Musk and feral Trumpism

Quinn Slobodian's and Ben Tarnoff's book Muskism tells well the life so far of Elon Musk.

He was born in 1971 into a wealthy but mildly liberal, and very dysfunctional, white family in South Africa. At age 18 he moved to Canada, immediately to escape conscription. "Who wants to serve in a fascist army?" he later commented.

In his earlier years as a tech capitalist in the USA, working up to his status now as the world's richest person, he was erratically liberal. He backed Obama, Clinton, Biden in 2008-20.

Since about 2022, he has been clearly right-wing, and since mid-2024 pro-Trump and far-right. In early 2025 Trump appointed Musk "senior adviser to the President" and licensed his "DOGE" operation, smashing up large parts of the US administrative machine supposedly to eliminate "woke" influence, get full carry-through of Trump's edicts, and save money.

In mid-2025, after quitting DOGE, he clashed with Trump for a while. Then he reconciled. For now he functions more as an international outrider for Trump than as an associate in government.

The book claims to do more than chronicle, and sees an ideology of "Muskism", "found in the feedback loop between man and moment", which (alarmingly) could be the "playbook for our new postliberal age".

"Musk… sees the matrix [i.e. the electronic networks around us] not as the problem, but as part of the solution. Muskism, in the end, means building a better matrix".

"The perils of superintelligence could be neutralised by dissolving ourselves into data… become AI". "The real bugs in the code [are] people, especially the non-white illegal immigrants".

Musk's life story, however, suggests more an off-beam series of personal vagaries. He went feral politically around the time when his daughter Vivian gender-transitioned in 2020-2. He raged that she had been "killed by the woke mind virus".

Musk is, like say Henry Ford, talented in some areas, but mostly unstable. Like Ford, he has huge economic power; and, unlike Ford, he has had and may regain personal political power, as an attack-dog for Trumpism.