X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
The story of Elon Musk, the way it's often told, makes him sound like a fictional character, a comic-book superhero – or, especially lately, a supervillain. As the world's richest man, the US President’s right-hand man, and the owner of X, he’s possibly the world’s most powerful man. Musk wants to build robots and colonise Mars and appears to be dismantling sizable parts of the US government. His vision of the future seems to stem from the science fiction that has fueled his imagination since he was a boy. But what's the real story, the true history, behind Musk’s sense of destiny? Back in 2021 Harvard history professor and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore became fascinated by this question. So she made a podcast that tried to explain Musk through the science fiction he grew up with. A lot has happened in the four years since. So she’s gone back in to bring the story up to date. “X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story” is a production of the BBC and distributed by Pushkin Industries.
Episodes
Elon Musk’s origin story keeps changing. First, he was Tony Stark, or Iron Man. Not too long ago, he compared himself to Batman. Arguments started online over whether or not Musk is a real-life Bruce Wayne. In this episode, Jill Lepore looks at the original ‘Caped Crusader’, created back in 1939. Batman’s origin story is bound up with fascism. And every time Musk is compared to Batman it raises a very o...
Elon Musk is reinventing himself as a kingmaker for the United States and the world. He wants to shape the future. But in this episode, Jill Lepore goes back to his past — to his childhood, his strange family history, and his fascination with Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
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Elon Musk is a rocket man. He wants humans to become ‘a multi-planetary species’ and talks about establishing human settlements on Mars. As President Trump talks up the Mars program while dismantling aid initiatives around the globe, Jill Lepore traces how Silicon Valley's existential catastrophism led to Musk’s extraterrestrial vision of capitalism.
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In 2008 Tesla Motors launched its first car, the completely electric Roadster. Tesla was a great story — something genuinely new, an engineering marvel. Musk became a media darling, on the cover of countless magazines under headlines like ‘Elon Musk, AKA Tony Stark, Wants to Save the World’. Within the logic of Muskism, talking about saving the world was a business strategy, a way to sell cars without ads. Why did...
In 2021, Elon Musk started calling himself The Dogefather to signal his support for Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency based on a joke meme about a dog. That dog is now wagging the tail of the world’s economy. In this episode, Jill Lepore looks at Silicon Valley's cryptocurrency craze through the lens of some very old science fiction. Like everything else about Muskism that purports to be futuristic, this idea is a relic, whose histo...
The science fiction that Silicon Valley techno-billionaires like Elon Musk adore concerns gleaming futures in which fantastically powerful, immensely rich men colonize other planets. In this episode, Jill Lepore looks at some of the science fiction that’s usually left out of this vision — science fiction by and about women.
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In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, and renamed it X. When asked why he wanted to own the social media network, Musk talked a lot about something he called the “woke mind virus.” Where does the idea of a mind virus come from? Jill Lepore looks to Cold War science fiction and the recently uncovered writings of Elon Musk’s grandfather in South Africa.
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Elon Musk has claimed that AI is humanity’s “biggest existential threat.” Paradoxically, Musk is also working to create artificial intelligence. Why? Jill Lepore tours through a century of imagined robot rebellions, and argues that these stories are never only about robots. So what’s Elon Musk really afraid of when he wrings his hands over AI? In this final episode, Lepore argues that while Musk may be a vis...
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