Manny’s Reviews > Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed > Status Update

"Individuals should always wonder who wrote the software running in their heads," Musk commented. "Most humans have very limited firewalls," he elaborated elsewhere, "so are easily reprogrammed".

Musk's approach assumed that all expenditures were waste, and that bad data - whether fraudulent contracts, useless staff, or illegitimate people - could simply be deleted. What DOGE sought to automate, media researcher Eryk Salvaggio noted, was "not paperwork but democratic decision-making". Efficiency became the alibi for centralisation.

After acquiring Twitter, Musk laid off nearly 80% of its staff and forced the remaining employees to work harder. Meanwhile, he pushed the platform's content to the right. If the social network was an "information weapon", why not wield it against his enemies? To fight wokeness, Musk would develop a new pathogen, propagated through a cascade of counter-memes: the anti-woke mind virus.

As Musk put it on Twitter in 2019, "I am become meme." It would be a running joke for Musk, riffing on J. Robert Oppenheimer's famous invocation of the Bhagavad Vita after witnessing the first detonation of a nuclear weapon in 1945: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds".

Musk first tweeted in 2010 but remained, at most, a casual Twitter user. Starting in 2015, this began to change. That year, he tweeted 617 times - an increase of 226% from the previous year. In 2017, he posted 1162 times, and average of three posts a day. By 2028, his annual tweet count had hit 2288. By 2024, he was posting an average of 60 times a day and sometimes 40 times an hour.

In the most extreme version of Muskism, the human is no longer the subject of history, but its discarded scaffolding. The product is not a car, or even a robot. The product is a self-regulating infrastructure in which the world - like the factory - runs on its own. No operators, no workers - just endless production, unfolding without interruption or intervention.

The first Obama term stands out as a rare moment of consensus on the need to reduce US dependence on fossil fuels imported from the Middle East. Musk did believe that burning fossil fuels was heating the planet, though that wasn't the only reason he wanted to electrify the auto industry. Another motivation was geopolitical: the "true cost of gasoline", he said in an interview, included "the auxiliary cost of wars".

Musk had set out to build a rocket. But more consequential than what he built was how he built it. Later, he would describe a lesson he learned from his close friend, the investor Antonio Gracias: "It's not the product that leads the success. It's the ability to make the product efficiently. It's about building the machine that builds the machine. In other words, how do you build the factory?

By 2025, SpaceX accounted for 95% of all orbital launches in the US, and more than half of all launches globally - a position that made the Pentagon, NASA and other government agencies deeply reliant on Musk. This was sovereignty-as-a-service, the logic of the modern internet platform scaled up to the level of the nation state.

"At school, Musk was bullied relentlessly. At home, he read constantly. When he ran out of books at the library, he devoured the entire Encyclopedia Britannica."

The authors do not mention this, but I am struck by the fact that the science-fiction author Cyril Kornbluth, who also held strong eugenic views, famously did the same thing.