Elon Musk and the end of the future

A book and a video game both argue that rather than treating Elon Musk as a singular character, we might better understand him as both symptom and avatar of our postliberal age – one in which crisis becomes opportunity for profit, provocation and cyborg expansionism.

Quinn Slobodian is the author of several books including Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018) and Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right (2025). Ben Tarnoff is a tech worker, writer, and co-founder of Logic Magazine. He is the author of Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future (2022). Bahar Noorizadeh is an artist, writer, filmmaker and founder of Weird Economies, a collaborative platform dedicated to radical economic imaginaries. Her work has been exhibited at major venues including the Guggenheim Museum NYC, Venice Architecture Biennale, and Taipei Biennial.

Formed by both post-apartheid South Africa and the Trumpist US, Elon Musk is emblematic of the collapse of the contemporary moment, and its troubling future. The historians Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, the authors of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed (2026), offer a new interpretation of Musk’s empire in which they argue that his vision is not merely an entrepreneurial venture, but a distinct ideology that reflects today’s still-emergent financial codes. Slobodian and Tarnoff discuss the book with the artist Bahar Noorizadeh, whose video essay Teslaism: Economics at the End of the End of the Future (2022) follows Musk as the tech billionaire crosses a wild-west landscape by car and on foot. The three discuss Muskism and Teslaism, and offer a critical view of the man who seeks to conquer Earth – and beyond.

Quinn Slobodian Both our book and your film, Bahar, use the suffix “ism”. In our case, the book uses the historical movement of Fordism as a point of comparison. Fordism, for instance, was not only a way of organising manufacturing and production, but also the complementary social contract that accompanied change in industry – Fordism put forward the idea of the male breadwinner, the welfare state, mass consumption, and rising intergenerational mobility. Muskism is, similarly, a term that both describes a new format for organising production, but also how Musk might – almost inadvertently – have become the figurehead for a new paradigm of capital. From the 1970s, sociologists identify a period of post-Fordism, in which there is more precarity, greater exposure to individual risk, globalisation and outsourcing, and the fragmentation of the production chain. The factory becomes a global entity. What we are all interested in with Musk is the apparent reversal of this trend, in a form of reverse movement, as the financialisation and fragmentation of supply chains is now being re-territorialised and re-nationalised by trade wars.

Bahar Noorizadeh I was also thinking about what Musk is symptomatic of, though I made the film in 2022, before his rightward turn. Musk is distinct from Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg or even Peter Thiel because of his desire to be plugged into a counterculture. He was famously rejected from Berghain; he was in a relationship with Grimes. There is something there to explore how he was trying to orient the asset of “coolness” towards a kind of cosmo-financial realm, which is exceedingly interested in a semiotic regime of signs and images. Yet on the other hand, there’s often too much weight given to finance in terms of abstraction, money markets and market derivatives, and we don’t discuss enough how finance actually manifests in hard, material supply-chain production. Teslaism was a way of thinking about how financialisation is put to use in engineering and automobile manufacturing – in the figure of the car – which is how we tell the history of economic transition.

Workers on the first moving assembly line put together magnetos and flywheels for 1913 Ford cars in Highland Park, Michigan. Alongside the assembly line, Ford also implemented wage rises for workers, so that they – unlike Tesla’s labourers – could buy the cars they made.

I suspect that all three of us are guided by the impulse that Muskism signals some kind of successor worldview to a vanishing era

QS Part of what makes Musk a kind of idiot savant, Forrest Gump-like figure – and he never seems more like Gump than when he’s charging through the landscape in Bahar’s film – is the way that he seemed to anticipate shifts in the global economic order. He was re-shoring [transferring a business operation that was moved overseas back to the country from which it was originally located] and vertically integrating [a strategy where a business takes ownership of the key stages of production and operation] before it was cool.

Ben Tarnoff I would add that Musk also helps us understand the new kind of political economy that we’re entering – whether we call it deglobalisation or post-neoliberalism. Whatever its name, it has arrived after the height of free market globalisation associated with the 1990s and 2000s. I suspect that all three of us are guided by the impulse that Muskism signals some kind of successor worldview to a vanishing era. Crucially, the term does not signal simply a return to past orders, and none of us believes that Muskism is purely a return to Fordism. Musk incorporates many Fordist ideas, for instance, the emphasis on vertical integration and shorter supply chains, but those elements are combined with more recent developments. Muskism is a thoroughly digitised, computerised and gamified enterprise, and that is part of what marks it as contemporary. It represents something qualitatively new, even if it draws on a diverse set of historical traditions, both politically and economically.

QS Tesla has never just been about creating cars. It is part of what Musk calls a “Tesla ecosystem”, of which the car is only one component alongside AI infrastructure and now a humanoid robot. Some of this is actually a pretty clever and even socially useful response to climate catastrophe and infrastructure breakdown. Bahar identifies that the Tesla team devised sheltered infrastructure for climate and energy refugees from across the world, rather than producing another crappy car. Bahar’s example demonstrates people’s imaginative capacity and belief in Elon Musk. That belief could be politically productive if it were harnessed to, for example, collective goals and democratically validated processes. At one point, Musk clearly thought he could funnel his cyborg energy towards some kind of doctrinaire leftism. Honestly, I think you could see his rejection by [the doorman] Sven Marquardt at Berghain as a world-historically important moment. His feeling of being scorned turned him towards the right – “If you don’t love me, then I’ll find people who do.” White nationalism is the only club that is happy to shower him with the praise that he so desperately seeks.

Berghain occupies a former power plant on the border between Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain. Its famously harsh door policy is overseen by head bouncer Sven Marquardt, who allegedly rejected Musk in 2022 – though Musk claims he refused to enter after seeing the word “peace“ painted on the side of the building.

BT I can’t resist making a somewhat silly comparison to a chapter in Isaac Deutscher’s monumental biography of Trotsky titled “At the Door of History”, where a young Trotsky stands in front of a door, behind which is Lenin and the entire future of Russian social democracy. In Muskism, the door of history is Berghain, and the historical outcome of great significance was that he didn’t go through the door. He got back in the car.

BN We can see that the subjective and the biographical have become integrated into the infrastructural and the systemic. For instance, Tesla doesn’t do advertising – Musk himself is a walking, talking advert for Tesla. The notion of trolling as advertisement is
pertinent to the discussion around risk, as is the capacity to move markets through personal whims as part of a game of personality that Trump and Musk are especially good at. The personality game also signals where the politician and entrepreneur divide starts to collapse.

QS Something that unites Musk and Ford, also in relation to risk, is the fact that their fortunes are entirely bound up in their [personal investment] portfolios. Their wealth directly correlates to the valuation of their personal companies. They don’t hedge against the possible downturn of their brand. That sets them apart from the average capitalist, who tends to try to reduce exposure as much as possible and balance out high-risk, high-gain bets with ones that will cushion them in the case of failure. Musk’s delirious forward motion is premised on this underlying economic reality.

BT Both Ford and Musk are also hostile to middle management and professional managerial bureaucracy, which, in Ford’s time, was just emerging. Both men see themselves as pursuing organisational strategies that centre the power and autonomy of engineers over and against managers. In the case of Ford, this takes the form of a hostility to finance or the banking industry, which in his case was wrapped up in antisemitism. He saw finance as the manoeuvrings of an apparently global Jewish elite. In the case of Musk, it’s more complex. Musk and Muskism are more closely entwined with financial markets. Musk is very adept at manipulating the psychological determinants of financial markets in order to inflate the value of his firms, and Tesla, in particular. The term that we use in our book to describe this phenomenon is “financial fabulism”, which, again, is not purely Musk’s creation, but something he inherits from the Silicon Valley of the 1990s, where he made his first fortune as a dotcom entrepreneur. It’s something that he refines, particularly through his use of social media. Bahar talks about it in terms of a system of economic production based on advanced storytelling. If you’ve ever watched one of Musk’s shareholder meetings, you realise that he has found a way to monetise storytelling, and in particular the telling of stories about the future.

Video stills from Teslaism: Economics after the End of the End of the Future (2022), Bahar Noorizadeh.

The Dungeon, often credited as the first computer-based dungeon crawl game, was created by Reginald “Rusty” Rutherford on a PLATO terminal at the University of Illinois. It is also known as pedit5 because of its original file name.

QS I was recently on the dissertation commitee for Rowan Melling, at Simon Fraser University, about what he calls “recursive romanticism” in Silicon Valley. Early 19th-century German Romantics like Novalis would talk about the “blue flower”: a sublime, impossible entity that one nevertheless spends life seeking, and that’s how Musk once operated, too. He did seem genuinely compelled by the unattainable, sublime goal of landing on Mars. In your video, Bahar, that gets rendered very funnily as the sound of a million likes all at once. What disappoints many people about Musk now is the loss of that dream. Even Peter Thiel has said that Musk doesn’t seem to really believe in Mars anymore. There’s a sense that his once truly interplanetary aspiration has now returned to a rather disgusting one of fortressed ethnostates.

BN Is there something qualitatively different between the stories he’s telling now, and those he used to tell? It feels like there’s not as much jouissance in his stories. Or perhaps there’s a fascist jouissance with the border control stories. Either way, they’ve lost their appeal for the general public.

BT One way to read the shift in Musk is to think about it as a migration from one sub-genre of science fiction to another. Musk’s orientation before 2020 was towards classic science fiction. Then after 2020, it turns clearly towards cyberpunk, associated with writers like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling and their many later manifestations – particularly in video games. Cyberpunk takes place in futures characterised by social inequality, violence, institutional decay and gloom – a future defined by hyper-Reaganism. Cyberpunk is also interested in the disintegration of the human as a category through the augmentation of the human body – literally through cybernetic implants, and more figuratively, in the sense of human beings becoming so integrated with their technologies that they achieve a kind of cyborg status. Musk’s view of the cyborg involves a much more aggressive and overt assertion of power, and the dangers he now envisions are far more apocalyptic than those he did before 2020. This gives his thinking an apocalyptic urgency that is unique to this new stage.

QS If we imagine the earlier Musk as someone who wanted to push the technological frontier, we could say that what changed for him was the realisation of what could go wrong.  There’s a tipping point between 2020 and 2022 when Tesla becomes the most valuable car company in the world, and Musk becomes the wealthiest person in the world. But something else happens around that time: one of his kids comes out as trans. Fusion with technology allows us to transcend formal constraints and artificial divisions, including gender binaries. And, lo and behold, one of Musk’s own offspring has realised the potential of technology to realign her gender to a form that better aligns with her understanding of herself. Among other things, I think this event scared him because he realised that not only was he complicit in a Promethean act of unleashing technology’s potentials, but he must also take responsibility for the resulting social chaos and, in his understanding, human demographic extinction. He took it upon himself to reassert the race and gender hierarchies that were required to get humanity back in the harness. To openly proclaim white and male pride, as he now does on a daily basis, is certainly a form of pleasure, but it’s not the same as blue sky universalism. He’s still getting his rocks off, but it’s more open authoritarianism than the frontier pioneer spirit.

DOGE Agency Efficiency Leaderboard (2025) ranks government agencies by total dollar savings from contract cancellations, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, lease cancellations and renegotiations, asset sales, and regulatory savings. Critics note that DOGE has not provided documentation for the $215 billion it claims to have saved.

BT My instinct is also that Muskism, in a way, is best understood as a mutation of the traditional party politics system. Part of what makes the social contract possible is the mediating work of institutions like large political parties comprising the organised working class. The party also forms an organised constituency for this social contract, and implicitly contains the threat of social disorder that you need to purchase social peace. Large parties are the basis on which advanced capitalist countries are stabilised after a period of extreme industrial uncertainty, including the prospect of communist revolution. The neoliberal era famously hollows out political parties in the West so that membership to them is no longer meaningful. Musk seems to constitute what the Italian sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo calls the “digital party”, which is Gerbaudo’s term for political formations like the Five Star Movement that have appeared in recent years. These parties promise to enhance political participation through the use of digital tools, but in practice, tend to cash out as autocratic affairs after a handful of people have concentrated their power over the organisation. The dynamics of participation and reply-guyism that Musk initiates on X can be understood as the construction of a digital party where he is the hyperleader, speaking to his base. But that base is only empowered insofar as it amplifies Musk’s power. If we step back, we could see that as a political organisation, and one that may constitute the political form of “post-post-Fordism” – an update to the hollow party of the neoliberal era and the mass party of the Fordist era. This isn’t purely about Musk’s humour or how his charisma works within a particular audience, but the kind of structures that he has spawned around him that make new forms of participation possible, that in turn, amplify his power.

QS Let’s talk about video games, which Musk loves and which gave Teslaism its format.

BT I played lots of video games for research, particularly Civilisation, which Musk was an early and ardent fan of. I also played Path of Exile 2 and Diablo 4, which he played obsessively during the implementation of DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] in the early months of the second administration. They belong to a subgenre known as “dungeon crawlers”, a type of role-playing game set in dungeon-like environments filled with monsters. It somewhat perversely takes the logic of counter-insurgency, where you’re progressively clearing areas and pushing deeper and deeper into a level to confront a boss of some kind. This shaped his view of what he was doing in Washington DC, as his comments in posts on X and interviews show clearly: he saw himself as entering the dungeons of the city and slaying the demons of the deep state. Beyond that, players also constantly receive feedback from the game in the form of performance metrics. This is designed to increase the addictiveness of the games, because it’s pleasurable to feel as if you are progressing linearly. Gaming affected Musk’s time in government, not just in how he drew on its imaginative resources to conceptualise what he was doing, but also in his commitment to a certain kind of quantification. The DOGE website actually has a leaderboard, where departments are ranked by how many cuts they were able to sustain.

QS One of my favourite pieces of research that didn’t end up in the book was that Musk was exposed for cheating in one of these games, because his character was playing at the same time that he was present at the inauguration ceremony. But what I like about Teslaism, Bahar’s game, is that it seems to be based on a kind of aimless, existential drift that one would imagine to be a state that Musk is seeking escape from. The Musk of Teslaism is propelled by some unknown force, and seemingly doesn’t really have an object or a task, which seems a clever way to use the game against Musk himself.

BN Something that’s important to note about gaming is the relationship it exposes between culture and capital. The AI computing company Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, is the main producer of GPUs [Graphics Processing Units], which are one of the central nodes of the microchip industry. Additionally, it’s clear that role play and fantasy are important to this variation of the far right. The GameStop stock manipulation was a form of real-life gaming, bending the power of financial law to generate material effects out of social bonds that seem otherwise very flimsy. When it came to Teslaism, I wanted to analyse Musk primarily as a symptom of his time, rather than as a person. But it was in the gameworld that I felt the sense of totality that Musk is building in the real world. The film was made on [the programme] Unreal Engine, and as a game designer, you feel like a kind of god. With the design of Teslaism, and the significance of “drive”, I understood that when you have one object running at the centre of the screen, your eyes are glued to it. This is how the entire attention economy and doomscroll culture works, by attending to a moving object at the centre of the screen. Teslaism became a representation of the car as an automated subject. People have claimed the least efficient design of the 20th century is the personal automobile, but nevertheless, it occupies our imagination as something indispensable to the future. This combination of gaming and first-person racing game design is the closest I could get to a manifestation of how financial time works – speculative finance creates the idea of the future by inventing a continuum that also rests on the idea of the disaster. The notion of catastrophe is indispensable too. It comes closer to the idea of psychoanalytic drive as the motor of  capitalism. Psychoanalytic theories about drive are usually structured around the idea of desire, but I think “drive” could be an interesting way of thinking about this shift to the financial continuum, which has no object in sight. That’s the reason for the aimlessness of Musk’s running. .