Does Elon Musk represent a new form of capitalism?

**Peter Thal Larsen** (0:03)
In the past few days, we have seen two sides of Elon Musk. The first side was when SpaceX, his Rockets to Chatbots company, launched a record stock market listing. Unless you have been stuck in a cave or circling the globe in outer space, you should know by now that SpaceX is valued at more than $2 trillion, and that this feat has made Musk the world's first trillionaire.
Yet in the hours leading up to the IPO, at the same time as Musk was being lauded by the heads of the world's largest investment banks and asset managers, we saw another side of him. He was using his account on X, the social media network he controls, to try to stir up what can only be described as a race riot in the United Kingdom. After a violent attack in Northern Ireland, which led to masked men burning families out of their homes, Musk used his considerable influence to stir up anger and resentment. He unleashed a cascade of tweets in which he urged his followers to protest loudly and repeatedly, approvingly retweeted the far-right activist Tommy Robinson and claimed that Restore Britain Party, whose leader Rupert Lowe wants to deport millions of people and prosecute existing politicians, is the only party that can save Britain.
These two snapshots pose a tricky and urgent question. Is Musk unique? Or does his blend of rules-breaking, gravity-defying entrepreneurialism and extreme political activism represent some new strain of capitalism? That's the question we're going to explore on The Big View today. It's what we do at Reuters Breakingviews. We tap our best sources around the world for fresh insights into the biggest stories in business, finance and economics. I'm your host, Peter Thal Larsen.
To talk all this over, I'm delighted to be joined by Quinn Slobodian. Quinn is Professor of International History at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. He's the author of numerous books, including most recently, Muskism, A Guide for the Perplexed, which he co-wrote with Ben Tarnoff. Quinn Slobodian, welcome to The Big View.

**Quinn Slobodian** (2:14)
Happy to be here.

**Peter Thal Larsen** (2:16)
So, there's a lot to talk about, but what I want to start with this concept of Muskism.
I mean, I think we've all heard and read and watched a lot about Elon Musk in the past few months, probably too much. But this is the first attempt that I've seen to make the case that there's something more systematic going on here, that he's representative of something. So, what would you say in a nutshell, what are the defining features of Muskism?

**Quinn Slobodian** (2:50)
Well, I suppose it's worth saying something about our intention in putting that ism on his name.
It isn't so much to see him as a kind of religious figure or a political philosopher who has laid out systematically his worldview and his game plan in advance. Rather, the way we were using it is the way that social scientists have used for now over a hundred years the category of Fordism. So, when people talked about Fordism, they didn't always talk about the things that Ford himself was thinking about or had put on paper, had said aloud. But they were extrapolating from what he was doing in the factory into a larger social system and asking themselves, how is this downstream of the factory going to transform the rest of society and politics? How is the family going to be re-

**Peter Thal Larsen** (3:41)
Sorry to interrupt, but just to be clear, this is Henry Ford we're talking about, right?

**Quinn Slobodian** (3:44)
Henry Ford, right. So, Henry Ford.

**Peter Thal Larsen** (3:47)
Yeah.

**Quinn Slobodian** (3:48)
Actually, it's exactly 100 years ago that this category Fordism gets invented. And so for 100 years now people have been saying, what does it mean to build a society around industrial manufacturing? Well, we thought about this category for the center of our book. We were asking a similar question, which is, what kind of world is implied? What kind of society is implied when you construct an economy on the basis of the digital sector and digital capitalism? And Musk, because of the wide range of things he's done, from kind of the hardest of hard tech to often the most vaporous of software, gives you a good kind of palette to work with. And our intention was to switch up the conversation, which is often dominated by, we think, unhelpful categories like libertarianism or the escapism that's often associated with someone like Peter Thal.
And in its place, we're substituting what we think are more down-to-earth concepts, including state symbiosis. So the idea that the tech sector has always worked closely with the government and is becoming even closer in the last year or two. Categories like sovereignty as a service, which is what we describe Musk and Muskism as selling and offering.