Elon Musk’s Endgame | The Ezra Klein Show

If Republicans keep the Senate, if they perform better in the House than people expect, a lot is going to come down to one man, and that man is not Donald Trump. It's Elon Musk. At this point, Musk has given around $450 million to the Republican campaign effort. That makes him the single largest donor in any election cycle ever. It is a quarter of all campaign donations Republicans have received. And yet [music] the size of this, I think what it throws into relief is how hard it is to conceptualize how much money Elon Musk really has. [music] Because for Musk with his net worth of around a trillion dollars, for him to give 300 million, 400 million, it's like the median American household giving like a hundred bucks. It is for him nothing. And yet it [music] is reality warping for the rest of us. And it's not even Musk's only source of power. All this money, there's his control of X, his control of Starlink, [music] >> of SpaceX, of Neurolink, of Tesla.

He has power over wealth, attention, and critical infrastructure that no human [music] being has ever combined at this level. At least once you are outside the range of say a Donald Trump or a Xi Jinping, somebody who controls a superpower as a state. That's not what Musk has. And yet he has this almost state-like thing that is completely pursuant to his whims. So what does he want to do with it? What is he doing with it? What what is this [music] world that he is flexing his power and taking on real risk to build? Quincyian is a professor of international history at Boston University. He's the author of several books including globalist highix bastards [music] but relevant for here muskism which he co-authored with Ben Tarnoff. He joins [music] me now. [music] Quinn Sabodian, welcome to the show. >> Very happy to be here.

>> So Elon Musk is flexing a lot of power right now. He's made the largest ever set of campaign donations from one person in one cycle. It's now $450 million. all of it to Republican groups. He's alone a quarter of all GOP donations this cycle. What is he trying to buy? Well, I think he's trying to entrench the dependency that he already enjoys. One is through his financial role in the US political economy and by extension the global economy. SpaceX now as one of the world's top tech companies, Tesla as a large part of the tech portfolio that people hold in their pension funds and their individual investor accounts means that if you attack Musk, you're also kind of attacking one of the pillars of US political economy. So that's kind of the money side. On the machine side, he's trying to make the world ever more dependent on his infrastructures and the use of SpaceX as the really monopoly launch provider to put things into low Earth orbit. The rolling out of low Earth orbit satellites as Starlink as kind of the default communications medium for battlefield operations and for um you know rural consumers and so on. But then further to that, there's what I would think of as kind of the messaging piece of that or the media piece. And there he's much more targeted trying to produce kind of communicative ecosystems in which his way of framing

social problems and solutions to social problems is uncontested and uncontestable. So his purchase of Twitter in October 2022, long described as kind of one of the biggest business failures in American history, has proven to be actually probably quite effective, I would say, so that people are caught in kind of an echo chamber of his creation. and his targeting of the midterms and his production of a flexing of his own power to make or break candidates as he hopes is a way to he hopes to kind of fine-tune that control over the media and messaging ecosystem and get out ahead of what he worries will be a kind of regulatory wave uh that would accompany a Democratic majority. What's funny to me or interesting to me about the description you give there is you could imagine someone with Musk's portfolio of interests seeing a very different strategy as optimal because the work he does is so intertwined with the government being highly highly associated with one partisan side of the fight in America in you know Europe if the sort of right-wing parties he's been boosting >> it creates risk I You talked about entrenching dependence, but he's also creating a situation where if you have in 2029, you know, President John OSF or President Gavin Newsome or President AOC and the Democratic Congress, reliance on SpaceX, on Starlink, you know, on Grock

maybe in the Pentagon >> can be seen as a huge risk. And so from that side, this doesn't all look purely rational like a master businessman just entrenching like it looks like a man who believes things and is actually risking quite a lot to push those beliefs upon the world. >> Yeah. I mean it's an unusual approach, right? I mean the way that corporate leaders have usually tried to exercise their influence on the political landscape in the past has been slightly more from behind the scenes of course, right? But I would say then he's again working on two tracks. One is deepen that financial and structural dependency such that even if a president Osaf or a president AOC comes into power, they have a limited ability to rein in his you know fulcrum central role in the American [clears throat] health of the stock market and its dominance in certain key frontier sectors. Um their hands would be tied still I think. But at the same time, he can use this tactic of kind of hyperpolarization, which he's obviously taken as his own kind of trademark even amongst his own Silicon Valley leadership class, to potentially become the favored partner for a future ruling administration. And that's also the way he's approaching the relationship to far-right parties in Europe. Right? a rational person would try to come up with some kind of compromise with the ruling parties in Western Europe, make peace with the EU in some way to gain market access. He's

taken an opposite approach, gone on a full frontal attack against Brussels and the and the existing legacy centrist parties and tried to ally which would what I've long thought of as he sees as the kind of Teslas of politics, the AfDs, the Restore Britons that he hopes will come from marginality and nowhere to completely disrupt and destroy the legacy institutional parties of social democracy and Christian democracy. So it's high risk but potentially also high reward if you find yourself then in a kind of a pole position for a changing model of governance across the board. >> I do think Musk is somebody who works backwards from visions of possible futures >> and I want to play a clip from an interview he recently gave the economist where he describes how things things are going to play out over this was just over the 5 to 10 year time frame. It would be an exercise in vanity to for me to think that I would be controlling the super genius AI that is vastly smarter than me. What my biological neural net tells me is that the most important thing for the for AI safety is to be maximally truth seeeking and curious. Uh if that's the case, uh I think it will foster humanity.

>> So let's unpack that. You're sure that humans will no longer be in control in 10 years time? >> I think it is unlikely. Um, in the same way that if the difference in intelligence between AI and humans is vastly greater than the difference in intelligence between AI and chimpanzees, it's hard to imagine that the chimpanzees would be in charge. >> The the whole first half of this economist interview who gave us sort of like this where he's very casually just describing a world where within a decade >> money wouldn't exist. >> Money won't exist. Human beings have lost control of the entire world. He is not even really in control of his own companies anymore. >> So what does truth seeking and curious mean >> to Musk? >> To Musk um the curious part in his own terms means that given the likelihood of super intelligence exceeding human intelligence at sometime in the near future. then we would need to make sure that it wants to keep humans around for its own interest and either its own entertainment or its own >> Yeah, I've heard him describe this sort of as it's he wants an AI that would find it more entertaining to have us in the world than to not have us in the world. And the even more extreme version of that is like in line with simulation theory which is that if we are just existing in a digital simulation that has been created by a future alien race or a hyper advanced human race then we want to keep things entertaining enough

here in this kind of reality show of the present such that they wouldn't terminate the programming. So that's I mean in his own terms that's how he describes the goal there. I think it really tracks what have been pretty substantial changes in his attitude towards AI even across the last 10 years, right? And we know that in 2015 he started open AI with Sam Alman really at that time under the influence of the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostonramm whose book super intelligence had come out the year before. And the overwhelming threat at that point was the possibility of a runaway digital super intelligence which in the most famous example might you know turn us all into paper clips if it got the wrong kind of a prompt. So [snorts] at that time he seemed to have one big message which is let's hit the brakes, slow it down and make sure that we're aligning the values of the AI with our own. But at the same time he's starting Neuralink. And as he starts Neurolink, the way he describes it in fact directly to Altman and other in as well as in other cases is that Neurolink is designed to accelerate our fusion with network technologies so that a human machine symbiote as he calls it will be able to sort of stay out ahead of that Skynet digital super intelligence. So that's the first phase of Musk's AI thinking is actually we need to augment human consciousness to make sure that we are accelerating a better version of the AI against the evil.

>> We must become the robots to not be destroyed by the robots. >> Exactly. This attitude changes almost overnight in November 2022 with the launch of Chad GBT. with the launch of Chad GPT and the realization by him and the entire Silicon Valley entrepreneurial and leadership class that LLMs and generative AI was the new growth story that they'd been looking for for years. Suddenly his whole discourse about AI changed. Instead of it being the digital super intelligence that was a concern, now it was the woke LLM which had been trained on the progressive posts and internet discourse of the era of Black Lives Matter, defend trans kids, me too. And iconically, the image of Google Gemini's generated image of the black founding fathers kind of stood in for people like Musk and Andreasen as the danger of this new phase of AI, which in the most memorable description Musk said he feared would turn him into a woman of color. Um, so if that's your new fear, then what do you do in in response? You create uh an anti-woke AI. And that is precisely what XAI is and what Grock was. The truth seeeking part is really his market proposition against what he sees as the alternative models of open AI and anthropic which have been shot through as he describes it and contaminated with the woke mind virus. But also in this period that we're describing >> he [snorts] has gone through a pretty

big political transformation. Musk of 2012, 2013, you know, pro Obama seems to have fairly been all Silicon Valley politics. Uh the Musk of 20122 does not. He's really becoming already the sort of leader of what we now call the the tech right. So the shift on wokeness for him and the shift in his politics, I think, predates actually in some ways his shift on AI. So how do you understand what that shift was? >> Yeah. So when the Obama administration wanted to do a big push into renewables to reduce dependency on fossil fuels and thus also helped to get out of the Middle East, then Musk was able to profit from that getting this nearly half billion dollar loan from the Department of Energy into the Biden administration. that demand for electric autonomy, as we call it, still existed, but now it was part of also a kind of proworker, pro- union push, which meant that Musk wasn't one of the favored companies for the Biden White House.

>> Yeah. Famously does not get invited to the electric vehicle summit. >> It's snubbed in a way that is kind of like roughly equivalent to the Trump roast at the White House correspondence dinner as the sort of initiating incident of a feeling of being, you know, if you don't like me, then forget you. I'm going to create my own club. Um, one of the forms it took was of course the upswell of social movements making demands around racial justice, gender justice that were of course entering the workplaces of Silicon Valley too that were producing new pressures um open letters, walkouts. This became a site of real um combative anger for the CEO class which felt that this labor class was now exercising power over them the management in a way that was repellent but also the co containment measures become something that really both triggers Musk's anger at his inability to shape the regulatory world around his own needs and also a time where he gets a lot of validation for for his opposition to the containment measures. So his tweet where he says the Corona virus panic is dumb is his first 1 million like tweet and as a response to it Trump responds you know this is outrageous you know reopen the Fremont factory and then he goes ahead and just does it anyway actually against California orders and gets away with it.

[snorts] So this also points to something else I think is relevant in his rightward turn which is his immersion into the world of social media and Twitter in particular which we think of as less a kind of corrupting process of his rationality and more as sort of his iterative attempt to figure out how to trigger um processes that end up actually enriching him and expanding his power. So what can look like a kind of dissipation online or kind of online brain rot is often often actually corresponding with movement upward in the value of his stocks in his personal net worth. It's in 2021 when everyone's online and on their phones that he becomes the richest man in the world and it's sort of by as people have described making himself into a human meme stock. So this what he finds out online on Twitter is that you know polarization is actually rather than being a kind of handicap for his accumulation model is actually real accelerant for it. Well, you're saying polarization and and that is part of it, but polarization also is a method of getting attention, right?

And and and this is a way in which Trump and Musk, I think, have very similar psychologies, but it's so interesting with him the way all the parts are always connected. But I don't think people I don't think I had a really good sense of how rapidly his fortune has expanded. So 2020, >> he has according to estimates $39 billion. Now, it's a lot of money. If I had $39 billion, I'd be stoked. >> Yeah. >> He now has a trillion dollars, >> right? >> Six years. In 2020, he had 4% of the wealth he has now, >> right? >> And what has happened inside those years is not that his company's made a lot of money. He does not have highly profit generating. I mean, I'm not saying there are no profits, but what happened with SpaceX, what happened with Tesla, >> it's not that they began showing profits that shifted, you know, Musk's net worth. What did happen? How do you go from $40 billion to a trillion dollars in six years? >> Yeah. I mean, the price to earnings ratio of his companies are completely outrageous compared to their competitors, but they speak to what as something else, as something he's perfected in in practicing, we talk about in the book as financial fabulism.

So this projection not of a current set of fundamentals or a current revenue model but the promise of being able to open up perhaps infinite future revenues. he becomes, you know, the most iconic example of that and Tesla as something that's able to plausibly present itself as the future of motorization and then maybe also the future of humanoid robots and SpaceX's ability to say, "Listen, we delivered on a drop in over 90% of the cost of putting matter into orbit internet with over 11,000 satellites in space with over 12 million million subscribers tangibly changing the ability to win wars in places like Ukraine. These things are real um things you can point to if you want to persuade yourself that if you're going to make a bat, you make it on this man. >> Well, let me hold you on that for a second because one thing I often see and I think of it as a genuine kind of intellectual mistake, people want the people they don't like to not be impressive. Of course, >> and I think there is a big strain of thought that sort of exists on the left now as they've >> understandably turned against Elon Musk in his politics. What he's [snorts] built is incredible.

>> Yeah. >> And it's real. I mean, we can talk about profits or nonprofits and price to earnings ratios, but >> you can use Starlink. >> Yep. >> You know, you can drive into Tesla. they really have made, you know, sending um tonnage into space uh relatively affordable in a way that it wasn't before. Like >> it like Musk really did do that. >> Yeah. And one of the ways he did that I think is by being ahead of the curve with the move back towards delobalization reshoring retterrorization of production models as well. >> What do you mean by that? I mean that when he launched SpaceX in 2002, one of the ways he radically cut the cost of putting matter into orbit was by bringing a lot of the production inhouse. So making bespoke or making themselves a lot of the components that they need for their rockets, not relying on subcontractors, not relying on kind of lengthy procurement models, but speeding everything up and bringing it all inhouse. Um Tesla famously did this as well. When they built the gigafactories, they were trying to bring as much of the supply chain as they could under the roof of one factory, which meant that exactly in 2020 when automakers got absolutely slammed by the closing of borders, Tesla got hit, but they bounced up much more quickly. It was really one of the things that gave them the possibility to bounce back. So before those big supply shocks, before COVID, before Ukraine, actually Musk was already using a partially kind of decoupled model of production. I

completely agree with you that it's a real stumbling block for many critics who simply want to short circuit to this idea he's just a liar and a grifter or even simply a crony capitalist. In fact, he's not just a crony capitalist because he's pushing out often the kind of technological frontier for economies that do business with him. If you're not a subscriber to the New York Times, we have some news for you. You can now explore the Times for free without any pay walls at all during your first [music] month in the New York Times app. I think that brings together a couple interesting things here because as you mentioned to justify the valuations, Musk is not just selling a vision of the world that he has already achieved. >> He's selling a like a different vision of the future and and he sort of described what it was to the economist. So I want to play that here. >> What is what will your companies be doing in 10 years and how will they make money? Well, you can really think of the economy as uh digital and physical intelligence.

You need the endectors in the form of humanoid robotics um human you need a basically a lots of bots in a nutshell. You need lots of bots um and then you can go from um intelligence manifesting itself only digitally to shaping atoms. Um and you say what what is an economy? An economy is um the production of goods and provision of services. And if you have vast numbers of robots uh with vast amounts of digital intelligence, you have a sort of a quad quasi infinite economy. So, so this is this is really the the future is going to be very very different from the past. >> So, so this is currently the promise of what I would call like Musk industries which is not necessarily that he is going to individually dominate AI. It's that they are going to be the company that takes AI, the kind of conglomerate of companies that takes AI out of bits and into atoms that they will dominate the AI robotics intersection. I I think whether they will or not is obviously something we can't know. But I think there's something worth like getting at at a deeper level of the world being envisioned and promoted here, which is what is the role that human beings play

in this future? >> I mean, it's a very difficult one to sell, right? And one of the strange things about that interview is that he says, you know, economically, civilizationally, we're moving to a situation of kind of if not subordination and simply marginalization by super intelligence. So for that to be the goal to which you're working is first of all very difficult to build consent for and legitimacy for obviously [snorts] um but it also requires a huge amount of synergies between neighboring technologies and one of the ways he's actually unlocked the level of fortune he has this year is by making progress towards bringing together that vertically integrated Musk Industries model under one kind of label. It's only been recently that XAI absorbed X.com and then SpaceX in turn absorbed XAI and now he's vocally calling for the merger of Tesla and SpaceX which would be the largest merger in history and would precisely bring together the part of his empire that does atoms in the form of humanoid robots with the part that does the AI under the umbrella of SpaceX. But then I think one aspect of Muskism which we need to keep our eye on is that he's actually um propelled by the need to create an impression of invulnerability which is actually belied by the truth.

So if you pick up the SpaceX perspectus and read through the risk factors, number one risk factor is national legislation. These are the things that actually keep Musk up at night, right? is the moves being made by national governments to throw sand in the treads of the tank that he's trying to drive towards his goal. So that's I think is something to bear in mind too is like his impression of invulnerability is actually part of his uh political project. And beneath the the sort of mechanism of legislation and the risk of legislation to him is also what populations believe, what [snorts] they believe about the world, what they believe about him, what they want. >> And this, I think, brings together like both a near-term and a long-term obsession. >> Musk has, and you've written about this, a sort of more specific conception of what he calls woke mind virus. When he is describing it, the metaphor is more like computer virus. Yes. than I think people quite realize.

So what is to him the woke mind virus? Because I think it's a little bit different than what people think of as wokeness. >> Yes. So the term viruses of the mind was coined by Richard Dawkins in the early 1990s and wellrespected if sort of incendiary conservative evolutionary biologist and not coincidentally the same guy who coined the term meme in his book the selfish gene from 1976. And the two arguments work together the meme and the mind virus. Both suggest that ideology and belief are nothing more than these kind of discrete units that move between individuals mediated through by the 1990s network technologies. And he is using a direct um analogy between the computer virus and the religious belief. And Musk has absolutely swallowed this notion whole to the point that I think if you want to understand how he understands politics or the problem of consent or indeed the problem of truth, it's insufferable from this idea of humans and machines beingworked together into what he calls cybernetic collectives within which problems of political affiliation, support, loss of support, dissent, anger are triggered always through the multiplication or the reduction of certain memes or certain mind viruses.

So because he saw the mind viruses of racial justice demands and so on leading to a dominance of a blocking coalition against him as he saw it in the 2020s then he needs to propagate the anti-woke mind viruses that will defeat those which seems like an outrageous way of thinking about politics but this is where I think what I talked about at the beginning as a kind of communicative dependency becomes really important because what SpaceX now is is a kind of extraordinary end-to-end vertically integrated communicative space that reach [snorts] >> what does that mean when you say communicative space >> I mean it reaches from chat bots to satellites and what he's trying to do there and what he's selling the comparative advantage of SpaceX is having is access to the real world um emotions of the humans who are posting on x.com so he says you have a kind of real time news engine um opinion engine update and feelings engine meaning that your LLM is also more you know okur and upto-date and of course the implication is that if you can create that as a kind of hermatically sealed silo then you can also become the controller of that space of discourse. So the way that he's transformed X since his acquisition of Twitter is designed to boost exactly the kind of messages that are come in closest proximity to his through actual

monetization of the accounts involved. There's extraordinary news story about the British farright politician Rupert Low who made a tweet about the incompatibility of Muslims with British civilization and there was a follow-on report of how many thousands of pounds he'd actually earned through memes through X.com. So in in Musk's mind, he's producing a kind of mind virus engine [snorts] which he could also call truth. And if he can you know absolutely control the algorithms within which that is magnified or contained then he will have domination over the media. I >> I want you to hold on the sort of more ideological dimension of this belief. So when he understands the quoteunquote woke mind virus >> y >> as a threat to truth seeking as a creation of a kind of corrupted western civilization that has lost that will have lost some of the values that drove it forward before he talks a lot now about western civilization.

>> Yeah. >> What is he saying specifically? >> Yeah. Well, here I think it's actually helpful to come in through the back door through some of his science fiction obsessions, right? I mean, the Foundation series from Isaac Asimov is something he refers to constantly. His mo most recent child is named Seldon after the Harry Seldon figure in the foundation series who is described as a kind of a brilliant um mathematician really who introduces a discipline called psycho history which through kind of manipulation of the present will ensure the survival of civilization. And it's relevant because it's kind of a mixture of rationality and attention to mass emotion and the way that crowds operate and the way mobs work. And the problem with Seldon's plan is that it's confronted with someone who's even better at controlling emotions, which is someone called the mule. And Musk's understanding of communications is always this combination of a world of rationality and then a world of what he calls the limbic instinct or the kind of animal um impulses that drive us. He sees and there I don't think he's totally incorrect the success of social networks as being the way that they draw on both of those kind of resources. And he understands his own interventions as skillfully manipulating two of those simultaneously. So that I think helps to explain how he understands his role.

It's quite fascinating actually that the richest man in the world sees himself in kind of a transitional function to really hand over human history to posthuman history. I mean the vision of super intelligences reducing us to the role of chimpanzees is not actually something anyone with any level of influence has tried to persuade the mass of people to go along with before. And that alone means that he plays with, you know, these categories of truth, curiosity, and emotion in ways that I think can sometimes be jarring and unfamiliar. >> A lot of it is unfamiliar. And when you hear Musk talk, for a person who >> operates with such a high sense of agency when he begins talking about this, he abandons agency. >> But you might imagine a person who felt that way, like not being that interested in day-to-day politics at the moment, but but he is. [clears throat] And and this is where these twin obsessions, I think, come together. Maybe a way to get into this is to play this clip from Rogan, which I think connects some of what you're talking about with the woke mind virus and truth seeeking to to this idea he has that there is like a central security vulnerability in Western civilization.

>> So that we've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it's like I believe in empathy. Like I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for for civilization as a whole and not commit suicizational suicide. >> Also, don't let someone use your empathy against you so they can completely control your state and then do an insanely bad job of managing it and never get removed. >> The the the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're they're it's a it's they're exploiting a a a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, and I I I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot. When he says we've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on, when he says >> that our civilization might be committing suicide, >> what is he saying is happening?

I mean, concretely, when he says something like that, he's uh echoing a very common point of discussion on the European far right. to the far right and to Musk. The real problem with where society is going is not that there are a lot of people trying to or coming to Europe or the United States, but the problem is that the liberals have decided it's a good idea to allow people from radically different cultures and radically different religions to come to the heart of Western civilization. So that not that precise notion of suicidal empathy is all about refugee policy and immigration policy and is at the heart of his demands for what he calls remigration. But I think at a deeper level it comes to his um unwillingness to kind of terry with the traditional concepts of modern political thought. So if you think about what every previous political thinker has been forced to uh contend with over the last 250 years certainly in this country is categories like democracy, popular sovereignty, some idea eventually of like a care for the people. Extended sort of political versions of what you might call empathy, the ways in which communities are imagined as being composed of people who are relative peers or equals at some level. That whole legacy Musk I think would see as part of the contamination of western civilization by empathy. So

social order becomes a programming problem and in programming uh attempts to kind of transform the core code that you're working on are not interpreted as a possibility for consensus building or compromise but simply sites of contamination that need to be programmed away. When I have heard Musk defend this view, the argument he makes, the argument I think he's getting at here to to sort of extend what you're saying is that Europe and the United States, primarily who he's talking about, >> have been through empathy for individuals allowing mass numbers of people to come into their countries who do not fundamentally share their values and their premises. when when he says here that you you need to be careful not to have so much empathy for the individual that you don't have empathy for a civilization as a whole. That's I think what he's describing. >> And I I think it raises maybe a number of of questions here. But one of the core ones to me is how his upbringing in a parttheid South Africa has like influenced or shaped this set of concerns. One doesn't have a lot of kind of documentary um evidence to work with. So there's a certain leap of interpretation that's necessary, but it's not a very big leap of interpretation. And one of the things we describe in the book is the way that

being a minority privileged population racially marked in South Africa that drifted through everyday life and one's whole life course in a way that drifted past sort of faceless colored masses of the African population helps to reinforce in very obvious ways a sort of sense of the non-player characters and the playing characters and South Africa itself. ALF is not a traditional kind of modern nation state in the sense that it's built on a kind of um asymmetrical logic where the majority of the residents are actually just there in so far as they're useful to the minority of residents. So those old problems of what is popular sovereignty, what is national self-determination, how can you get a group of people who live next to each other to see each other in sort of bonds of reciprocal attention or minimal care? Simply didn't apply in late aartite South Africa. Right? It's like as effectively one of the last decolonizing sites in the world, it lived on with that imperial two-tier logic much longer than the rest of the world did. So I think it's easier for him to just set aside what to most political thinkers are things that need to be considered seriously. I think it's worth looking at how that breaks down concretely as well.

So how have previous oligarchs, how have previous titans of industry secured popular consent, right? This is actually where the comparison to Fordism is helpful. Ford himself virulent anti-semite, violently anti-UN. And yet Fordism is something we associate with collective bargaining agreements, upward generational mobility, the construction of the single family breadwinner model, the welfare state even. How did that happen? Well, it happened because through social struggle, through enlightened legislation, and through democratic pressure, a compromise or a social contract emerged in which people were minimally willing to go along with the way that this guy was going to design the factory and the way he was going to make his money. What's the equivalent for Musk, right? What is the social contract that people like Musk are proposing? Where is the equivalent of Carnegie libraries? In the case of Musk, you can look concretely at the Musk Foundation, which few people have heard of, but is one of the top 10 endowed philanthropic foundations in the United States. Why have few people heard of it? Because they routinely don't spend the 5% of their assets that they're required to do as a 501c3 philanthropic foundation in the United States. And when they do, who do they give it to? as in the recent example, they gave it to a school called Ad Astra that is next to SpaceX in Texas that was designed pretty much exclusively for

employees of Musk. So that vision of kind of outward-f facing social purpose, his complete reneging of that is itself quite extraordinary, right? And and and sets him apart actually from others in his class, right? The Gates Foundation arguably um if empathy at as a basic level is a woke mind virus then the Gates Foundation is thoroughly infected with it, right? I mean they have a vision of saving as many lives as possible no matter where they are on the planet. Tons of critiques associated with that of course but a pretty standard way of trying to buy consent under conditions of grotesque inequality. So, it's um it's an extraordinarily bold, I think, a front to all of the normal ways we historians have thought about how instability is stabilized in moments of extreme change. And what's amazing really for me is to see how resilient he's been despite the depth of his provocations. One of the reasons I wanted to have you on was because you wrote a book before the book you did with Ben Tarnoff on Muskism that I think is important to to Musk to understanding Musk maybe to understand some of the modern right the book is called HX Bastards just if you don't mind just tell me about the the main argument of that >> the main argument of that is that there were a group of people who called themselves neoliberals right coined it in 1938

and when they called themselves neoliberals. They meant that they needed to figure out how to protect the principles of market freedom in a time when that was under challenge from as they saw the left and the right. So some of these people became quite famous. The Milton Friedman's, Friedrich Hayek, Gary Becker, George Stigler and through the cold war of course they um exercised their political influence as well. They could became favorites of Thatcher and Reagan and come the end of the cold war one would think that they had reached their ultimate victory. Right? And yet, and this is what was so fascinating, when I went back to look at transcripts of the meetings that they were having, the papers they were publishing, as the Berlin Wall fell, as the Soviet Union fell apart, they were actually panicked about a new set of threats. The red enemy, as they often put it, had turned into a green one. Remember, this was an early high point of activism against um greenhouse gases and the dangers of what was then more often called the greenhouse effect and global warming than climate change. They were worried about the resurgent demands for affirmative action and equality of representation in the workplace, equal pay. They were worried about minority sexual demands from the gay rights movement to the feminist movement. So this becomes important because it creates the conditions for an alliance which would only really come to full

fruition um years later between people who wanted to defend free market freedoms as best they could with people who seem to have opposition to those same progressive politics but for different reasons. So this is the moment of the paleoconsservative alliance for example between a radical libertarian like Marie Rothbart with someone who is mostly interested in cultural nationalism like papyan. Alternative for Germany is a perfect example of this as well. Founded by neoliberal economists who thought the euro was being mismanaged creating alliances with ethnationalists um and opponents of Muslim immigration. How these two things ended up getting linked together seems to be like an important question to figure out about our politics. Well, one of the ways that I understand you as making the argument is that they're linked together in a view that very fundamental categories and hierarchies of persistent society are are natural that they reflect IQ differentials, cultural differentials, um you know, people who are more or less fit either at the individual level, at the group level, etc. And what I thought was interesting about this book in conversation with your Musk book is that to me when when I see sort of the way Musk talks about the woke mind virus to me there's a lot of this in it. this sort of sense that there are important hierarchies

categories in society and that the danger comes from a kind of constant progressive push or a woke push >> to dissolve them and that you can't have western civilization without the sort of hierarchies upon which western civilization was was built and I just sort of interpret a lot of Musk's political activity as not about free markets or any of these other things but about this >> yeah I mean the subtitle to that book is race, gold, IQ, and the capitalism of the far right. And in all of those cases, there was a expressed belief that nature was an unequal place and it distributed gains unequally either through birth or you know territorial endowments and that to deny that basic natural inequality was to you know pave the road to surfom as Hayek described it in a new way. now it would be paved with green bricks and pink bricks instead of red bricks and someone like Musk I think absolutely falls into that category where I think the '9s conversation gets updated and kind of uh transformed in our present moment is especially around a category like IQ. [snorts] So IQ is fascinating because in the 1990s it came surging back for a few different reasons. The arguments that put it back on the table were especially those of Charles Murray, the think tanker, and Richard Hearnstein, the Harvard psychologist, in their enormous bestseller, The Bell Curve, from 1994.

And that book said two things. It said, "At the one end of the bell curve, we're going to get people whose IQ is going to be ever more determinative of economic success because of the knowledge economy we're in. And at the low end of that bell curve, we're going to have people who are going to be less and less able to perform in this knowledge economy. and they're going to be a social problem. And the incendiary part of course that there are group differences in racial intelligence such that we can assume that there will be disproportionately large number of black people at that bottom end of the bell curve. So the era of the knowledge economy is also the era of mass incarceration and the real um turn towards more punitive police law and order policies. And the way that this was mapped onto an idea of who is equipped and who isn't for the big transition in how money will be made and jobs will look ends up being a pretty good kind of way to read that. Why that's different now is that by their own statements the tech leadership now assumes that almost all of those knowledge jobs are going to be automated away. Right? So if IQ was predicting even at the far 10% of the curve for the people who would thrive in the coming internet world then what happens if that's now been reduced to like.1%.

Because all those other jobs the coders the project managers the copywriters the technical writers are all going to be done by LLMs and agents which is what they of course are banking on. Then you have a question where AI has actually eaten IQ and now you've gone from just a cognitive elite which is what Harrenstein and Murray called it to a kind of hyper hyper small cognitive super aristocracy. I want to stay on this point because to me this kind of coheres a lot of things in Musk that are puzzling from the outside >> which is you know you've got this guy for whom a long time the long-term vision is the most important thing is expanding the light cone of human consciousness through the stars now there's a sort of you know kind of seems like bending of the psychic knee to the AI superiority Musk is at the same time very worried about falling birth rates. >> Yeah.

>> As he is destroying like foreign aid which certainly help people thrive and be alive and you know live long lives and reproduce at the same time that he is virulently anti- at least the immigration policies of many of these countries. And it's like where does this sort of guy who on the one hand appears to believe in just like maximizing the quantity of consciousness fit with this guy who seems to not really like a lot of humanity? Where does this guy who believes in humanity fit with this guy who seems to be accelerating you know the AI turnover? But if your sort of fundamental view of the world is about a kind of cognitive hierarchy >> and you have certain views about you know where AI will sit in that where different cultures sit in that >> it's not like onetoone with any individual thing not one to one with race not even one to one with silicon versus flesh >> it's just onetoone with a certain vision >> of who or what qualifies as having like the capacity to be a main character. in this performance >> then a lot of it I think begins to fall into a an unsettling but a kind of >> like coherent space.

>> Yeah. No, I mean I think there's a couple ways to look at I mean one is to draw back on his grandfather's ideology, right? Which I hesitate to do too much because there's no evidence that Musk himself was influenced by his maternal grandfather. His maternal grandfather Joshua Halddederman was a very active member of something called Temocracy Incorporated in Canada in the 1930s. And what Temocracy Incorporated was proposing was something very similar to what we're talking about here. It was about the dissolution of the existing price system, the dissolution of democracy altogether, the reduction of the unit of exchange and I guess store of value to something called an URG which was the unit of energy that each human is able to produce in their life. And the rational allocation of those urgs would be overseen by a very very small but elite cast of engineers. And that is a extremely you know far-fetched but very radical vision that actually on the from the menu of existing political ideologies probably comes the closest to what it seems like Musk is describing.

But I think to get there is there are a few steps involved right and and [laughter] >> sorry that had a lot of understatement to it. >> Yeah. Yeah. Um so there is the problem of the transition right now for Musk. I think it's a central problem which is how do we get even from where we are now to this 10year mile marker to the end of his life. Right. Actually he has no real plans for his succession. It's one of the extraordinary things about SpaceX from a corporate law point of view is the he has 85% of the voting shares if he dies tomorrow and you'd have simply have to wait for those shares to be allotted. So that I think he's really banking on that transition having taken place in his own lifetime. And how do you get there? Right? And this is where the relationship to the highex bastards discourse is actually relevant again because one of the arguments I make in that book is that under these um an atmosphere of uncertainty, times of unrest, then there is a tendency as within the investor world to do a flight to safety. And what these far-right thinkers in association with neoliberal thinkers were doing were offering different forms of refuge and safety where a certain kind of value would be protected and more durable. So those were things, you know, your whiteness will save you. Your access to a gold horde will save you. Your citizenship value, which was one of Bannon's talking points in the first Trump campaign, will save you. The problem with Musk now is if he's saying that the people who will

get through the filter are such a small minority that how do you sell this vision to enough people to let you realize your goals in the medium term except I think defaulting to very shopworn scripts of ethnationalism and social war. So his decision to say the way I'm going to win consent is simply to make you frightened of outsiders and make you believe you need my uh technology to save your lives of yourself and your family is a way that politicians have used to justify lack of material redistribution for you know over 100 years. There's actually nothing new about that. And it's actually one of his, I would say, less innovative sort of interventions is this belief that simply memeing the fear of the invader will be enough to get you through that uh transitional moment until you get to quite literally, you know, liftoff or escape [music] velocity. >> [music] >> I always thought the reason the Musk Trump alliance >> was so potent particularly in its early moments before Musk kind of discredited himself as a direct actor through Doge.

>> Yeah. but was that one they recognized in each other and particularly Musk recognized in Trump. It's why I think he endorsed him after the assassination attempt when Trump raised the bloody fist. that what Trump in the in his third campaign for president began to represent was a return of masculine will to politics like out of this era of >> you know woke feminized consensusoriented politic that that and for a lot of people like this idea of the builder the industrialist right the ein rondian superman >> the world spirit on horseback the world spirit on horseback >> that you know >> Trump began to embody some of I don't think he does now, but there's this way in which I think what to Musk's many many many many fans like >> I think young to middle-aged male fans, what he represents is this kind of like masculine conquering impulse. It's why I think some of the kind of scary visions of the future he presents at the level not of content but of texture, they don't always scare people because to like hear a person saying this is to hear a person saying like we will sally boldly forth and try to forge a glorious and unknown future for humanity. Even if it's one that on the face of it barely seems like a future for humanity at all. But at least at least it is not afraid of the future.

>> Yeah. And I think it also sets up a kind of you know Pascal's wager or kind of Ro's basilisk dynamic which is like the closer you are to him the closer you adhere to his vision and the more likely is that you'll be one of the ones who gets through the filter. Right? So if he's the one who is making the future then to deny him would basically be to doom yourself to obsolescence. And that's you know not an exchange that a lot of people are willing to make. But I think the important thing to see, you know, just not so as not to give him too much credit in this is to see how he's actually managed to monopolize a lot of things that were the product of collective will creation and collective intelligence. Right? that I think directs attention to the task of reform which is like how can you dethrone Musk not in the sense of throwing away all of the technology that he produced by often piggybacking on other people's innovations but how can can you create a different story whereby it's you know the people the nation who decide this and not just one man and his posts well that I think brings us maybe back into the more material realm of immediate politics because one of the things that strikes me about what we are seeing now is that it is a fundamentally unstable equilibrium. So you have Elon Musk who as you have described his companies are inextricably intertwined with politics.

It would be hard to unwind the state from that. >> Absolutely. But also by that very same token, if you're a, you know, Democrat, right, the idea that you're going to be dependent on on Musk and he can turn off Starlink when, you know, if Ukraine or some other um country or ally or even America is doing something he doesn't like, that that's very very dangerous. >> You know, one thing that that intertwining with the state creates is both like a a vulnerability. And so it becomes very very very dangerous for him the more he becomes allied with a kind of more extreme version of the right >> to have any leftwing or centrist candidates win really like anywhere in the world and the countries are dependent on him >> and that just at some point either I think you end up in a situation where like Musk needs to break the opposition to him >> or it's like the state needs to contain the threat. >> It just seems fundamentally unstable. It's not like he gave $10 million. He just dropped about $450 million like it's nothing because to him it is nothing. Yeah.

>> Right. >> Yeah. I mean the way that my co-author and I we're talking about this and we had interestingly I would say more pragmatic conversations about Musk and Muskism in the book in Europe than we've had in the United States. I think the proximity of Musk and the problems you're describing to Americans makes it very hard to deal with it rationally because there's such a desire to lash out at this level of kind of cexis like the suturing together of the future of the American economy with Musk and his products that sometimes there's a will to kind of moralize and psychize and just bat him away and denounce him without further reflection. Whereas in Europe, we found that there was a kind of a threer strategy that we were discussing and people were discussing. One is regulation of course is one model, right? And that's you could say the route the route that the EU is taking. The other model though is replacement. So you look at what Musk has made and you say how much would it cost to make substitutes and often the cost is very very high. But the third model is really to kind of reimagine what the heck this tech is even for. And that's where I think looking at the range of Musk's um history of business creation is actually helpful because we alluded to this before, but the kind of promise of electric autonomy for example that he was holding out when Tesla was mostly making EVs, but also when it was making solar panels and you know battery storage units was actually um much more

socially useful and potentially inspiring than what he has done with his businesses ever since. So I think that one attitude there is to is to start from first principles and just say like what are we even you know investing in any of this for in the first place >> what do we want >> what do we want and and actually one of the pedagogic virtues of Musk and his very monstrousness is he's made that question impossible not to ask right because if the answer to that question is what we want is continued level of being completely fused with this man then I think a lot of people on reflection would not want that so he's made us ask that question and he knows that he's put himself into a kind of a difficult situation with people asking that question. Hence the impression of inevitability. So in the economist interview he said it's not like we can stop AI right now. There's no red button that says stop. Actually, of course, there is right. Generative AI on its current model requires uh enormous amount of buildout of compute infrastructure that actually right now is being slowed down to the point of even stopping through hundreds of moratoria across the country. So, it's actually not true that there's inevitability to the world that he's imagining. it actually is true that we have options and breaking out of the kind of cosmic um you know vector that he's produced through the the uses of the attention economy is the first step in that. But I think it gets even more pragmatic than that. I'll give you an example on his newsletter this week.

Paul Krugman centrist liberal economist has talked in two segments about nationalizing Starlink. >> Right. >> Paul's only a centrist to you. [laughter] >> Yeah. But this is actually not something that you would have expected him to talk about a few years ago, right? I mean, the use of the defense production act, the comparisons to the the nationalization of Montgomery Ward. >> A pragmatic economist until recently would have said if you nationalize a country, a company that's in the top 10 on the NASDAQ, you're going to trigger a recession. There'll be cascading effects of loss of competence, repricing of risk and >> loss of incentives for future companies to build this kind of capacity. >> Exactly. But the very fact that this kind of controlled demolition of the very muskus dependencies you're describing is now being brought onto the agenda I think is very encouraging. >> But but this is what I actually mean by an unstable equilibrium. I saw those pieces from Paul. I thought they were very very interesting. And as you say it's interesting that Paul who you know I call him like sort of a progressive economist but >> not a communist, >> right? Not a someone prone to nationalization.

>> Someone prone to nationalization. Exactly. Um, the fact that he was, you know, talking about this, I think speaks to a world where it's like you could really imagine a situation with a Democratic president and Musk turns off Starlink at some critical moment and the Defense Production Act is like immediately engaged and like you do have this like moment of genuine showdown, right? This both I think from Musk's perspective needs to be understood as a risk of like what he's doing and the way he's acting >> and from the other perspective because you are getting to this position and we should say one reason I haven't focused on the Ukraine Starling question >> is right now the reporting is contested in a way I cannot untangle >> as to whether or not orders came from somewhere inside the Trump administration or were implied by somewhere in the Trump administration or you know the activity was from Musk >> and I just don't know the answer and I could see it also being a miscommunication right you know the these things happen too >> so I don't want to say confidently what happened there >> but I think it is one can say relatively confidently that you could imagine a series of things happening where for instance you know Musk and look I don't love Michael Bloomberg dropping $80 million at the end of the campaign either right I I don't think this is the way campaign should work you know you begin having much more serious efforts at you know restricting the ability of like mega billionaires to drop this much Um, and Musk is a billionaire on a scale that somebody like Bloomberg, you know, cannot even touch.

>> It is just rare for an individual person to have so much power that they they they're not a state unto themsself, >> but they are some kind of like state capacity sized entity. >> Yeah. >> Right. Operating, you know, it's like the Vatican of technology that he's got over there. >> Yeah. But I think it's also important to then keep in mind one of the things that I started this conversation talking about, which is the financial dependency, right? SpaceX is in the top 10 in the stock market indices. More than 50% of Americans hold some kind of equities or stocks. Most of those are directly or indirectly, mostly indirectly through passive funds connected to the health of Musk's um businesses. So let's say 20 to 30% of Americans have some kind of stake there indirectly. So, one of the things that Musk has proposed recently is that he'd give one stock in SpaceX to every American child. And the proposal is that would happen through the Trump accounts, which are, you know, automatically made accessible to um children in the United States. If he goes through with his plan, then that number of American citizens goes up to about 50%. So there you're approaching a way of kind of blackmailing, you could say, the American population away from following someone like Krugman's plans by saying, "Do you really want to hurt yourself?

Are you going to hurt your child like that by punishing me, Musk, the person who's keeping the stock market afloat?" And if you get into the granular questions of who owns the stock, it gets even more interesting. Who are top 10 investors? the Ontario teachers pension, huge amount of SpaceX stock, the primary educational target of the Trump administration and Musk often himself, Harvard University, huge [snorts] holder of SpaceX, University of North Carolina. So when you see that, you know, in a way these although high-profile and superficially startling moments of turning on and off drone connectivity in the battlefield are the sharp edge of the wedge, you could say, but the base of really what anchors the dominance of the Silicon Valley digital sector in the United States is really in the stock market itself. and the fact that that's how we do redistribution. That's how we do the social contract is say you pay in to this you know market determined pension fund and you will be paid out of it and whoever is keeping that thing propped up actually arguably has the real power of saying what the social contract looks like. So then I think sitting in that that birectional dependency but that real dependency I is it's maybe worth ending in a strange place but I actually do think it's an important one. You you mentioned that the conversations in Europe are maybe a little less prone to the psychologizing than the conversations in America.

>> The problem though is that Musk's psychology is very important. >> Yeah. >> And there's something that he says a lot. I I was there in 2016 at the Recode Conference. I was actually, I think, one of the first people to write about this >> when he was talking about how, you know, he believed it was very likely we lived in a computer simulation. This sort of idea that Nick Boston, that >> philosopher you you mentioned, is is very associated with, >> but he's kept saying it and actually in somewhat stronger terms. So, so I want to play this clip. This is Elon Musk on Walter Isacson's show. >> How convinced are you that we might be in a simulation? You know, I once had a dinner at my house with a physicist and a computer scientist, and they're both like leaders in their field. And I asked the question, what do you think the probabilities that we're in a simulation? And the physicist said 0% and the computer scientist said 100% simultaneously. [clears throat] So, I [laughter] guess maybe I should go 50% then.

I don't know. It's it's I mean there there there's odd things that happen in this simulation where especially if you're me I mean think about it like if you're me and you're like should should all these things really be happening? Should I really be making spaceships to go to the moon and Mars? Like what the that doesn't seem real. >> The simulation theory is that if you just imagine advanced society would create lots of simulations, right? The way we make maybe make lots of video games. You just shouldn't assume that >> we are living in the base reality. That's sort of the the the argument in a nutshell. >> But he goes further and and and I get in a psychological way why, right? I've heard him say this now repeatedly that well, what really seems unlikely is to be Elon Musk. What really seems unlikely >> is to be building starships and influencing global politics and having 250 million ex followers or whatever it is and being the first trillionaire. And that the mixture of a life that is so unlikely >> and also not like grounded in some other ontology, right? Not some religion or some other way of imagining the world, >> plus a sort of attraction to the simulation hypothesis.

And of course, you'd be a lifelong gamer. And I I just think that, you know, for a person with as much power as he has [snorts] to kind of have that kind of psychology to suspect this is a game where like your role in it is making big moves. >> Mhm. >> I don't really know how to describe that situation, but it is a distinctive one that we all now have a lot of exposure to. >> Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of varieties of the simulation theory, too, right? One is like we are all simply just artifacts of this future civilization's um computer video game, but the other is that there's a most people are shadow people and a small number of people are actually playing characters. And it seems like that's the one that orients him most. And in the kind of libertarian community that reflected a lot on these things, one of the people is Robin Hansen, the George Mason University economist, who said, "What kind of ways would we conduct ourselves if this were true?" And he says, you know, if this were true, then it would make sense to first care nothing about other people.

So things like foreign, he says foreign aid and the welfare state would be frivolous things to spend time on to be as entertaining as possible to accumulate as much wealth as possible and to try to simply organize the world around you in as successful way as you can. So there's like this radical reneging on anything like social responsibility that is only possible if you embrace this incredibly kind of nihilistic you know reaffirmation of your megalamania. And the question is how to remove the props and struts that hold him up in that delusion because it is not true and he needs to be somehow persuaded from the outside that it's not true. If he continues to be incentivized to indulge in those ways of thinking, then he will be uh never required to kind of be uh devested of that. I think that's a place to end. Always a final question. What are three books you recommend to the audience?

>> Well, there's so much amazing work happening right now in the world of tech criticism and political economy. So I wanted to draw attention to three exceptional recent books that kind of I would say move up the stack from under the ground to the clouds and the apps. The first book would be the Ria Franos's book extraction the frontiers of green capitalism which is about something that we've kind of put out of our minds for the last 18 months or so which is really the challenges of climate combined with a world that still operates according to the price mechanism and where the state can fit in. None of these machines certainly none of the data centers would work without the raw materials being extracted somewhere from the earth and put into their uh circuitry and Thea gives a wonderful kind of description of the political settlements and tensions and struggles that emerge in the process of doing so. The second book would be a book by Nick Cernich called Silicon Empires. I think one of the handicaps we have have right now in talking about tech ideology and tech political economy is a lot of things get jumbled together.

So when you talk about semiconductors it's somehow also a discussion of frontier labs is also a discussion of you know neoclouds and data centers but these individual market sectors actually operate under very different dynamics. And I haven't read anything yet better than Nick Cernichek as a kind of a calm guided tour up the stack of what AI actually is as a built entity. The third book is one I think is really special. It's called against tech oligarchy by JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine. And both of them were organizers within tech companies in Silicon Valley. So Clarissa Redwine led the successful organization of Kickstarter and both of them were in Twitter trying to organize employees at the time of the Musk takeover. So what they just draw uh attention to is the fact that class struggle and class politics exists in Silicon Valley inside of tech companies. And they give the insiders view of how you practice class power inside of the tech sector. And it's interestingly not always as they see it through the oldfashioned model of getting recognition for a union that can sometimes slow down some of the dynamics that draw people into social activism.

So it's a very cleareyed and wonderfully written kind of insight into something that I think most people know very little about. Quincian, thank you very much. >> It's my pleasure. [music] >> [music] >> Hey, [music] hey hey.