Explained: Elon Musk's plan for world domination | Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff interview

**Quinn Slobodian** (0:00)
Am I tough enough?

**Ava** (0:01)
Strong and stable leadership. Total ruba. Hell yes, I'm tough enough.

**Ben Tarnoff** (0:04)
Shut the fridge.

**Quinn Slobodian** (0:05)
Not another once.

**Ava** (0:07)
It's the PoliticsJOE podcast. I'm gonna start with Elon Musk in South Africa. So let's go back to the late 80s. He has avoided the draft, and he's moved to the States. Can you talk to me about whether, well, I mean, I know the answer to this, but why have you written about Apartheid with Elon Musk, what was the importance, or what was the impression that that left on him?

**Ben Tarnoff** (0:34)
Yeah, it's a good question, and it comes up a lot when people ask us about Musk, because a lot of folks remember that he was born, as you mentioned, in Apartheid, South Africa. He's born in Pretoria in 1971, and the Apartheid regime is remembered correctly as a white supremacist regime, of course it was, and as has been pointed out by many observers, there are clearly resonances between that and his later turn to the far right. But for us, the Apartheid was also interesting to look at because the regime saw itself not just as a white supremacist one, but as a modernizing one. So they actually embraced high technology. For instance, they built out a nuclear program. They actually built an operational bomb by the early 1980s. And they also pursued a degree of economic self-sufficiency. And they thought of these things, technology and economic self-sufficiency, as integral to the survival of the regime, because they correctly perceived that they were encircled by enemies. They had a black majority within the country that was opposed to apartheid rule. They also had enemies at their borders, who in turn actually erupted into armed conflict. So that experience for us actually felt quite resonant with some later practices of Musk, in particular his industrial philosophy. One of the features of Musk as an industrialist at both SpaceX and Tesla is his emphasis on vertical integration. And that at the time that he was pursuing it in the 2000s, really cut against the grain of the conventional wisdom, the high point of free market globalization, but into the 2010s and especially the 2020s looks quite prescient. It attunes him to the new politics of deglobalization, which is kind of where we're living now.

**Ava** (2:20)
I actually found that part about the vertical integration very interesting, which is it sort of lent itself to this obsession with sovereignty that Elon Musk seems to have. And let's take that back a moment, because let's talk about sort of around... Well, actually, we could skip forward even to the Cybertruck, because that's the sort of most obvious gauche example of it. What is it about that? What is he selling with that product?

**Quinn Slobodian** (2:46)
One of the things we find useful about using Musk as a vehicle for the book, because in a way, it's not a psychological portrait of Musk. We're using Musk as a way to talk about the last 25 years of global capitalism. And he's a kind of exaggerated figure, a kind of indicator species for a lot of things that are happening just below the surface. Some of those include the rise of green capitalism, so the idea that you can do an energy transition while keeping a price system in place, the overwhelming reliance on digital capitalism and big tech firms to carry the stock market and to carry economic growth, and then the clash with China and the United States. And Musk has been there everywhere along the way. Something like the Cybertruck is interesting because it had an earlier iteration, which was the kind of cherry red, beautiful EV roadster. So when Musk was preaching what we call electric autonomy around 2008, he was coasting the wave of digital capitalism and green capitalism, but it looked quite different in 2008 than it looks in 2024 In 2008, you could still imagine climate change or something that could be slowed down or maybe even quote unquote beaten. So maybe everyone would just have their own, you know, cute EV in their garage and consumer capitalism could flow on as it did before. By the time of the Cybertruck, it's not just Musk that has changed, but the world has changed around them too, right? We have flood after flood, hottest summer on record after hottest summer on record. Climate change is not going to be stopped. It may at best be slowed down, but really you're going to have to adapt to it. So we see his turn to this kind of more militarized, securitized version of his own products is itself a kind of a symptom of the changing mood in the United States and beyond.