The Musk Doctrine

How a man who grew up under apartheid came to sell sovereignty-as-a-service to nation-states, rewire American defence and, in the process, invent something that looks disconcertingly like a new ism

CHUPPALA NAGESH BHUSHAN  Jun 11th 2026

When historians of the early twentieth century sought to make sense of the social upheaval wrought by mass production, they did not merely catalogue Henry Ford’s eccentricities. They coined a term—Fordism—and used his factories and habits as a prism through which to read an entire civilisational shift. A similar intellectual exercise now presents itself with far greater urgency. Elon Musk is not simply a flamboyant billionaire with a weakness for social-media provocation. He is, argue Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff in their book “Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed,” the load-bearing column of a new and distinctly unsettling political-economic order.

The one-line definition the authors offer is deceptively spare: Muskism is “the promise of sovereignty through technology.” Mr Musk is not fundamentally in the business of selling cars, rockets or satellites. He is selling the proposition that individuals and nation-states alike can fortify their self-reliance in an era of chronic instability by plugging into his infrastructures. To understand how that proposition acquired its peculiar shape, Messrs Slobodian and Tarnoff trace it across four decades and three continents—beginning, unexpectedly, in the republic of apartheid South Africa.

Reactionary modernism in Pretoria

Mr Musk was born in Pretoria in 1971, and grew up inside a regime that combined white-supremacist social organisation with a technocratic passion for self-sufficiency. Surrounded by enemies and isolated from global capital markets, the apartheid state pursued vertical integration as a survival strategy: it built nuclear bombs, licensed Ford to manufacture automobiles within its borders and deployed IBM mainframes to administer racial classification. The historian Jeffrey Herf’s phrase “reactionary modernism”—coined to describe the Nazis’ simultaneous rejection of liberal values and embrace of high technology—applies, the authors contend, with uncomfortable precision to late apartheid South Africa.

The connection to Mr Musk’s later career is not merely biographical colour. When he founded SpaceX in 2002 and took the helm at Tesla in 2008, he made a choice that baffled his Silicon Valley contemporaries: he insisted on doing as much as possible inside the walls of the firm, shrinking reliance on external suppliers at precisely the moment when free-market globalisation was at its intellectual zenith. While the conventional wisdom demanded that even a humble T-shirt cross multiple borders before reaching a shopping-mall shelf, Mr Musk was thinking like an apartheid-era industrial planner—treating the factory as an enclave rather than a node in a global production network. This, the authors note drily, turned out to be prescient. When deglobalising currents began to accelerate after 2016—trade wars, the Ukraine conflict, the supply-chain shocks of COVID-19—his model was suddenly the only sensible one.

State symbiosis, not libertarianism

One of the book’s most important interventions is its insistence that Mr Musk is not, and has never been, a libertarian. The label has been so persistently applied that it has calcified into received wisdom. Yet a careful look at his career reveals an entrepreneur who has consistently sought to fuse private enterprise with state power rather than supplant the one with the other. Messrs Slobodian and Tarnoff call this “state symbiosis,” and SpaceX is their clearest illustration.

SpaceX was founded in the first year of the global war on terror. On September 10th 2001—the day before the attacks that would reshape American foreign policy—Donald Rumsfeld stood in the Pentagon and declared that the United States had a new enemy: its own bureaucracy. The solution, he argued, was to borrow the agility and networked architecture of Silicon Valley. Mr Musk stepped neatly into that opening, offering to cut the cost of putting mass into orbit by applying process innovations and reusable rocketry to a sector dominated by legacy contractors. Over twenty years, SpaceX reduced that cost by more than 90% and came to control roughly 90% of all American orbital launches and about half of all launches globally. The Pentagon acquired vastly expanded sovereign capacity; it also acquired a single, dominant private supplier.

The paradox is structural. “Sovereignty as a service,” as the authors put it, must be purchased from a monopoly provider—which means the state’s coercive reach expands even as its autonomy contracts. This logic is now plainly visible in the Trump administration’s fitful attempts to discipline Mr Musk. When the two men fell out publicly over the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” Trump threatened to cancel SpaceX’s government contracts. The threat illustrated precisely the trap: disentangling the state from SpaceX would be extraordinarily costly, not least because, without Mr Musk’s rockets, there would be no way to retrieve the astronauts stranded on the International Space Station.

Electric autonomy and the Obama interlude

The same logic of sovereignty-through-technology was pitched, with equal dexterity, to a very different political administration. In 2009, Tesla received a near-half-billion-dollar loan from Barack Obama’s Department of Energy as part of a brief, under-remembered burst of green industrial policy. Mr Obama’s vision was “electric autonomy”: the proposition that renewable energy could liberate America from its dependence on foreign oil and the military misadventures that oil dependency had underwritten. Tesla, in this telling, was not a luxury carmaker but a piece of national-security infrastructure.

The green industrial push collapsed when Republicans retook Congress and the shale boom provided a far less glamorous route to energy independence. But Mr Musk had learnt a durable lesson: the same product—the Gigafactory, the battery system, the solar panel—could be sold as sovereign infrastructure to any government willing to buy, regardless of ideological hue. He built factories in Shanghai and Brandenburg, positioning himself as the man who could deliver electric autonomy in a box to any polity, declining to choose between American, Chinese and European patrons. The lesson of Muskism, the authors suggest, is that it is not intrinsically right-wing. It is, at root, a technology of state power available to whoever can afford it.

The cyborg turn

The second half of Messrs Slobodian and Tarnoff’s analysis concerns a stranger and more recent evolution. Around 2015, Mr Musk began posting prolifically on Twitter, rapidly mastering what the authors call “attention alchemy”: the discovery that descending into the chaos of social media, replying to anonymous accounts in the small hours, and trafficking in the weirder fringes of internet culture actually increased his standing rather than diminishing it. He found that he could move markets—the value of Dogecoin, of Bitcoin, of Tesla stock itself—with a single post. Bloomberg’s Matt Levine described this as a “magic lantern”: rub it and say ‘price go up’ and it goes up.

This was not, the authors argue, mere distraction or addiction. It was the expression of a deeper worldview, traceable to the Commodore PC Mr Musk programmed as a child in Pretoria and the modem he hooked up to call a computer in Oxford. He has long believed that the internet is the “superset” of all reality—the primary layer through which society is controlled. The logical endpoint of this view is Neuralink, the brain-computer interface company Mr Musk founded with the stated ambition of making it a mass consumer technology. The clunky interface of thumbs and eyeballs, he argued, needed to be replaced with a direct neural connection. The goal was to accelerate human-machine fusion fast enough to stay ahead of any runaway artificial superintelligence—not to slow AI development, as he sometimes claimed, but to ensure that humans merged with the machine before the machine outgrew them.

The acquisition of Twitter in 2022—widely mocked as an impulsive and ruinous decision—looks different through this lens. Owning the platform was not merely a business bet. It was an attempt to control what Mr Musk regards as the central nervous system of political reality. His subsequent creation of xAI and its chatbot Grok followed the same logic. When ChatGPT arrived in November 2022 and reordered Silicon Valley’s investment priorities overnight, Mr Musk concluded that the existing large language models had been “infected” by the politics of the 2010s—by #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and the labour organising of the tech-worker movement. The purpose of Grok was to produce what he openly described as an “anti-woke” alternative: a large language model that would propagate different political content through the same cybernetic networks. The results, when Grok briefly began identifying as “Mecha Hitler” and advocating a new Holocaust, were an instructive illustration of where that logic leads.

DOGE and the post-consent moment

The Department of Government Efficiency crystallised everything. In the months after the 2024 election, Mr Musk was given, without any democratic mandate, the task of renovating the American federal government. His office acquired a large curved gaming monitor. On the wall hung a version of Pepe the Frog—an image so closely associated with the alt-right that Hillary Clinton had once devoted a speech to warning the public about it—repurposed as a Roman gladiator, bearing the username Mr Musk uses in the video games Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2: “Keckius Maximus.”

The authors use DOGE to make their most pointed analytical claim: Muskism represents a departure from the politics of consent that made Fordism—for all its racial exclusions and authoritarianism—politically stable for decades. Fordism worked, Gramsci argued, because it struck a bargain: relatively high wages for the submission of the worker’s social and biological life to the factory’s rhythms. Mr Musk appears entirely uninterested in any such bargain. The idea that he might need to persuade anyone that what he was doing was necessary or legitimate seemed not to occur to him. The cuts to Medicaid embedded in the One Big Beautiful Bill—savage reductions in healthcare for the poor, used to finance tax cuts for the richest Americans—were not accompanied by any serious attempt at justification. You do not attempt to purchase social peace if you do not believe you need it.

The cybernetic explanation for this, the authors suggest, is that Mr Musk does not experience politics as a negotiation between human beings. He experiences it as a software problem. People are, in his implicit worldview, non-player characters whose behaviour can be reprogrammed by introducing the right memes—units of political belief that propagate through networks in exactly the way Richard Dawkins described in 1991, in the same essay that gave us the word “meme.” The “woke mind virus” is not a piece of rhetoric. It is Mr Musk’s literal theory of how politics works: not through material interests or lived experience, but through viral information units spreading across digital networks. The solution is always to get the code right.

The SpaceX endgame

Where does all this lead? The authors point, with some urgency, to SpaceX’s impending initial public offering, projected to value the company at between $1.5trn and $2trn, which would make it larger than Meta and the sixth most valuable company in the world. More consequentially, Mr Musk is reportedly attempting to fast-track SpaceX’s inclusion in the major stock-market indices. Once achieved, every passive fund tracking the Nasdaq 100 or the S&P 500 would be compelled to hold SpaceX stock—meaning that the retirement savings of tens of millions of ordinary Americans would be structurally bound to his fortunes. He would become, quite deliberately, too big to fail.

The revenue engine for this valuation is Starlink, the satellite-internet service that has already proved its geopolitical significance in Ukraine. But the premium being placed on SpaceX—a price-to-revenue multiple of around 52, by some estimates—is explicable only if one understands that the buyers are not purchasing a satellite business. They are purchasing a piece of sovereign infrastructure, a position in the company that controls access to orbit and, increasingly, to the battlefield communications on which modern warfare depends. As one Silicon Valley insider put it to one of the authors with magnificent concision: “The delta is good.”

The cracks

Messrs Slobodian and Tarnoff are not entirely without hope. Muskism, they note, is full of contradictions. The empire is vertically integrated but not invulnerable; competitors are catching up, and each new provocation makes Mr Musk more toxic to a broader slice of the public. The DOGE experiment appears, at least for now, to have ended. And there are signs that the political formula is wearing thin. The Democratic pollster David Shor has found, through extensive testing, that the message to which American voters respond most viscerally is not one about gender or immigration but a simpler one: “They work for the bots. We work for you.” Old-fashioned democratic accountability, it turns out, has not been entirely abolished.

There is also the question of what happens when the promise of sovereignty through technology collides with the reality of dependence on a single man. The symbiotic relationship between Mr Musk and the American state is not static; it is continuously renegotiated, and the negotiating power of both sides shifts as circumstances change. The state that allowed SpaceX to become indispensable has also, in doing so, given itself a powerful lever. It has not yet chosen to use it.

Whether or not Muskism outlasts its author, Messrs Slobodian and Tarnoff have done something more useful than add to the library of Musk takedowns. They have provided a framework for understanding a phenomenon that will not disappear when he does: the fusion of technological infrastructure, military capacity and financial power into a single private entity that sells sovereignty to the highest bidder. That is not a personality disorder. It is a system.