Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed is not a standard biography that seeks to understand Elon Musk. Instead, it poses wider questions. How has Musk, the individual, become Muskism – a phenomenally successful playbook for doing business, amassing wealth and global power, and even influencing the future trajectory of human development? And what does Muskism’s stratospheric success tell us about the modern world?
Slobodian and Tarnoff attribute Musk’s business success largely to the privatising zeal of successive US governments. For decades, US administrations have been eager to outsource as many functions as possible to the private sector, and have provided enormous amounts of funding to do so.
Time and again, Musk has seized the opportunity to ride these tsunamis of US state funding. SpaceX, for example, got its start as a military contractor during the “war on terror”. Tesla grew from the wave of government funding directed at the New Green Deal. Starlink has its military counterpart Starshield, funded by the US department of defense.
Crucially, Musk’s enormous wealth and power rely on the fact that the US government has outsourced its functions to such a degree that it is forced to buy back those functions from Musk’s corporate monopolies. In 2025, for example, SpaceX accounted for 95 per cent of all orbital launches in the US, making Nasa and the Pentagon almost entirely reliant on him.
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Following Musk’s enshittification of X/Twitter and destructive tenure at DOGE, the consequences of empowering him are clear. But Slobodian and Tarnoff warn greater dangers may lie ahead. Musk is now focused on what he describes as his main quest, “pedal to the metal on humanoid robots and digital superintelligence”. What could possibly go wrong with placing our technological future in the hands of a man who believes that empathy for one’s fellow humans is an “exploit” – a vulnerability in our mental software?
In answer to their central questions, the authors make a convincing case that Muskism has been possible only because our, and particularly US, culture celebrates gross inequality and derides empathy and the common good. Musk is the supreme example of the ongoing plunder of our society, and our souls, that is the result. For understanding where we are and how we got here, Muskism is an essential read.
Ian Hughes is author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities are Destroying Democracy and a Senior Research Fellow at the MaREI Sustainability Institute at UCC.
