A pyrotechnic examination of Elon Musk as a symptom and avatar of our postliberal age

'A searing analysis of Elon Musk… Impressive and unrelenting, this grapples with a destructive ideology that seems poised to consume everything' - Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)

'Impeccably researched and splendidly written, Muskism introduces us to a world full of promise and fear' - Branko Milanovic, author of The Great Global Transformation

Who on earth is Elon Musk and what is he doing? Is he a hero, a villain, or does he swing constantly between those two poles? According to the constant media gush driven by his every act and pronouncement, Musk is best understood in personal terms. This book argues differently. Rather than seeing Musk as an individual, it sees him as an avatar of something called Muskism: a playbook for our new postliberal age.

It’s not that Musk himself holds a coherent set of beliefs; you could say his life is one long improvisation. And he’s certainly never used the word Muskism – just as, a century ago, Henry Ford never used Fordism to define his own postliberal modernity. In exploring the forces that have shaped Musk, from South Africa to Silicon Valley, Space X to DOGE, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff outline the motifs and practices that have come to dominate our own crisis-ridden world.

Muskism, they show, speaks the language of crisis and emergency to invoke a less human future: where humans are purged from the productive process and, through social media and video games, merged with the machine. This is a worldview in which the technocrat is king; which piggybacks on the state to achieve supremacy; and in which only a select few deserve salvation. If you enter, this book warns you, you will grind and you will live in the shadow of one man – but the rewards could be priceless and the alternative might be extinction.

"A searing analysis of Elon Musk… Impressive and unrelenting, this grapples with a destructive ideology that seems poised to consume everything" - Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)

"A searching look into Elon Musk’s quest to rule the universe... Muskism is a doctrine of wealth for the few and political and economic domination: SpaceX in space, X and Grok online, Starlink on every phone… Dystopian isn’t a strong enough word for the technocratic future the authors prophesy in this bleak but urgent book" - Kirkus

"Slobodian is an academic historian and public intellectual. I look to him for accessible but probing takes on Cold War neoliberals, the failings of globalism, and–you guessed it, a certain world-cratering slimeball in Silicon Valley. Ben Tarnoff is a leading tech writer, known for his clarion call to deprivatize the internet. So these two feel like the perfect guides to help a layman understand the Musk phenomenon" - Literary Hub, “Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2026”

"As Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff argue in this fascinating and chilling book, [Musk] is selling "technosecurity" - safety through energy sulf-sufficiency, surveillance, robotics and AI - to a frightened world. His business model is to bind so tightly with the state that he makes himself indispensable... As Slobodian and Tarnoff point out, "Trying to unplug from Musk, you realise that he owns the socket" - The Times