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Muskism: A guide for the perplexed

To understand Elon Musk and the world he intends to make, we have to understand the worlds that made him. So argue historian Quinn Slobodian and journalist Ben Tarnoff in their new book, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.

From his early years in apartheid South Africa come a deep commitment to racial hierarchy, industrial self-reliance, and fortress futurism. From Silicon Valley came the idea to finance moonshot projects with public money. And online, Musk uses the tools of virality, repetition, and provocation to undermine legacy institutions in pursuit of a kind of techno-state.

Why should we care? Because the worlds that made Musk are now making ours.

In this talk, recorded at BESI on May 1, 2026, Slobodian and Tarnoff enter the world of Muskism, in which proselytizers speak the language of crisis and emergency to invoke future where humans are purged from the productive process and, through social media and video games, merged with the machine. Those who dare enter this worldview, they warn, will grind and live in the shadow of one man. However, the rewards could be priceless — and the alternative might be extinction.

About the speakers

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff stand side-by-side.

Quinn Slobodian is a professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His books include Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy and Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right. In 2024, Prospect Magazine named him one 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.

Together, they are the authors of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. Rather than attempting to understand Musk as an individual, the book sees him as an avatar of something called Muskism: a playbook for our new postliberal age.

Muskism, they show, speaks the language of crisis and emergency to invoke a less human future, where humans are purged from the productive process and, through social media and video games, merged with the machine. Those who dare enter this worldview, they warn, will grind and live in the shadow of one man. However, the rewards could be priceless — and the alternative might be extinction.