The Architecture of Muskism
Novara Media host Richard Hames sits down with Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian, authors of a new book dissecting what they call "muskism" -- a political-economic phenomenon that extends well beyond the personality of Elon Musk himself. The conversation is dense, spanning two decades of Silicon Valley's entanglement with the state, and it lands on a central thesis that deserves serious attention: Musk is not an aberration but an avatar of converging capitalist currents, amplified by staggering inequality into something that reshapes objective conditions.
The discussion resists the temptation to psychologize. Slobodian and Tarnoff are materialists first, tracing how Musk's empire grew in symbiosis with the American state at every stage -- SpaceX launching during the War on Terror, Tesla rising on Obama-era green industrial policy, the whole edifice now pivoting toward AI and defense contracts under Trump. The personal quirks matter, they argue, but only because unprecedented wealth gives them unprecedented reach.
Attention Alchemy and the Inverted Pyramid
One of the most useful frameworks in the conversation is what Tarnoff calls "attention alchemy" -- Musk's ability to convert online performance into real financial value. The mechanism is straightforward: tweet about Tesla, pump the stock, harvest the valuation. But the conditions that make this possible are historically specific. Tarnoff locates the peak of this alchemy in the pandemic era, when cheap money, stimulus checks, and indoor isolation drove retail investors onto platforms like Robinhood.
Tesla also navigates the pandemic pretty well and that is in large part because of those practices of vertical integration that we discussed in connection to Fortress Futurism a moment ago. So Tesla's factory in Fremont is shut for 7 weeks because of a public health order... but when it reopens, it actually manages to weather that period better than many of the big automakers in large part because it has shorter supply chains.
The "inverted pyramid" metaphor -- a vast virtual domain of speculative value resting on a narrow material base -- captures something real about Tesla's valuation. Ford trades at a price-to-earnings ratio of roughly 11. Tesla's average over six years is 230. That ratio represents an enormous projection of future earnings that has almost nothing to do with present-day car manufacturing and almost everything to do with the narrative machine Musk has built around himself.
From Bright Green to Dark Green
Slobodian traces a revealing arc in Musk's relationship to climate politics. In the Obama era, Tesla was the flagship of a "bright green" future -- sleek electric cars, government subsidies, multilateral climate treaties, no need to change your lifestyle. By the 2020s, that vision had curdled. The shale boom made the United States energy-independent, Republicans abandoned green industrial policy, and catastrophic weather events made it clear that climate change could not be "beaten" but only survived.
The Cybertruck is the most obvious example. It's very different aesthetically and it symbolizes very differently in comparison to the, you know, cherry red roadster of 2008. It's, you know, this unpainted aluminum. It's built to survive not just seemingly climate catastrophe, but also social catastrophe, right? It's built like an armored vehicle.
The shift from the Roadster to the Cybertruck is not merely aesthetic. Slobodian situates it within a broader transition from collective to individual climate response -- solar panels on the roof, a Tesla Powerwall in the garage, Starlink on the antenna, the Cybertruck in the driveway. The home becomes a privatized fortress, decoupled from public infrastructure. This is not climate denial so much as climate acceptance repackaged as consumer choice. The logic is seductive and deeply corrosive to collective action.
The State Symbiosis Problem
Perhaps the most provocative thread in the conversation concerns Musk's relationship to government. The standard libertarian reading -- tech billionaire wants to shrink the state -- misses the point entirely. What Musk and figures like Palantir's Alexander Karp actually want is a strong state whose strength depends on private-sector providers. Tarnoff coins a phrase that captures this neatly: "sovereignty as a service."
You want a strong state, but you want that state to be beholden to your corporations.
Palantir's windfall during the DOGE initiative illustrates the pattern. Musk's operatives swept through federal agencies dismantling existing systems; Palantir followed in their wake, stitching things back together with its own data integration platforms. The result is not a smaller government but a government newly dependent on a handful of private vendors for core functions. This is a form of privatization far more sophisticated than contracting out garbage collection. It targets the informational infrastructure of governance itself.
A counterpoint worth raising: this model is not entirely new. Defense contracting has operated on similar principles for decades, and the revolving door between the Pentagon and firms like Lockheed Martin or Raytheon long predates Musk. What is arguably different is the scale and the ambition -- extending state symbiosis beyond defense into domestic governance, data integration, and social services. Whether that extension proves durable or provokes a backlash remains an open question. The DOGE initiative's stumble when it reached Medicare and Social Security suggests there are limits to how far this model can be pushed without triggering fierce public resistance.
The Discourse Machine
The conversation's bleakest passage concerns the closing of what Slobodian calls the social sphere. Musk's acquisition of Twitter, widely derided as a catastrophic business decision, may have been strategically shrewd. The platform now functions as a self-reinforcing feedback loop: Musk posts something cryptic, blue-check accounts query Grok for interpretation, Grok responds with the biases Musk has baked into it, and those responses feed the training data that shapes future outputs.
The avenues of expressing dissent vanish and the means by which one might speak back to those setting the terms for social life are no longer there because the zone has been flooded in advance.
This is a darker mechanism than simple censorship. It is not about silencing dissent so much as drowning it in procedurally generated noise. The comparison to earlier forms of media control -- propaganda broadcasts, state-run newspapers -- understates the sophistication. Those older systems required human propagandists. This one automates the process and makes it feel organic, like consensus rather than coercion.
There is a reasonable objection here, though. The internet remains vast, and alternative platforms, independent media, and encrypted communication channels continue to exist. The claim that "the only places we can even register each other's thoughts are in the walled gardens that they have built themselves" may overstate the degree of capture. Substack, Mastodon, Signal, podcasts like Novara's own -- these are not nothing. The question is whether they can reach critical mass or remain marginal enclaves.
Four Futures, One Through Line
The conversation closes with four speculative scenarios for where Muskism goes next: Carbon Musk (a return to green capitalism), Contractor Musk (deeper state symbiosis), Compound Musk (a retreat into dynastic insularity), and Cyborg Musk (the fusion of human consciousness with AI through Neuralink and robotics). Slobodian is candid about which trajectory seems most likely and most alarming -- the cyborg path, backed by the coming SpaceX IPO, which is projected to be the largest in history.
We, some nerdy lefty critics on the internet might think this is a bad idea, but the world's capital market seems to think it's a very good idea. So we will have to once again just defer to their superior wisdom.
The self-deprecation lands with a sting. The analytical rigor of the conversation is formidable, but analysis does not translate into leverage. Tarnoff and Slobodian are clear-eyed about this asymmetry. They can name the phenomenon, trace its genealogy, and map its likely trajectories. What they cannot do -- and what they do not pretend they can do -- is stop it.
Bottom Line
Tarnoff and Slobodian offer the most structurally serious account of Musk's power currently available. By treating him not as a personality to be mocked but as an expression of historical forces -- vertical integration, attention alchemy, state symbiosis, climate adaptation as consumer product -- they provide a framework that will outlast whatever Musk does next. The concept of "sovereignty as a service" alone is worth the price of admission. The conversation's weakness is its reluctance to identify countervailing forces with any specificity. The DOGE backlash over entitlements, the Project Maven protests, the Eli Lilly stock crash from a parody tweet -- these moments of friction are noted but not developed into a theory of resistance. For readers looking to understand how a single individual's paranoid worldview became the operating system of American tech capitalism, this is essential material. For those looking for a way out, the search continues.