Elon Musk Is Defending His Walled Garden From the Rest of Us
Tech oligarchs like Elon Musk envision a future in which a chosen elite enjoys sovereignty, as a service, through the technologies they provide. Those left outside their Edenic fortress are merely a threat.
If Fordism was the logic of the twentieth century, Muskism, a new book argues, is the dark and twisted operating system of the twenty-first. (Stefani Reynolds / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
This June, SpaceX is set to debut its initial public offering (IPO), which, at $1.4 trillion, will be the biggest in history. Elon Musk has been vocal in the past about his disdain for publicly traded companies, and even his most devoted fans are puzzled. But going public is a fundraising operation; the world’s richest man needs money.
Last month, SpaceX acquired his money-losing company xAI, the proprietor of Grok, the chatbot best known for espousing white-supremacist conspiracy theories and producing child pornography. While fusing AI capabilities with rocketry will help him deliver on his promise to go to Mars, he still needs the capital to actually get there.
What Musk wants is to turn SpaceX into a meme stock, artificially inflated by his cult of personality and financial sorcery. “I am become meme,” he famously tweeted. This was a statement of purpose. Musk’s memeification is a philosophy: the online is real, and the distortion of reality endemic to the algorithm is reality.
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