factor of inspiration from science fiction.

So says Jill Lepore, a Harvard professor you may know from her New Yorker articles or her seminal book on Wonder Woman, among many others. Lepore deserves credit for identifying this kind of capitalism, for sharing her disquiet about it, and for setting out to name and dissect it in a new podcast. With all those “ex” words to describe it, and the sci-fi connection, the entity has one obvious label: X capitalism.

Instead, Lepore dubs it “Muskism” — and it’s this focus on one man, Elon Musk, instead of a systemic issue, that causes problems with the podcast. Despite being beautifully sound-edited, and co-produced by the BBC, Elon Musk: The Evening Rocket barely has time over the course of five half-hour episodes to deal with the wider issue of what capitalism itself is morphing into in the 21st century. And so a promising look at an important invisible phenomenon disappears down a rabbit hole of half-formed arguments — one familiar to anyone who has read Musk’s Twitter mentions.

To be fair, Musk has certainly done his damnedest to make himself the face of X capitalism. As Lepore notes, listen to his early interviews and you can hear the shy nerd with outsize ambitions who was not yet the P.T. Barnum-style showman. Then Musk discovered a talent for keeping Tesla afloat at a crucial moment (the 2008-2009 financial crisis) by juicing preorders for a vehicle (the Model S) that hadn’t even arrived at its final design yet.

The Iron Man comparisons followed, though let’s be honest here — the only way in which Musk actually looks or acts like comic-book Tony Stark, or Robert Downey Jr., is that he sometimes wears a leather jacket. But Musk didn’t exactly disavow the connection, appearing as himself in Iron Man 2. He discovered that outlandish if vague plans for Mars colonies boosted interest in SpaceX. Fast forward to 2021, when Musk boosts his profile by stirring up controversy in every contemporary debate, from cryptocurrency to COVID restrictions. No publicity was bad publicity, as it turned out.

Musk sets up his online personality as bait, and Lepore, like a lot of critics, falls for the allure of paying it negative attention. Nobody would be more pleased than Musk to give his name to an entire form of capitalism, no matter what critique was attached to the naming. Don’t be surprised to see him or his millions of stans use a #Muskism hashtag — turning the label into a positive for their guy in the same way the Reagan administration gleefully took to calling its Strategic Defense Initiative “Star Wars” (originally an insult leveled by Sen. Edward Kennedy).

Personally, like Lepore’s, my opinion of Musk has been on a downward trajectory for years. From cautious admiration while attending the Model S launch in 2012, it plummeted to head-shaking disgust at his lowest point yet, the “pedo guy” tweets of 2018. (His latest sexist tweet debacle, which literally happened as I wrote this, shows he hasn’t yet learned his lesson.)

The well-sourced history of Tesla earlier this year confirmed my growing sense that Musk is out of his depth, a control freak careening from crisis to crisis, coasting on pure luck and the kind of connections that come with being a Silicon Valley billionaire. That plus my love of science fiction should have put me squarely in the target audience for The Evening Rocket.

In fact, the podcast left me more sympathetic towards Musk when I finished it, which is quite an impressive feat. The scapegoating is strong with this one.

Legitimate reasons to criticize Musk are right there for the taking. Instead, Lepore strains herself drawing a connection between South African apartheid (which, as she admits, Musk did not support or experience much, having left South Africa as soon as he could, age 18) and space exploration.

She admits that Tesla has done some good in the world — but only in brief end-of-episode praise for its flawless execution on the world’s largest battery in Australia. (Lepore does have a point here: Tesla got more good done when it was being less than flashy, literally working on a public utility project.) She criticizes Tesla for accepting Bitcoin, given how bad Bitcoin mining is for the environment, then criticizes Musk for reversing course. He is literally damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.

The biggest sin for sci-fi fans is that this most literary of critics seems to be confused about her source material. Several times, Lepore expresses doubt that Musk really loves Douglas Adams’ delightful Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, given that the story contains spoofs of capitalism such as the wealthy planet-building planet of Magrathea. This is fair enough. But Hitchhiker‘s contains a whole lot more she doesn’t mention, including a loving portrait of the showboating galactic president Zaphod Beeblebrox — a Musk prototype if ever there was one.

Hitchhiker’s, first launched as a radio show in 1978, was also a product of its time, featuring a preponderance of men and just one main female character. Yet it somehow escapes the criticism that Lepore levels at other male heavy classic sci-fi such as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, published 30 years earlier. Musk’s love of Foundation (it was etched on a disk in the dashboard of the Roadster launched into space) is taken as a sign that he wants to start space colonies run by elite white men.

Which may come as a surprise to fans of the Apple TV+ series Foundation. That show uses a diverse cast and the same basic story to reveal what Asimov was really writing about: a small, wily, pro-science counterculture outlasting the bellicose threats of a creaking old Empire focused on superstition and the short term. (Not for nothing did I name it among the most anti-Trump books I’d ever read.)

Taken as read in all this is the notion that space exploration is inherently bad; that anyone aiming to go out there must necessarily be ignoring the big problems down here. Infuriatingly for NASA lovers on the left, Lepore identifies space as a Republican issue. Here, more than anywhere else, she has an unfortunate failure of imagination; here she could have challenged her assumptions. Two things can be true at the same time: Blue Origin and SpaceX are worth celebrating, and their owners should pay more taxes.

Yes, Mars is a dead-end for settlement, but how about the surprisingly more realistic prospect of cloud cities on Venus? A space elevator would make orbit accessible to everyone, not just the superrich, while removing the need for destructive rocket fuel. The promise of putting businesses in space, as asteroid-mining proponents will tell you, is that it can remove the most damaging elements of industry from the surface of the Earth. Cryptocurrency doesn’t have to be mined; with the right incentives, as sci-fi luminary Kim Stanley Robinson notes, crypto tech could save the planet.

The X capitalism phenomenon is as complicated as the 21st century itself; that’s why we’ve barely begun to identify and name it. Many of its environmental commitments are legit, such as Apple data centers run on entirely renewable energy. X capitalism resists simplistic labels such as good or bad. It deserves an in-depth examination, not a poorly-constructed argument that serves only to feed the ego of one man and fire up his legions of followers. If you come for the self-appointed king of X capitalism, to paraphrase The Wire, you’d best not miss.