The Geopolitics of SpaceX and Elon Musk

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**Ravi Agrawal** (0:31)
Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief.
This is FP Live.
Almost everyone on planet Earth now knows about SpaceX. It was launched in 2002 by Elon Musk, and when it went public earlier this month, it had the largest IPO in history, making Musk the first US dollar trillionaire, for a bit at least. The stock has declined this week, but it's fair to say that Musk might soon become the first recurring dollar trillionaire. More seriously though, the IPO raises so many big questions. Should one person or one company have so much power in space? Does SpaceX give the United States a competitive advantage? Can Starlink, the satellite internet service, be used as a geopolitical force, denying or granting internet for ideological reasons? And is this really about space? Or is it about enriching Musk as he vertically integrates a set of companies to make himself indispensable and almighty? Think about it, X, previously Twitter, Grok, which automates it, Grokopedia, which turns discourse on X into encyclopedic fact. And then there's Starlink, controlling the very airwaves. One could argue that all these companies amplify Musk's worldview. So what does that mean for the world? And I should also make clear, this is not just a geopolitical topic. This impacts me, you and all of us. Musk fast-tracked the listing of SpaceX on NASDAQ. If you live in America and you have a 401k, or if you live anywhere in the world and you are invested in a US index fund, you are invested in SpaceX. And that makes the geopolitics of that one company and of Elon Musk a much more pertinent question to discuss.
Well, my guest today is Quinn Slobodian, a professor of international history at Boston University. He is the author of several terrific books, but most recently co-author of Muskism, A Guide for the Perplexed. This is a bonus episode this week, so I'm skipping my usual read on the news. Do take a look at our previous episode on the war in Iran. I really learned a lot from our guest there. As always, we love hearing from you. Write us at live at foreignpolicy.com.
Let's dive in.
Quinn, welcome to FP Live.

**Quinn Slobodian** (3:08)
Happy to be here.

**Ravi Agrawal** (3:10)
Quinn, there is so much to talk about. Before we get to SpaceX, Muskism. Explain it. What does that mean?

**Quinn Slobodian** (3:18)
Well, our inspiration by myself and my co-author, Ben Tarnoff, was the way that people have dealt with Fordism. For 100 years now, people have talked about something called Fordism, originally defined as the dictatorship of technical reason in 1926
But later, a social system that combined mass production plus mass consumption to produce a reconfigured social contract. Our thought was so much has gone into investigations of Musk as a person, as a thinker, as an innovator, as an engineer. But less has gone into his understanding of what social worlds are supposed to emerge to complement his business model downstream from the new forms of accumulation that he rolls out. So we wanted to say, what is Muskism? If he were given the full leash to carry out his vision in its fullest form, what would that mean for all of us?

**Ravi Agrawal** (4:12)
There's this bit, as you're defining Muskism in the book, where you write that in trying to unplug from Musk, you realize that he owns the socket. Talk about that a little bit. What does that mean and what is Musk's so-called walled garden that you refer to?

**Quinn Slobodian** (4:29)
Sure.
So one way we have of defining Muskism as a one-liner is that it's the promise of sovereignty through technology to both nations and individuals, that ends up cashing out as actually deeper dependency on one person, namely Musk himself. So we talk about categories of sovereignty as a service, meaning he does expand the ability of nations to put mass into orbit, to have connectivity through satellites. These are genuine kind of expansions of state capacity for individuals like Musk, nations like the United States and so on. But they always cash out as a deeper dependency. We also talk about state symbiosis, the argument being that we shouldn't be distracted by ideas of libertarianism. That's never really been the motivator for someone like Musk. It's never even really been his core governing philosophy. But indeed, he's always been very much invested in creating a tight and interlock dependency on state as backstop, the subsidizer, as primary client.