March 27, 2025 • 28 mins
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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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Elon Musk is the richest person on the planet. Long
before Donald Trump appointed him to run DOGE, a department
of government efficiency, Musk had plans. Plans to save the
world from climate catastrophe with electric cars and solar panels
and underground tunnels, Plans to colonize Mars, Plans to build
(00:42):
chips to put in people's brains. He is followed by
more than two hundred million people on social media. He
has two ex wives and eleven children, including a son
named x The bare facts of Musk's life, the way
they're usually told make him sound like a fictional character,
a comic book superhero.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
But what's the real story, the actual history behind the
comic book. Welcome to X Man, the Elon.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Musk origin Story.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
I'm Jill Lapour.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
I'm a professor of history and law at Harvard. For
a long time, I've been studying the relationship between technological
and political change. I'm fascinated by visions of the future
in political discourse, in literature, in science fiction, and even
comic books. This series, I'm exploring a new kind of capitalism.
(01:39):
I call Muskism extravagant extreme capitalism, extraterrestrial capitalism where stock
prices are driven by earnings but also by fantasies. Fantasies
that you can find in blockbuster superhero movies, but that
come from science fiction, some of it.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
A century old.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Elon Musk runs a rocket company. It's called space X,
his artificial intelligence company x AI, the name he gave
to Twitter after he bought it. X. Musk loves the
letter X, one of his first big startups, X dot com.
X is sexy as an X rated, but X is
(02:24):
sexy because X means mysterious and X means mysterious because
In sixteen thirty seven, when Renee Descartes sat down to
write a treatise on geometry, he decided to use X, Y,
and Z for variables, but his printer setting the type
kept running out of ys and z's but not x's
because you don't use X very often in French, so
(02:45):
he used mostly x's X the unknown. In the twentieth century,
X became science fiction writer's favorite letter of.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
The alphabet.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
X for extraterrestrial, as in the film The Strange World
of Planet X.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
Be prepared for a fantastic adventure into.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
The future, a monstrous world of terror and chaos. By
the nineteen nineties x men, xbox, x files, and then
Elon Muskin x, dot com, SpaceX. Something strange was happening
to capitalism. As the gap between the rich and the
(03:33):
poor got wider and wider, the claims of corporations got
more and more grandiose. Google opened an R and D
division called X, whose aim was to solve some of
the world's hardest problems. Tech companies started talking about their mission,
and their mission was always magnificently inflated, transforming the future
of work, connecting all of humanity, making.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
The world a better place.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Scholars kept groping for adjectives to describe these new brands
of capitalism. Surveillance capitalism, platform capitalism, identity capitalism, What about
just capitalism X for extreme extravagant existential A capitalism in
which companies worry very publicly and quite feverishly about planetary disaster,
(04:20):
about the all too real catastrophe of climate change, but
also about all sorts of so called existential risks to
the future of the human race, so that they can
save us all. A capitalism animated by catastrophe, A capitalism
driven by science fiction and driven to by the disavowal
of its.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Own origins to recover that history.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Each episode of X Men were blasting off to the past.
This episode is called Dimension X. Our first destination and
time and space is South Africa in the nineteen seventies.
Elon Musk was born in Pretoria in nineteen seventy one.
His father, Errol, was an engineer who owned a construction business.
(05:11):
His mother was a former model. They had three kids.
Elon was the oldest. His parents got divorced when he
was still a boy. Eryl Musk has lately become a
prominent figure in his son's shadow. Outspoken and controversial, He's
compared the jailed far right activist Tommy Robinson to Nelson
Mandela and predicted Robinson would one day be Britain's Prime Minister.
(05:35):
Eryl Musk's relationship with his oldest son is fraud, but
he's always maintained that Elon is a genius, as he
did about a decade ago during an interview with South
Africa's Radio seven oh two.
Speaker 4 (05:47):
Is something about Elon that's an X factor?
Speaker 5 (05:51):
What is that? Yeah? I would say that he's always
been a very deep thinker.
Speaker 4 (05:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (05:57):
When he was very small, for example, he would ask me,
where is the whole world?
Speaker 2 (06:03):
The story of Elon Musk's childhood, as it's usually told,
is right out of science fiction, from a genre known
as the boy Wonder story. My favorites are the Tom
Swift books series that started in nineteen ten.
Speaker 6 (06:16):
Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout, the speediest car on
the road. Barton Swift, esteemed inventor, was drawing a complicated machine,
pausing to make some intricate calculations when his young son
interrupted him.
Speaker 7 (06:35):
I'm gonna build an electric runabout.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
Dad. Hmmm, I don't take much stock in electric autos. Tom.
All the electric runabouts I ever saw didn't seem able
to go so very fast, oh very far.
Speaker 7 (06:52):
That's true, but it's because they didn't have the right
kind of battery. It seems to me that if you
put the right kind of battery into an automobile, it
could scoot along pretty lively.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
That Tom Swift story was published more than a century ago.
But the way well Musk tells it, little Elon was
that same boy wonder.
Speaker 5 (07:12):
When the computers came out right in the beginning, he
came to me and said he would like to have
one of these new computers.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
In nineteen eighty four, when Elon Musk was twelve, he
sold a video game to PC magazine for five hundred dollars.
It's called Blastar Black Screen, little squary blobs, Space Invader
style our mission destroy alien freighter carrying deadly hydrogen bombs
and status beam machines. So don't get me wrong, Elon
(07:46):
Musk really was a whiz kid. And when Elon Musk
tells his own origin story, like when he spoke at
the Computer History Museum in California, that's how.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
He tells it.
Speaker 8 (07:56):
I was very prairie booker, so I was reading all
the time. So I was either reading, working on my computer,
or reading comics.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
He read a lot of books, but he says that
one book above all became his guide for life, the
Elon Musk Bible.
Speaker 8 (08:09):
When I was twelve or thirteen, a head company existential crisis,
and I was reading various books trying to figure out
the meaning of life. And we happened to have like
some books by Nietzschen Schopenhauer in the house, which you
should not read at age fourteen is bad, it's really negative.
Then I read The Hitchhiker's Guide the galaxyat which was
(08:30):
quite positive, I think.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
In Douglas Adams is Hitchhiker's Guide, the people of Megalithia
built an enormous computer to ask it a question about life,
the universe and everything, and after thinking for millions of years,
it answers forty two.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Musk says that taught him a.
Speaker 8 (08:47):
Lesson a lot of times, the question is hotter than
the answer, and if you can properly phrase the question,
then the answer is the easy part.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
The Hitchhiker's Guide didn't start out as a book. Adams
wrote it for BBC Radio four, and starting in nineteen
seventy eight it was broadcast on the BBC World Service,
including to Pretoria l What was.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams? Far
back in the mists of ancient time, in the great
and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich,
and on the whole tax free. Many men, of course,
became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing
(09:31):
to be ashamed of, because no one was really poor,
at least no one worth. Speaking of.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
The Hitchhiker's Guide, that is, begins with an indictment of
economic inequality. What was it like to listen to this
in South Africa under apartheid. Musk hardly ever talks about apartheid.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
At least not publicly. I'm going to.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Talk about it for a while here because it's a
crucial piece of this history. But first, let me be
really clear. White people who happened to grow up in
South Africa under apartheid in the nineteen seventies and nineteen
eighties are not responsible for apartheid. Peter Teel, another Silicon
entrepreneur and later a key business partner of Elon Musk's,
(10:13):
also lived in South Africa for a while as a kid.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
They were children.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Also, Musk left South Africa when he was seventeen to
avoid being conscripted into the army, the army that imposed
and enforced the regime. I'm not placing blame here. Still,
I do think there's a weird way in which the
culture of apartheid found expression in the nineteen nineties in
Silicon Valley's Vision.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Of the Future.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
You know, you've said that apartheid is a habit of mind.
Can you tell me what you mean by that? I
called up Jacob Glamini, a professor of African History at Princeton.
He grew up in South Africa, and he's written beautifully
and powerfully about apartheid.
Speaker 9 (10:52):
What I mean by that is that so the partid
was not just a social and political and economic system,
but that it was also a cultural system which inculcated
in South Africans, both black and white, patterns of behavior,
ways of thinking. It's side to transform how people saw themselves,
but also how they saw the world.
Speaker 10 (11:12):
The color question is rapidly increasing in seriousness and urgency.
I consider a Partheight to be South Africa's lost chance
to remain a white man's country.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Apartheid, which means aparthood, began in nineteen forty eight. That
same year, nineteen forty eight, Elon Musk's mother was born
in Canada. Her father, jay N. Haldeman, was an ardent
conservative and anti communist. In nineteen fifty, Haldeman moved his
family to South Africa. Was there a lot of immigration
from say North America to South Africa after apartheid was declared?
(11:51):
I just find that like an odd journey for a
family to make in nineteen fifty.
Speaker 9 (11:55):
Oh yeah, I think that is quite striking. There is
this conscious airport and conscious attempt to recruit people to
South Africa to beef up white numbers to a point
where blacks would not be such a demographic threat. You know,
here's a place, you know, with amazing sunshine, great weather,
and you can actually live like a king or a queen.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Elon Musk's mother published a memoir in twenty twenty. It's
called A Woman Makes a Plan Advice for a lifetime
of adventure, beauty and Success. A lot of the book
is about growing up in South Africa in the nineteen
fifties and nineteen sixties. She says her parents were persuaded
to move there from Canada by missionaries who talked of
its beauty. Not once does she mention apartheid. Domini says
(12:43):
that's not unusual that the regime organized itself around acts
of forgetting and erasure, including pretending the native population somehow
didn't even exist.
Speaker 9 (12:53):
Unlike in the Americas, right, you know, where the indigenous
populations were annihilated, the South Afcana Gas is different. The
vast majority of the population is not annihilated, and whatever
you have to build has to be built around this
idea that the natives have not disappeared.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
A resistance movement rose up, led beginning in the nineteen
sixties by a young lawyer, Nelson Mandela.
Speaker 9 (13:15):
The Africans require the franchise on the basis.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Of one man, one vote.
Speaker 4 (13:22):
They won political independence.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Mandela was sent to prison in nineteen sixty two. Meanwhile,
the resistance grew.
Speaker 5 (13:31):
Radioprio.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
The Boys of the African National Congress, the U and
General Assembly denounced the apartheid regime in nineteen seventy three.
Two years later, right about when Elon Musk was starting kindergarten,
police opened fire on thousands of school children during a
protest and Soweto were playing.
Speaker 5 (13:49):
In the yard in the school yard and the stituating
Atrendo in the process.
Speaker 6 (13:55):
Hitting three kids.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
These were black children. White children went to white schools.
Speaker 9 (14:01):
Black people had to pay for their education, but whites didn't.
Some people were jogging. It was actually socialism for whites
and capitalism for blacks. Right, That's how a party it
actually justified itself that you know, we are creating a
class of successful white people.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
People who ran construction businesses like Eryl Musk. Elon's father
made a lot of money in the apartheid era, building
two of everything, one for blacks and one for whites.
For whites, they built a fantasy.
Speaker 9 (14:29):
World ideologically, I think one of the successes of a
part daid was in making white South often believe that
everything they achieved was through individual initiative, and everything that
they ever got in life was through their own hard work,
you know, never mind the fact that the system was
designed to in some ways give them all the benefit
and to give them all the resources to gether in life.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
It's so interesting because the starkness of that divide, you know,
the rigidity of the separation, has so many earlier representations
in the world of science fiction, right, Like so much
of H. G. Wells's science fiction is about what about
a terrible, awful future in which we divide people into
some who will live underground and do all of the
work for us, and we will never see them, and
(15:14):
we will pretend they don't even exist, and those of
us who will live in the skies and in the clouds.
And to me, sometimes when I think about what Silicon
Valley is imagining, we will colonize Mars, and some people
will go there who really need to be relieved of.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Their experience on Earth.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
I mean, am I off base to say that some
of that seems to revive these notions of very very
strict hierarchies.
Speaker 9 (15:40):
I don't think you off based at all, Jill. I mean,
I think you've put your finger on it. And of
course we don't want to instrumentalize this and see you know,
it has just cause an effect. But I think there's
a strong case to be made for the connection between
the Sabarti dystopia and this idealized version of a world
(16:01):
where the elites don't have to share their oxygen with
lesser beings.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
So I listened to The Hitchhiker's Guide, and I find
it strange that the Elon Musk is such a fan,
because a lot of it sounds to me like an
indictment of people just like him, or like Amazon's Jeff Bezos.
The mega rich, with their privately owned rockets blasting off
to other planets.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
And for these extremely rich merchants, life eventually became rather dull,
and it seemed that none of the worlds they settled
on was entirely satisfactory. Either the climate wasn't quite right
in the later part of the afternoon, or the day
was half an hour too long, or the sea was
just the wrong shade of pink, and thus where it
(16:43):
created the conditions for a staggering new form of industry,
custom made luxury planet building.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Also hear me out, I think the Hitchhiker's Guide, broadcast
by the BBC in the nineteen seventies, just when the
world was condemning apartheid, sounds quite specifically as though it's
an indictment of apartheid like social and economic systems. And
I don't think I'm over reading. Douglas Adams wrote Hitchhiker's
(17:13):
Guide on a Hermes manual typewriter. One key is more
worn down than the rest, the letter X. And you
know what was on the side of that typewriter, a sticker.
It says end apartheid. When Elon Musk started college at
the University of Pretoria, apartheid was on the verge of collapse.
Speaker 10 (17:36):
Today the mighty off South Africa back and why a
back up nine has.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
No huge hib By then, in nineteen ninety, when Mandela
was released after twenty seven years in prison, Elon Musk
had left South Africa behind to launch his new life
in North America. After studying at the University of Pretoria,
Elon Musk traveled to Canada, where his maternal grandfather was from.
He wanted to get to the United States, but it
(18:05):
was easier to get a Canadian passport. Having broken with
his he flew to Montreal with nothing but a backpack,
then hitchhiked to Saskatchewan, where his grandfather had lived before
moving the family to South Africa. And it's this grandfather,
jay N. Haldeman, who I want to look at next,
because before he left Canada in the nineteen thirties, he'd
(18:26):
been a leader of a strange sci fi inspired movement
known as technocracy. It bears an uncanny resemblance to some
things going on today in Silicon Valley, repackaged as existential
risk futurism.
Speaker 4 (18:41):
What Technocracy Inc. Is chiefly engaged in now is the
organization of an army of trained men and women who,
when the present interference controls break down and the intricate
machinery of production and distribution is in danger of stopping,
will be able to prevent that catastrophe before it is
(19:03):
too late.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
So this sounds like science fiction, but this really happened.
People in the technocracy movement, they called themselves technocrats, wanted
engineers and scientists to run governments. They took their inspiration
from science fiction, where engineers and scientists.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Were always solving problems.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
They were suspicious of democracy and also of capitalism.
Speaker 4 (19:24):
Biprice system is not meant merely the capitalistic system, which
is only one variety of the species. It means the
collapse and complete obsolescence of the entire method of distributing
goods and services by means of a price. There will
be no place for politics or politicians finance, so financiers
(19:48):
rackets are racketeers.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Grant Weitdoff teaches Digital Humanities and American Studies at Princeton.
He says the technocracy movement started in New York in
nineteen nineteen with a guy who ran a floor waxing business.
Speaker 11 (20:01):
His idea was that engineers had these unique qualities that
would somehow make them good social leaders. They could assess
a situation from a bou they would come up with
much more rational or economic solutions than politicians or economic
leaders would.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Then, with the stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine
and the depression that followed, democracies were collapsing all over
the world. Technocracy really had its moment.
Speaker 11 (20:26):
Local chapters at that point had sprung up everywhere across
the US and Canada, and each of those chapters start
putting forward their own competing ideas. There's an invented unit
of measure called the ERG. This is one solution that
we replace currency with units of energy, depended on how
much energy a single worker is capable of producing in
(20:47):
a given day and how much they should get in
return for that work.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
As far as I can tell, it's at this point
that Elon Musk's grandfather got involved with technocracy. He lost
his farm during the depression and ever after didn't believe
in banks or banking. A lot of people felt that way,
and some of them were drawn into the set of
ideas about a different way of thinking of about money.
Speaker 11 (21:10):
And some of the chapters start doing odd things to
kind of get their message across. They start wearing these
identical gray uniforms, driving these gray cars in these large parades,
blasting speeches out of megaphones. They adopt this yin yang
symbol on all of their uniforms and all of their signs.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
I'm kind of pulled in two different directions, you know.
On the one hand, I just think they're nuts. On
the other hand, it seems to reflect an enormous amount
of anguish and uncertainty, but it has a kind of
quasi fascistic feel to be how should we read that?
Speaker 11 (21:47):
Technocracy from the start was caught up in a lot
of different science fictional imaginarys that it didn't always have
full perspective on. They want to write themselves into these
gleaming science fictional futures that they are obsessed with, but
without actually thinking through what that would mean in practice,
what it would mean to replace an entire system of government.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Some of what.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs now endorse, including
through DOGE the Department of Government Efficiency, bears more than
a family likeness to the technocracy movement. Libertarianism, deregulation of
the economy, faith that technological innovations can solve both political
and social problems, a critique of paper currency and the
(22:35):
price system. Also, for some reason, technocrats objected to personal names.
Musk's grandfather renamed himself one zero four five zero dash
zero one. Another technocrat called himself one x one eight
zero nine x five six like one of Elon Musk's
youngest children, a boy named x ash a twelve or
(22:59):
X for short. Elon Musk after that year in Saskatchewan
spent two years at Queen's University in Ontario. Then he
transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with degrees in
economics and physics.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
He spent a summer interning.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
At dot COM's in Silicon Valley, where things were getting wild.
It was a gold rush. In nineteen ninety five, the
Internet opened to commercial traffic for the first time. You
could buy stuff online. But how Musk started a PhD
program in material science engineering at Stanford but dropped out
(23:37):
after two days. As he later told CNN, back in.
Speaker 8 (23:40):
Ninety five, there weren't very many people on the Internet,
and certainly nobody was making any money at all. Most
people thought the Internet was going to be a.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Fat Elon Musk started his first company, ZIP two, with
his brother and a friend. Everyone at the time was
trying to engage in what was called disruptive innovation, which
means destroy existing industries by doing things completely differently online.
Zip too, was a newspaper industry disruptive innovation. It helped
newspapers make the transition to online publishing, though it also
(24:12):
contributed to a crisis in journalism, all sorts of people
founded news aggregators and news feeds. Musk made his first
fortune in nineteen ninety nine he sold zip to for
three hundred million dollars.
Speaker 6 (24:26):
Cash.
Speaker 8 (24:27):
Receiving cash is cash. I mean those are just a
large number of band Franklins.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
He then turned to thinking about online money technocrats. Like
his grandfather had wanted to abolish the price system, Musk
wanted to restructure the system of exchange itself.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
This planet has or had a problem, which was this,
most of the people living on it were unhappy for
pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for
this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with
the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is
odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green
pieces of paper that were unhappy.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
In nineteen ninety nine, Musk founded a new company, X
dot com.
Speaker 8 (25:09):
So this is an ATM, and what we're going to
do is transform the traditional banking industry.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Musk put millions of dollars into x dot com. He said,
selling one business and starting the next was like a
high stakes poker game. You win a big pot, you
risk it all all over again. This is called serial entrepreneurship.
Start it, sell it, raise venture capital to start the
next thing. Every time you do this, you've got to
(25:34):
come up with a story, characters, and a plot. Because
your investors don't have any real metrics, no earnings or profits,
no prices. Investors are buying your story. A startup doesn't
actually have to make anything, or do anything, or succeed
in any measurable way for a venture capitalist to make money.
That startup just has to sound good enough for someone
(25:55):
else to invest in it. All it has to do
is tell a really incredible story, and the more obviously,
the story comes straight out of the pages of science fiction.
Speaker 8 (26:04):
The better.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
X dot com described itself as an online bank, but
its founders soon discovered that people mostly wanted to use
it as an online payment system. Meanwhile, Peter Teal had
started a company called Confinity that could send payments between devices.
Teal worked as a securities lawyer before helping to found Confinity.
In nineteen ninety nine, the company launched.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
A service it called PayPal.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
If people were going to buy things online, they needed
to be able to pay for things online. As Teal
saw it, they were reinventing money. In two thousand confinityan
X dot Com merged. One thing Musk regrets is that
the company's product got called PayPal instead of X. The
founders of these companies became known as the PayPal Mafia
(26:55):
because they made staggering sums of money when PayPal went
public in two thousand and two and was later bought
by eBay, and then they went on to found their
own venture capital companies, funding other startups, including YouTube and Facebook.
X Capitalism was born.
Speaker 6 (27:15):
Later.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Musk, nostalgic about this time in his life, reacquired the
domain X dot com. For a long time, there was
just a little X there on a blank page because
the only thing in the source code was the letter X.
Who was just waiting there when in twenty twenty two,
Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X. But we're skipping
(27:39):
ahead back in two thousand and two. Once Musk had
his PayPal fortune, he mostly used that money not to
fund other people's ventures, but to start a company of
his own, a rocket company, and for that he.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Needed a new origin story.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Next time on X men blasting off to Mars with
SpaceX
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Elon Musk is the richest person on the planet. Long
before Donald Trump appointed him to run DOGE, a department
of government efficiency, Musk had plans. Plans to save the
world from climate catastrophe with electric cars and solar panels
and underground tunnels, Plans to colonize Mars, Plans to build
(00:42):
chips to put in people's brains. He is followed by
more than two hundred million people on social media. He
has two ex wives and eleven children, including a son
named x The bare facts of Musk's life, the way
they're usually told make him sound like a fictional character,
a comic book superhero.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
But what's the real story, the actual history behind the
comic book. Welcome to X Man, the Elon.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Musk origin Story.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
I'm Jill Lapour.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
I'm a professor of history and law at Harvard. For
a long time, I've been studying the relationship between technological
and political change. I'm fascinated by visions of the future
in political discourse, in literature, in science fiction, and even
comic books. This series, I'm exploring a new kind of capitalism.
(01:39):
I call Muskism extravagant extreme capitalism, extraterrestrial capitalism where stock
prices are driven by earnings but also by fantasies. Fantasies
that you can find in blockbuster superhero movies, but that
come from science fiction, some of it.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
A century old.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Elon Musk runs a rocket company. It's called space X,
his artificial intelligence company x AI, the name he gave
to Twitter after he bought it. X. Musk loves the
letter X, one of his first big startups, X dot com.
X is sexy as an X rated, but X is
(02:24):
sexy because X means mysterious and X means mysterious because
In sixteen thirty seven, when Renee Descartes sat down to
write a treatise on geometry, he decided to use X, Y,
and Z for variables, but his printer setting the type
kept running out of ys and z's but not x's
because you don't use X very often in French, so
(02:45):
he used mostly x's X the unknown. In the twentieth century,
X became science fiction writer's favorite letter of.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
The alphabet.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
X for extraterrestrial, as in the film The Strange World
of Planet X.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
Be prepared for a fantastic adventure into.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
The future, a monstrous world of terror and chaos. By
the nineteen nineties x men, xbox, x files, and then
Elon Muskin x, dot com, SpaceX. Something strange was happening
to capitalism. As the gap between the rich and the
(03:33):
poor got wider and wider, the claims of corporations got
more and more grandiose. Google opened an R and D
division called X, whose aim was to solve some of
the world's hardest problems. Tech companies started talking about their mission,
and their mission was always magnificently inflated, transforming the future
of work, connecting all of humanity, making.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
The world a better place.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Scholars kept groping for adjectives to describe these new brands
of capitalism. Surveillance capitalism, platform capitalism, identity capitalism, What about
just capitalism X for extreme extravagant existential A capitalism in
which companies worry very publicly and quite feverishly about planetary disaster,
(04:20):
about the all too real catastrophe of climate change, but
also about all sorts of so called existential risks to
the future of the human race, so that they can
save us all. A capitalism animated by catastrophe, A capitalism
driven by science fiction and driven to by the disavowal
of its.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Own origins to recover that history.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Each episode of X Men were blasting off to the past.
This episode is called Dimension X. Our first destination and
time and space is South Africa in the nineteen seventies.
Elon Musk was born in Pretoria in nineteen seventy one.
His father, Errol, was an engineer who owned a construction business.
(05:11):
His mother was a former model. They had three kids.
Elon was the oldest. His parents got divorced when he
was still a boy. Eryl Musk has lately become a
prominent figure in his son's shadow. Outspoken and controversial, He's
compared the jailed far right activist Tommy Robinson to Nelson
Mandela and predicted Robinson would one day be Britain's Prime Minister.
(05:35):
Eryl Musk's relationship with his oldest son is fraud, but
he's always maintained that Elon is a genius, as he
did about a decade ago during an interview with South
Africa's Radio seven oh two.
Speaker 4 (05:47):
Is something about Elon that's an X factor?
Speaker 5 (05:51):
What is that? Yeah? I would say that he's always
been a very deep thinker.
Speaker 4 (05:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (05:57):
When he was very small, for example, he would ask me,
where is the whole world?
Speaker 2 (06:03):
The story of Elon Musk's childhood, as it's usually told,
is right out of science fiction, from a genre known
as the boy Wonder story. My favorites are the Tom
Swift books series that started in nineteen ten.
Speaker 6 (06:16):
Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout, the speediest car on
the road. Barton Swift, esteemed inventor, was drawing a complicated machine,
pausing to make some intricate calculations when his young son
interrupted him.
Speaker 7 (06:35):
I'm gonna build an electric runabout.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
Dad. Hmmm, I don't take much stock in electric autos. Tom.
All the electric runabouts I ever saw didn't seem able
to go so very fast, oh very far.
Speaker 7 (06:52):
That's true, but it's because they didn't have the right
kind of battery. It seems to me that if you
put the right kind of battery into an automobile, it
could scoot along pretty lively.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
That Tom Swift story was published more than a century ago.
But the way well Musk tells it, little Elon was
that same boy wonder.
Speaker 5 (07:12):
When the computers came out right in the beginning, he
came to me and said he would like to have
one of these new computers.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
In nineteen eighty four, when Elon Musk was twelve, he
sold a video game to PC magazine for five hundred dollars.
It's called Blastar Black Screen, little squary blobs, Space Invader
style our mission destroy alien freighter carrying deadly hydrogen bombs
and status beam machines. So don't get me wrong, Elon
(07:46):
Musk really was a whiz kid. And when Elon Musk
tells his own origin story, like when he spoke at
the Computer History Museum in California, that's how.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
He tells it.
Speaker 8 (07:56):
I was very prairie booker, so I was reading all
the time. So I was either reading, working on my computer,
or reading comics.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
He read a lot of books, but he says that
one book above all became his guide for life, the
Elon Musk Bible.
Speaker 8 (08:09):
When I was twelve or thirteen, a head company existential crisis,
and I was reading various books trying to figure out
the meaning of life. And we happened to have like
some books by Nietzschen Schopenhauer in the house, which you
should not read at age fourteen is bad, it's really negative.
Then I read The Hitchhiker's Guide the galaxyat which was
(08:30):
quite positive, I think.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
In Douglas Adams is Hitchhiker's Guide, the people of Megalithia
built an enormous computer to ask it a question about life,
the universe and everything, and after thinking for millions of years,
it answers forty two.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Musk says that taught him a.
Speaker 8 (08:47):
Lesson a lot of times, the question is hotter than
the answer, and if you can properly phrase the question,
then the answer is the easy part.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
The Hitchhiker's Guide didn't start out as a book. Adams
wrote it for BBC Radio four, and starting in nineteen
seventy eight it was broadcast on the BBC World Service,
including to Pretoria l What was.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams? Far
back in the mists of ancient time, in the great
and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich,
and on the whole tax free. Many men, of course,
became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing
(09:31):
to be ashamed of, because no one was really poor,
at least no one worth. Speaking of.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
The Hitchhiker's Guide, that is, begins with an indictment of
economic inequality. What was it like to listen to this
in South Africa under apartheid. Musk hardly ever talks about apartheid.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
At least not publicly. I'm going to.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Talk about it for a while here because it's a
crucial piece of this history. But first, let me be
really clear. White people who happened to grow up in
South Africa under apartheid in the nineteen seventies and nineteen
eighties are not responsible for apartheid. Peter Teel, another Silicon
entrepreneur and later a key business partner of Elon Musk's,
(10:13):
also lived in South Africa for a while as a kid.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
They were children.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Also, Musk left South Africa when he was seventeen to
avoid being conscripted into the army, the army that imposed
and enforced the regime. I'm not placing blame here. Still,
I do think there's a weird way in which the
culture of apartheid found expression in the nineteen nineties in
Silicon Valley's Vision.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Of the Future.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
You know, you've said that apartheid is a habit of mind.
Can you tell me what you mean by that? I
called up Jacob Glamini, a professor of African History at Princeton.
He grew up in South Africa, and he's written beautifully
and powerfully about apartheid.
Speaker 9 (10:52):
What I mean by that is that so the partid
was not just a social and political and economic system,
but that it was also a cultural system which inculcated
in South Africans, both black and white, patterns of behavior,
ways of thinking. It's side to transform how people saw themselves,
but also how they saw the world.
Speaker 10 (11:12):
The color question is rapidly increasing in seriousness and urgency.
I consider a Partheight to be South Africa's lost chance
to remain a white man's country.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Apartheid, which means aparthood, began in nineteen forty eight. That
same year, nineteen forty eight, Elon Musk's mother was born
in Canada. Her father, jay N. Haldeman, was an ardent
conservative and anti communist. In nineteen fifty, Haldeman moved his
family to South Africa. Was there a lot of immigration
from say North America to South Africa after apartheid was declared?
(11:51):
I just find that like an odd journey for a
family to make in nineteen fifty.
Speaker 9 (11:55):
Oh yeah, I think that is quite striking. There is
this conscious airport and conscious attempt to recruit people to
South Africa to beef up white numbers to a point
where blacks would not be such a demographic threat. You know,
here's a place, you know, with amazing sunshine, great weather,
and you can actually live like a king or a queen.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Elon Musk's mother published a memoir in twenty twenty. It's
called A Woman Makes a Plan Advice for a lifetime
of adventure, beauty and Success. A lot of the book
is about growing up in South Africa in the nineteen
fifties and nineteen sixties. She says her parents were persuaded
to move there from Canada by missionaries who talked of
its beauty. Not once does she mention apartheid. Domini says
(12:43):
that's not unusual that the regime organized itself around acts
of forgetting and erasure, including pretending the native population somehow
didn't even exist.
Speaker 9 (12:53):
Unlike in the Americas, right, you know, where the indigenous
populations were annihilated, the South Afcana Gas is different. The
vast majority of the population is not annihilated, and whatever
you have to build has to be built around this
idea that the natives have not disappeared.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
A resistance movement rose up, led beginning in the nineteen
sixties by a young lawyer, Nelson Mandela.
Speaker 9 (13:15):
The Africans require the franchise on the basis.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Of one man, one vote.
Speaker 4 (13:22):
They won political independence.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Mandela was sent to prison in nineteen sixty two. Meanwhile,
the resistance grew.
Speaker 5 (13:31):
Radioprio.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
The Boys of the African National Congress, the U and
General Assembly denounced the apartheid regime in nineteen seventy three.
Two years later, right about when Elon Musk was starting kindergarten,
police opened fire on thousands of school children during a
protest and Soweto were playing.
Speaker 5 (13:49):
In the yard in the school yard and the stituating
Atrendo in the process.
Speaker 6 (13:55):
Hitting three kids.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
These were black children. White children went to white schools.
Speaker 9 (14:01):
Black people had to pay for their education, but whites didn't.
Some people were jogging. It was actually socialism for whites
and capitalism for blacks. Right, That's how a party it
actually justified itself that you know, we are creating a
class of successful white people.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
People who ran construction businesses like Eryl Musk. Elon's father
made a lot of money in the apartheid era, building
two of everything, one for blacks and one for whites.
For whites, they built a fantasy.
Speaker 9 (14:29):
World ideologically, I think one of the successes of a
part daid was in making white South often believe that
everything they achieved was through individual initiative, and everything that
they ever got in life was through their own hard work,
you know, never mind the fact that the system was
designed to in some ways give them all the benefit
and to give them all the resources to gether in life.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
It's so interesting because the starkness of that divide, you know,
the rigidity of the separation, has so many earlier representations
in the world of science fiction, right, Like so much
of H. G. Wells's science fiction is about what about
a terrible, awful future in which we divide people into
some who will live underground and do all of the
work for us, and we will never see them, and
(15:14):
we will pretend they don't even exist, and those of
us who will live in the skies and in the clouds.
And to me, sometimes when I think about what Silicon
Valley is imagining, we will colonize Mars, and some people
will go there who really need to be relieved of.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Their experience on Earth.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
I mean, am I off base to say that some
of that seems to revive these notions of very very
strict hierarchies.
Speaker 9 (15:40):
I don't think you off based at all, Jill. I mean,
I think you've put your finger on it. And of
course we don't want to instrumentalize this and see you know,
it has just cause an effect. But I think there's
a strong case to be made for the connection between
the Sabarti dystopia and this idealized version of a world
(16:01):
where the elites don't have to share their oxygen with
lesser beings.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
So I listened to The Hitchhiker's Guide, and I find
it strange that the Elon Musk is such a fan,
because a lot of it sounds to me like an
indictment of people just like him, or like Amazon's Jeff Bezos.
The mega rich, with their privately owned rockets blasting off
to other planets.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
And for these extremely rich merchants, life eventually became rather dull,
and it seemed that none of the worlds they settled
on was entirely satisfactory. Either the climate wasn't quite right
in the later part of the afternoon, or the day
was half an hour too long, or the sea was
just the wrong shade of pink, and thus where it
(16:43):
created the conditions for a staggering new form of industry,
custom made luxury planet building.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Also hear me out, I think the Hitchhiker's Guide, broadcast
by the BBC in the nineteen seventies, just when the
world was condemning apartheid, sounds quite specifically as though it's
an indictment of apartheid like social and economic systems. And
I don't think I'm over reading. Douglas Adams wrote Hitchhiker's
(17:13):
Guide on a Hermes manual typewriter. One key is more
worn down than the rest, the letter X. And you
know what was on the side of that typewriter, a sticker.
It says end apartheid. When Elon Musk started college at
the University of Pretoria, apartheid was on the verge of collapse.
Speaker 10 (17:36):
Today the mighty off South Africa back and why a
back up nine has.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
No huge hib By then, in nineteen ninety, when Mandela
was released after twenty seven years in prison, Elon Musk
had left South Africa behind to launch his new life
in North America. After studying at the University of Pretoria,
Elon Musk traveled to Canada, where his maternal grandfather was from.
He wanted to get to the United States, but it
(18:05):
was easier to get a Canadian passport. Having broken with
his he flew to Montreal with nothing but a backpack,
then hitchhiked to Saskatchewan, where his grandfather had lived before
moving the family to South Africa. And it's this grandfather,
jay N. Haldeman, who I want to look at next,
because before he left Canada in the nineteen thirties, he'd
(18:26):
been a leader of a strange sci fi inspired movement
known as technocracy. It bears an uncanny resemblance to some
things going on today in Silicon Valley, repackaged as existential
risk futurism.
Speaker 4 (18:41):
What Technocracy Inc. Is chiefly engaged in now is the
organization of an army of trained men and women who,
when the present interference controls break down and the intricate
machinery of production and distribution is in danger of stopping,
will be able to prevent that catastrophe before it is
(19:03):
too late.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
So this sounds like science fiction, but this really happened.
People in the technocracy movement, they called themselves technocrats, wanted
engineers and scientists to run governments. They took their inspiration
from science fiction, where engineers and scientists.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Were always solving problems.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
They were suspicious of democracy and also of capitalism.
Speaker 4 (19:24):
Biprice system is not meant merely the capitalistic system, which
is only one variety of the species. It means the
collapse and complete obsolescence of the entire method of distributing
goods and services by means of a price. There will
be no place for politics or politicians finance, so financiers
(19:48):
rackets are racketeers.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Grant Weitdoff teaches Digital Humanities and American Studies at Princeton.
He says the technocracy movement started in New York in
nineteen nineteen with a guy who ran a floor waxing business.
Speaker 11 (20:01):
His idea was that engineers had these unique qualities that
would somehow make them good social leaders. They could assess
a situation from a bou they would come up with
much more rational or economic solutions than politicians or economic
leaders would.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Then, with the stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine
and the depression that followed, democracies were collapsing all over
the world. Technocracy really had its moment.
Speaker 11 (20:26):
Local chapters at that point had sprung up everywhere across
the US and Canada, and each of those chapters start
putting forward their own competing ideas. There's an invented unit
of measure called the ERG. This is one solution that
we replace currency with units of energy, depended on how
much energy a single worker is capable of producing in
(20:47):
a given day and how much they should get in
return for that work.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
As far as I can tell, it's at this point
that Elon Musk's grandfather got involved with technocracy. He lost
his farm during the depression and ever after didn't believe
in banks or banking. A lot of people felt that way,
and some of them were drawn into the set of
ideas about a different way of thinking of about money.
Speaker 11 (21:10):
And some of the chapters start doing odd things to
kind of get their message across. They start wearing these
identical gray uniforms, driving these gray cars in these large parades,
blasting speeches out of megaphones. They adopt this yin yang
symbol on all of their uniforms and all of their signs.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
I'm kind of pulled in two different directions, you know.
On the one hand, I just think they're nuts. On
the other hand, it seems to reflect an enormous amount
of anguish and uncertainty, but it has a kind of
quasi fascistic feel to be how should we read that?
Speaker 11 (21:47):
Technocracy from the start was caught up in a lot
of different science fictional imaginarys that it didn't always have
full perspective on. They want to write themselves into these
gleaming science fictional futures that they are obsessed with, but
without actually thinking through what that would mean in practice,
what it would mean to replace an entire system of government.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Some of what.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs now endorse, including
through DOGE the Department of Government Efficiency, bears more than
a family likeness to the technocracy movement. Libertarianism, deregulation of
the economy, faith that technological innovations can solve both political
and social problems, a critique of paper currency and the
(22:35):
price system. Also, for some reason, technocrats objected to personal names.
Musk's grandfather renamed himself one zero four five zero dash
zero one. Another technocrat called himself one x one eight
zero nine x five six like one of Elon Musk's
youngest children, a boy named x ash a twelve or
(22:59):
X for short. Elon Musk after that year in Saskatchewan
spent two years at Queen's University in Ontario. Then he
transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with degrees in
economics and physics.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
He spent a summer interning.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
At dot COM's in Silicon Valley, where things were getting wild.
It was a gold rush. In nineteen ninety five, the
Internet opened to commercial traffic for the first time. You
could buy stuff online. But how Musk started a PhD
program in material science engineering at Stanford but dropped out
(23:37):
after two days. As he later told CNN, back in.
Speaker 8 (23:40):
Ninety five, there weren't very many people on the Internet,
and certainly nobody was making any money at all. Most
people thought the Internet was going to be a.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Fat Elon Musk started his first company, ZIP two, with
his brother and a friend. Everyone at the time was
trying to engage in what was called disruptive innovation, which
means destroy existing industries by doing things completely differently online.
Zip too, was a newspaper industry disruptive innovation. It helped
newspapers make the transition to online publishing, though it also
(24:12):
contributed to a crisis in journalism, all sorts of people
founded news aggregators and news feeds. Musk made his first
fortune in nineteen ninety nine he sold zip to for
three hundred million dollars.
Speaker 6 (24:26):
Cash.
Speaker 8 (24:27):
Receiving cash is cash. I mean those are just a
large number of band Franklins.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
He then turned to thinking about online money technocrats. Like
his grandfather had wanted to abolish the price system, Musk
wanted to restructure the system of exchange itself.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
This planet has or had a problem, which was this,
most of the people living on it were unhappy for
pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for
this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with
the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is
odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green
pieces of paper that were unhappy.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
In nineteen ninety nine, Musk founded a new company, X
dot com.
Speaker 8 (25:09):
So this is an ATM, and what we're going to
do is transform the traditional banking industry.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Musk put millions of dollars into x dot com. He said,
selling one business and starting the next was like a
high stakes poker game. You win a big pot, you
risk it all all over again. This is called serial entrepreneurship.
Start it, sell it, raise venture capital to start the
next thing. Every time you do this, you've got to
(25:34):
come up with a story, characters, and a plot. Because
your investors don't have any real metrics, no earnings or profits,
no prices. Investors are buying your story. A startup doesn't
actually have to make anything, or do anything, or succeed
in any measurable way for a venture capitalist to make money.
That startup just has to sound good enough for someone
(25:55):
else to invest in it. All it has to do
is tell a really incredible story, and the more obviously,
the story comes straight out of the pages of science fiction.
Speaker 8 (26:04):
The better.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
X dot com described itself as an online bank, but
its founders soon discovered that people mostly wanted to use
it as an online payment system. Meanwhile, Peter Teal had
started a company called Confinity that could send payments between devices.
Teal worked as a securities lawyer before helping to found Confinity.
In nineteen ninety nine, the company launched.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
A service it called PayPal.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
If people were going to buy things online, they needed
to be able to pay for things online. As Teal
saw it, they were reinventing money. In two thousand confinityan
X dot Com merged. One thing Musk regrets is that
the company's product got called PayPal instead of X. The
founders of these companies became known as the PayPal Mafia
(26:55):
because they made staggering sums of money when PayPal went
public in two thousand and two and was later bought
by eBay, and then they went on to found their
own venture capital companies, funding other startups, including YouTube and Facebook.
X Capitalism was born.
Speaker 6 (27:15):
Later.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Musk, nostalgic about this time in his life, reacquired the
domain X dot com. For a long time, there was
just a little X there on a blank page because
the only thing in the source code was the letter X.
Who was just waiting there when in twenty twenty two,
Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X. But we're skipping
(27:39):
ahead back in two thousand and two. Once Musk had
his PayPal fortune, he mostly used that money not to
fund other people's ventures, but to start a company of
his own, a rocket company, and for that he.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Needed a new origin story.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Next time on X men blasting off to Mars with
SpaceX
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