Muskism (2026)

A pyrotechnic examination of Elon Musk as a symptom and avatar of our postliberal age. Who is Elon Musk, and what is he doing? Is he a hero, a villain, or does he constantly swing between the two? While the media often treats Musk in personal terms, this book argues that he is better understood as an avatar of something called Muskism: a playbook for our new postliberal age. Musk himself does not necessarily hold a coherent set of beliefs; his life can be seen as one long improvisation, and he has never used the word Muskism himself, just as Henry Ford never used Fordism to define his own postliberal modernity. By exploring the forces that shaped Musk, from South Africa to Silicon Valley and from SpaceX to DOGE, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff outline the motifs and practices that have come to dominate our crisis-ridden world. Muskism speaks the language of crisis and emergency to invoke a less human future in which people are purged from the productive process and merged with the machine through social media and video games. It is a worldview in which the technocrat is king, the state is used to achieve supremacy, and only a select few deserve salvation. The book warns that those who enter this world will grind and live in the shadow of one man, while the rewards may be priceless and the alternative may be extinction. The book is in English.