March 29, 2025 • 27 mins
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 history serves as a warning.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. The COVID nineteen pandemic was a boom time for
the world's billionaires, who gained nearly two trillion dollars of
wealth in twenty twenty alone. As CNBC reported at the
height of the pandemic, one of those billionaires was fast
climbing the list of the world's richest people.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Ewon Musk just past Bill Gates become the second richest
man in the world, with a fortune of over one
hundred and twenty eight billion dollars.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
For a while, he jockeyed for the top place with
other tech giants.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Altogether, the worth of those on the list is thirteen
point one trillion dollars, up from eight trillion last year,
the rise occurring as most the world was shut down
during the pandemic.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
By the end of that year, Elon Musk had become
the richest man in the world. It was also during
the pandemic that Musk underwent a political conversion, moving to
the right. By twenty twenty four, he'd become one of
Donald Trump's closest advisors.
Speaker 4 (01:17):
Take Over Elaid, Yes, take Elon Musk is taking over
with an Act to government spending in a newly created
Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which is also the
name of a cryptocurrency inspired by a dog meme.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Doge the Department of Government Efficiency, staffed by Silicon Valley
entrepreneurs and engineers hoping to make use of artificial intelligence
to reinvent American government. Welcome to x Men. The Elon
Musk origin Story. I'm Jill Lapour. I'm a historian professor
at Harvard. This episode is the fifth in a series
(01:55):
I've been hosting about a new kind of capitalism called Muskism.
Extravagant extreme capitalism, extraterrestrial capitalism, a form of capitalism influenced
by fantasies that come from science fiction. It's all bound
up with a tech bro vibe, comic books and superheroes,
fantasy and video games. The tech overlords as the Lords
(02:19):
of the Rings. This episode is called The Doge Father.
Elon Musk, Money, cryptocurrency, and the rise of techno Libertarianism.
As Donald Trump took office in twenty seventeen, Elon Musk
had achieved phenomenal really almost unbelievable success, especially with Tesla
(02:41):
and SpaceX, both of which were headquartered in California. He
was then a darling of the press it seemed as
though anytime Musk did anything at all, even just tweeting,
newsroom phones lit up. He was a golden boy with
super fans who adored him as a real life Tony
Stark iron Man. Then came COVID the coronavirus. Panic is dumb,
(03:05):
Musk tweeted on March sixth, twenty Twenty days later, the
governor of California announced that the state would shut down,
that we direct a statewide order for people to stay
at home. Musk was furious, and we are confident that
the people of the state of California will abide by it.
They'll do the right thing. Musk vowed to keep his
(03:26):
Tesla factory open, tweeting Free America Now, Elon Musk is
escalating his fight with a California county, restarting a Tesla
factory in Fremont despite a stay at home order there. Then,
in protest of California's strict regulations, Musk announced that he
was moving to lightly regulated Texas and had decided to
build Tesla's gigafactory there too. We approached both Tesla and
(03:50):
SpaceX for a response on several points in the series,
but at the time of the recording, we had not
received a reply, one way or another. Musk had become
a culture warrior, tweeting and tweeting and getting richer and richer. Meanwhile,
during the pandemic, the contrast between the suffering of the
masses and the vasting increase of wealth among a very
(04:10):
few provoked a backlash. In the US, Senator Bernard Sanders
proposed the Make Billionaires Pay Act, a one time tax
on American billionaires to help cover the out of pocket
medical expenses of ordinary Americans for one year. Musk then
got into a Twitter war with Sanders. Sanders claimed Musk's
(04:30):
wealth had been made possible by billions of dollars in
government subsidies for his corporations. Musk suggested that Sanders should
leave him alone because Tesla is saving the planet. Musk
may not have been saving the planet, but his influence,
especially on markets, kept growing. Like a lot of people,
during the pandemic, Musk spent more time than ever online.
(04:53):
The number of his Twitter followers skyrocketed. As CNBC reported
in twenty twenty one, markets seem to hang on his
every word.
Speaker 5 (05:01):
One thing we've learned lately is that when Elon Musk tweets.
The news cycle follows him, and in fact he does
have a series of tweets in the past few minutes
says I'm selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house,
says Tesla. Stock price is too high im in my opinion,
and now give people back their freedom. It's going to
(05:22):
get attention. Stock now down almost seven percent.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
This became a signature feature of Muskism long before a
Musk bought Twitter. A single tweet by a single person,
not an announcement from a central bank, could drive a
stock price or hobble a currency market. In January twenty
twenty one, after the insurrection at the US capital Twitter
band Trump with Trump Gone, Musk became the loudest voice
(05:49):
in the room. The Love Hate Twitter account to follow.
He started tweeting about cryptocurrency Bitcoin and a joke coin
called dogecoin. If Trump's tweets destabilized American politics, Musk's tweets
seemed to be destabilizing financial markets. A lot of headlines
had to do with the fictive quality of money. After all,
(06:12):
all forms of currency are acts of imagination. As Douglas
Adams pointed out so well in the Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy.
Speaker 6 (06:19):
In fact, there are three freely convertible currencies in the universe,
but the Alterian dollar has recently collapsed, the Flanian pobble
bead is only exchangeable for other Flanian pobble beads, and
the trigantic pew doesn't really count as money. Its exchange
rate of six ningyas to one pew is simple, but
since a ninga is a triangular rubber coin eight hundred
miles long each side, no one has ever collected enough
(06:41):
to own one pew. Ning is a not negotiable currency
because the galactic banks refuse to deal in fiddling small change.
From this basic premise, it's very simple to prove that
the Galectic banks are also the products of a deranged imagination.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
I've spent a lot of time in this investigation of
Musk with Hitchhiker's Guide, because Musk read it as a
kid growing up in South Africa, and he cites it
all the time. But Hitchhiker's Guide is a strange influence
for Muscuism, partly because Adams was so brutally gut wrenchingly
funny about the arbitrariness of money and the follies of
financial schemers and assorted idiot executives.
Speaker 7 (07:19):
If we could, for a moment move on to the
subject of fiscal policy.
Speaker 8 (07:22):
School policy, How can you have money if none of
you actually produce anything?
Speaker 2 (07:27):
It doesn't grow on tree?
Speaker 1 (07:29):
And Adams was particularly devastating on the subject of the
damage done to the natural world by advanced extractive capitalism.
Speaker 7 (07:36):
Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt leaves
as legal tender, we have, of course, or become immensely rich.
We have also run into a small instation problem on
account of the high level of leaf availability, which means
that I gather the current going rate has something like
three major deciduous forests buying one ship's peanuts. So in
(07:58):
order to obviate this problem and defectively revalue the leaf,
we are about to embark on an extensive defiliation campaign
and burn down all the forests. I think that's a
sensible movie economic time.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
If you've been following the story of cryptocurrency, this scene
from Hitchhiker's Guide might sound a little too on the nose.
In twenty twenty one, Musk announced that Tesla was buying
millions of dollars of bitcoin and that you could buy
a Tesla with bitcoin, until he changed his mind, citing
the sort of environmental concerns that I looked into in
an earlier episode of this series. It turns out that
(08:37):
mining bitcoin really is burning down the forests. But you
can buy Tesla merchandise with doge coin, and maybe you
can sway a presidential election. In the twenty twenty four
US presidential election, nearly half of all corporate spending came
(08:58):
from the cryptocurrency industry. Some of that money went to Democrats,
but most of it went to Republicans. Among the billionaires
celebrating the announcement of doge that Apartment of government efficiency
was the CEO of the cryptocurrency company Coinbase. Cryptocurrency is
essentially money without government, a libertarian's dream. Doge's mandate is
(09:22):
to reduce government spending and to eliminate government regulations. The
second of these is a lot easier than the first.
What dismantling regulations might mean for money is a story,
though that goes back to the beginning of those regulations.
The kerfuffle over bitcoin really dates to eighteen forty eight
(09:44):
and the discovery of gold in California. A flood of
gold retavoc on the US dollar, and so as the
federal government took on new powers, it adopted a gold standard,
which set a rate for the price of paper currency.
Europe then did the same thing. This ushered in a
new era of global trade, and not incidentally, the grotesque
(10:04):
economic inequality of the Gilded Age. Farmers and factory workers
argued for a silver standard, but the US formally established
the gold standard in the year nineteen hundred. That same year,
a science fiction writer named Garrett P. Servis imagined a
different outcome in a novel called Moon Metal, in which
gold is discovered at the South Pole, setting off a
(10:26):
second gold rush.
Speaker 9 (10:29):
Gold is going to be as plentiful as ire. If
there were not such a flood of it, we might manage.
But when they begin to make trouser buttons out of
the same metal that is now locked and guarded in
steel vaults wound, where will be our standard of worth?
My dear fellow, I would as willingly face the end
of the world as this that's coming.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Just then, a sinister scientist discovers a mysterious new metal
on the Moon which he can beam to Earth by
way of a particle ray and introduces a new and
more precious form of currency.
Speaker 8 (11:03):
I can produce it in the pure form abundantly enough
to replace gold, giving the same relative value and the
gold possessed when it was the universal stand.
Speaker 9 (11:15):
But that will make you the richest man who ever lived. Undoubtedly,
why you will become the financial dictator of the whole earth.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Undoubtedly, currency is always a worry. Its value is so contrived,
so imaginary, but also so important. After the stock market
crash of nineteen twenty nine, people took their money out
of the banks and turned in their paper dollars for gold.
In the nineteen thirties, the US abandoned the gold standard,
at least for the duration of the depression, and prohibited
(11:46):
the private ownership of gold. If you've been listening to
x Men for the last few episodes, you'll remember that
it was during this era that in Canada, Elon Musk's
grandfather joined and became a leader of the technocracy movement,
founded on the belief that engineers could solve all political,
social and economic problems. Technocrats did not believe in price.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
By price 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.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Technocrats didn't believe in prices because they didn't believe in
any system not run by engineers. They wanted to get
rid of both governments and banks.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
There will be no place for politics or politicians, finance
or financiers. Rackets are racketeers.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
In place of prices and money. Technocrats wanted to reimagine
the entire economic system with a new currency, a unit
of energy, an erg whose stability would eradicate the volatility
of finance.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
A dollar may be worth in buying power so much
today and moral less tomorrow, but a unit of work
or heat is the same in nineteen hundred, nineteen twenty nine,
nineteen thirty three, all the year two thousand.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
The URG never did replace the dollar, and the US
formally abandoned the gold standard in nineteen seventy six, But
starting in two thousand and nine, people who want to
trade in units other than dollars can buy bitcoins. Bitcoin
a cryptocurrency isn't based on anything of value, Although not
unlike the URG, it has some relationship to energy, the
(13:37):
energy it takes to produce it. After Trump's election in
twenty sixteen, the price of bitcoin skyrocketed higher than it
had ever been before, and Trump withdrew the US from
the Paris Climate Accords. But bitcoin's value, like the value
of other money, only exists if you believe it exists.
JP Morgan once suggested that bitcoin was poised to become
(13:59):
the new gold standard.
Speaker 10 (14:01):
Cryptocurrencies were designed to make payments without a trusted third party,
such as a government or a financial institution involved.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Ishuar Prasad is an economist at Cornell University and a
fellow at the Brookings Institute. He believes cryptocurrency has set
off a revolution, a foundational change in finance, but that
bitcoin itself has not met its objectives.
Speaker 10 (14:24):
Bitcoin has really ended up failing in what it was
supposed to provide, which is a cheap, trustless medium of exchange.
It turns out it is not anonymous, it turns out
it is not cheap, and it is not very efficient.
So Bitcoin has centered up becoming a pure speculative asset.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
The technology underlying cryptocurrencies, Prosad argues, well, have all kinds
of effects on finance. It really is the future. But
he's not persuaded that, as some advocates claim, cryptocurrencies will
democratize finance.
Speaker 10 (14:56):
They've made it possible for people with very low incomes,
very low levels of wealth, to get relatively easy access
to digital payments and also to basic banking products. The
problem is that digital access is unequal and financial literacy
is unequal. So you might give people easy access to
(15:17):
a lot of products, but if you don't teach them
the risks emburied in those products, then you might end
up with the relatively less well off taking on much
more risks than they realize that they're taking on, and
the rich ending up being able to use these technologies
much more to their advantage, so they become even better
off than they are right now.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency based on nothing except a meme about
a dog, was started by a software engineer named Jackson
Palmer as a joke. Palmer later wrote an article called
my joke, Cryptocurrency hit two billion dollars and something is
Very wrong, in which he said that cryptocurrency, for all
its promise, had become nothing more than an unregulated penny
(16:02):
stock market. In twenty nineteen, after people started tweeting that
Musk should be the CEO of dogecoin, he said it
was his favorite cryptocurrency. Doge coin's value skyrocketed, Musk kept
tweeting about it, and up when its price he started
calling himself the doge Father. Musk talked about doge coin
(16:24):
on Clubhouse, an online chat room that was briefly popular
with Silicon.
Speaker 11 (16:28):
Valley occasionally make jokes about dogecoin that are really just
meant to be joked, but dose coin was made as
a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies. Obviously, but fate
loves irony, and as part of my says that the
most ironic outcome is most likely, or I say the
most entertaining outcome is often most likely and arguably the
most entertaining outcome, and the most ironic outcome would be
(16:50):
that dogecoin becomes the currency of Earth in the future.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
In twenty twenty one, Musk tweeted the single word doge
under a picture of a SpaceX rocket in front of
the moon. Doge to the Moon became a rallying cry.
On April Fool's Day that year, Musk tweeted, SpaceX is
going to put a literal doge coin on the literal
moon a joke, but also not a joke, Musk said
(17:19):
that SpaceX will be accepting doge coin as payment. Was
Musk a comic? The next month, Musk hosted NBC's Saturday
Night Live. He appeared in nearly every sketch as the
Nintendo villain Warrio on trial for murdering Mario. He explained,
I'm not evil, I'm just misunderstood. In a skit set
(17:40):
in the Old West, he played a bandit named Leron.
Speaker 12 (17:43):
What had instead of panning for gold?
Speaker 10 (17:45):
We just created our own cardsy currency.
Speaker 11 (17:49):
Yeah, and what the heck would it be based on?
Whatever we say?
Speaker 13 (17:53):
It's based on that.
Speaker 12 (17:54):
Hey, how money works.
Speaker 4 (17:57):
Money ain't a golden rock that we dig out of
the ground. Then we hope no one kills.
Speaker 10 (18:02):
Us before we train it for pieces of green paper.
Speaker 14 (18:05):
It's a perfect system.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
It's a weird thing about being a historian. Everything reminds
you of something else. Watching Elon Musk play Leron dressed
like a cowboy, he looked exactly like an old photograph
of his grandfather, the technocrat, who worked as a cowboy
and performed at rodeos doing rope tricks. The family likeness
is uncanny. Musk is also named after that cowboy's father,
(18:30):
his great grandfather, Elon muscism asks us to picture always
the future, but I find it hard not to keep
picturing the past. Yanked back lassoed by likenesses on SNL,
Musk appeared too on the show's newscast as a cryptocurrency
(18:51):
expert who can't give a straight answer.
Speaker 5 (18:53):
What is dose coin?
Speaker 11 (18:54):
Well, it actually started as a joke based on an
Internet meme.
Speaker 5 (18:58):
Okay, but what is dose coin?
Speaker 1 (19:01):
Finally he admits the truth.
Speaker 11 (19:03):
I keep telling you it's a cryptocurrency you can trade
for conventional money. Oh so the hustle, Yeah, that's uses.
Speaker 8 (19:14):
Everybody to the.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
That night, dogecoin lost a third of its value. Me
I was left thinking about the ending to that old
science fiction story Moon Metal from the year nineteen hundred.
Speaker 13 (19:27):
The looting of the Moon brought disaster to the rubber planet.
So mad were the efforts to get the precious metal
that the surface of our globe was fairly showered with it.
The air was filled with shining dust, until finally famine
and pestilence joined hands with financial disaster to punish the
(19:53):
grasping world.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
At the end of moon, metal markets collapse until an
international agreement leads to government control of currency. That is
what governments do in the US through the Federal Reserve
and through the Securities in Exchange Commission. The Biden administration
prosecuted crypto companies for securities violations under rules that the
(20:17):
crypto industry complained were unclear and misguided. The second Trump
administration is considering freezing much of that litigation.
Speaker 10 (20:26):
How much do you.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
Think we can rip out of this wasted six point
five trillion dollar Paris Biden budget?
Speaker 11 (20:35):
Well, I think we could do at least two trillion.
Speaker 13 (20:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
At a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden in New
York just before the election, Musk made some predictions about
the Department of Government deficiency.
Speaker 11 (20:47):
We're going to get the government off your back and
out of your pocketbook. America's does not not It's just
going to be great. America is going to reach heights
that it has never seen before.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
There is arguably a great deal of waste in the
US federal budget, though exactly where is the subject of
rather heated dispute, and many argued there's an excess of regulation.
Musk says that it takes longer to fill out the
paperwork to build a rocket than it takes to actually
build the rocket. Excessive regulations tie up all kinds of projects,
(21:26):
including housing and parks, projects that benefit all kinds of people.
So I'd be only too happy if something great, something wonderful,
were to come out of DOGE. But it strikes me
that a lot of what animates Musk in playing a
role in the American federal government concerns not taxing and spending,
but regulation of cryptocurrency. After all, the cryptocurrency industry helped
(21:49):
get Trump elected, and it expected results. As CNBC reported
just after the twenty twenty four election.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
Bitcoin briefly surging to a new record high as investors
bet that Donald Trump will deliver on his pro crypto promises.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
Just before he was inaugurated, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency
dollar sign Trump. By the day of the inauguration, its
market value had soared to ten billion dollars. To understand
all this, there's no better explainer than Mark Andreesen, a
venture capitalist whose company Andresen Horowitz has described itself as
(22:23):
the world's biggest investor in cryptocurrency. The Biden administration cracked
down on crypto scams. And Reeson says the Biden administration
also put pressure on banks not to work with crypto
companies in a deliberate bid to stifle the industry. Silicon
Valley had long supported Democratic political candidates and in general
leaned left, but Andreesen was outraged by the Biden administration's
(22:47):
interest in regulating both cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. As he
said on his podcast The Mark and Ben Show in
July twenty twenty four, it.
Speaker 12 (22:57):
Has been a brutal assault in an ascent industry that
I've never experienced before. I'm in total shock that has happened.
It's done intensely frustrating that it's been impossible to make
progress in this with the White House.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
That summer, Musk announced his support for Trump, as Andreason
described on another podcast called Honestly from the Free.
Speaker 12 (23:13):
Press, Elon right. Then Elon stepped up and said, yep,
I'm for him. That was the big moment in our
industry where the most important iconic figure in tech by far,
you know, did that in that moment, and so that
was the real shift.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
And Reason speculated that Musk's endorsement was likely partly pragmatic.
Speaker 12 (23:31):
I'm not speaking for Elon, but Elon decided that he
had to do this because if not, he wasn't going
to be able to launch rockets.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
Andreeson himself ranks pretty high on the list of the
highest donors to the Trump campaign. He soon became a
Trump intimate, recruiting people from Silicon Valley to work or
to volunteer for the incoming administration. With Doge and within
the Trump administration, Musk and Andreeson are achieving what the
technocrats of the nineteen thirties could only dream of the technocracy.
(24:05):
Andreson is also the author of an excellent distillation of Muskism.
It is called the Techno Optimist Manifesto, though it could
equally have been called the Manifesto of Muscism. It consists
of a list of statements, we can advance to a
far superior way of living and of being. We have
the tools, the systems, the ideas, we have the will.
(24:27):
We believe this is why our descendants will live in
the stars. If only we place our faith in the
techno capital machine and recent promises, we will become technological superman.
We are the Apex predator. We believe in greatness. We
believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness, strength, and recent sites
(24:48):
among his inspirations for this manifesto. On the list of
patron Saints of Techno Optimism Filippo Tomaso Marinetti. In nineteen
o nine, Marinetti wrote what he called the Futurist Manifesto.
It's a list of statements. We want to sing the
love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. We
(25:09):
want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march,
the perilous sleep, the slap and the blow with the fist.
We want to sing the man at the wheel. We
want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism. Standing
on the World Summit, we launched once again our insolent
challenge to the stars. So say Mojo, fists raised to
(25:34):
the stars. Ten years after Marinetti wrote the Manifesto of Futurism,
he co wrote the founding document of the movement led
by Mussolini, the Manifesto of Fascism. Marc Andreesen, like any
reasonable person, hates it when people call people they disagree with, fascists,
But here he cited the author of a fascist manifesto
(25:58):
as a major inspiration for his own manifesto, which is why,
to me, at least, the future envisioned by techno libertarians
happens to look chillingly like the very worst of the past.
The twenty first century is an age of technological wonder.
(26:19):
It is in many ways tremendously thrilling. Tesla and SpaceX
are engineering marvels, but I don't find Muskism thrilling as
political theory or social engineering. In twenty twenty one, the
year Elon Musk became the Doge father Time magazine made
an announcement.
Speaker 14 (26:39):
The person in the Year is Elon Musk. He is
reshaping life on Earth and possibly life off Earth as well.
And this is someone also who, in becoming the richest
person in the history of the world this year, really
speaks to the moment we're in.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Not mentioned in the Person of the Year announcement was
that at the time, two different women who were carrying
Musk's babies were in the same hospital in Texas. Musk
already had seven children, but he believes that a falling
birth rate is a civilizational threat and he means to
solve it. He seems particularly fond of a son born
(27:18):
in twenty twenty, during the pandemic, when Musk himself underwent
a kind of rebirth. He's often photographed carrying on his
shoulders this beautiful little blonde boy, and sometimes even brings
him along to press interviews. What's your name? What's your name? Actually?
Speaker 10 (27:37):
You should we help President Trump?
Speaker 12 (27:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Next time. On X men, the Astounding Tale of Baby
x
Pushkin. The COVID nineteen pandemic was a boom time for
the world's billionaires, who gained nearly two trillion dollars of
wealth in twenty twenty alone. As CNBC reported at the
height of the pandemic, one of those billionaires was fast
climbing the list of the world's richest people.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Ewon Musk just past Bill Gates become the second richest
man in the world, with a fortune of over one
hundred and twenty eight billion dollars.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
For a while, he jockeyed for the top place with
other tech giants.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Altogether, the worth of those on the list is thirteen
point one trillion dollars, up from eight trillion last year,
the rise occurring as most the world was shut down
during the pandemic.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
By the end of that year, Elon Musk had become
the richest man in the world. It was also during
the pandemic that Musk underwent a political conversion, moving to
the right. By twenty twenty four, he'd become one of
Donald Trump's closest advisors.
Speaker 4 (01:17):
Take Over Elaid, Yes, take Elon Musk is taking over
with an Act to government spending in a newly created
Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which is also the
name of a cryptocurrency inspired by a dog meme.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Doge the Department of Government Efficiency, staffed by Silicon Valley
entrepreneurs and engineers hoping to make use of artificial intelligence
to reinvent American government. Welcome to x Men. The Elon
Musk origin Story. I'm Jill Lapour. I'm a historian professor
at Harvard. This episode is the fifth in a series
(01:55):
I've been hosting about a new kind of capitalism called Muskism.
Extravagant extreme capitalism, extraterrestrial capitalism, a form of capitalism influenced
by fantasies that come from science fiction. It's all bound
up with a tech bro vibe, comic books and superheroes,
fantasy and video games. The tech overlords as the Lords
(02:19):
of the Rings. This episode is called The Doge Father.
Elon Musk, Money, cryptocurrency, and the rise of techno Libertarianism.
As Donald Trump took office in twenty seventeen, Elon Musk
had achieved phenomenal really almost unbelievable success, especially with Tesla
(02:41):
and SpaceX, both of which were headquartered in California. He
was then a darling of the press it seemed as
though anytime Musk did anything at all, even just tweeting,
newsroom phones lit up. He was a golden boy with
super fans who adored him as a real life Tony
Stark iron Man. Then came COVID the coronavirus. Panic is dumb,
(03:05):
Musk tweeted on March sixth, twenty Twenty days later, the
governor of California announced that the state would shut down,
that we direct a statewide order for people to stay
at home. Musk was furious, and we are confident that
the people of the state of California will abide by it.
They'll do the right thing. Musk vowed to keep his
(03:26):
Tesla factory open, tweeting Free America Now, Elon Musk is
escalating his fight with a California county, restarting a Tesla
factory in Fremont despite a stay at home order there. Then,
in protest of California's strict regulations, Musk announced that he
was moving to lightly regulated Texas and had decided to
build Tesla's gigafactory there too. We approached both Tesla and
(03:50):
SpaceX for a response on several points in the series,
but at the time of the recording, we had not
received a reply, one way or another. Musk had become
a culture warrior, tweeting and tweeting and getting richer and richer. Meanwhile,
during the pandemic, the contrast between the suffering of the
masses and the vasting increase of wealth among a very
(04:10):
few provoked a backlash. In the US, Senator Bernard Sanders
proposed the Make Billionaires Pay Act, a one time tax
on American billionaires to help cover the out of pocket
medical expenses of ordinary Americans for one year. Musk then
got into a Twitter war with Sanders. Sanders claimed Musk's
(04:30):
wealth had been made possible by billions of dollars in
government subsidies for his corporations. Musk suggested that Sanders should
leave him alone because Tesla is saving the planet. Musk
may not have been saving the planet, but his influence,
especially on markets, kept growing. Like a lot of people,
during the pandemic, Musk spent more time than ever online.
(04:53):
The number of his Twitter followers skyrocketed. As CNBC reported
in twenty twenty one, markets seem to hang on his
every word.
Speaker 5 (05:01):
One thing we've learned lately is that when Elon Musk tweets.
The news cycle follows him, and in fact he does
have a series of tweets in the past few minutes
says I'm selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house,
says Tesla. Stock price is too high im in my opinion,
and now give people back their freedom. It's going to
(05:22):
get attention. Stock now down almost seven percent.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
This became a signature feature of Muskism long before a
Musk bought Twitter. A single tweet by a single person,
not an announcement from a central bank, could drive a
stock price or hobble a currency market. In January twenty
twenty one, after the insurrection at the US capital Twitter
band Trump with Trump Gone, Musk became the loudest voice
(05:49):
in the room. The Love Hate Twitter account to follow.
He started tweeting about cryptocurrency Bitcoin and a joke coin
called dogecoin. If Trump's tweets destabilized American politics, Musk's tweets
seemed to be destabilizing financial markets. A lot of headlines
had to do with the fictive quality of money. After all,
(06:12):
all forms of currency are acts of imagination. As Douglas
Adams pointed out so well in the Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy.
Speaker 6 (06:19):
In fact, there are three freely convertible currencies in the universe,
but the Alterian dollar has recently collapsed, the Flanian pobble
bead is only exchangeable for other Flanian pobble beads, and
the trigantic pew doesn't really count as money. Its exchange
rate of six ningyas to one pew is simple, but
since a ninga is a triangular rubber coin eight hundred
miles long each side, no one has ever collected enough
(06:41):
to own one pew. Ning is a not negotiable currency
because the galactic banks refuse to deal in fiddling small change.
From this basic premise, it's very simple to prove that
the Galectic banks are also the products of a deranged imagination.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
I've spent a lot of time in this investigation of
Musk with Hitchhiker's Guide, because Musk read it as a
kid growing up in South Africa, and he cites it
all the time. But Hitchhiker's Guide is a strange influence
for Muscuism, partly because Adams was so brutally gut wrenchingly
funny about the arbitrariness of money and the follies of
financial schemers and assorted idiot executives.
Speaker 7 (07:19):
If we could, for a moment move on to the
subject of fiscal policy.
Speaker 8 (07:22):
School policy, How can you have money if none of
you actually produce anything?
Speaker 2 (07:27):
It doesn't grow on tree?
Speaker 1 (07:29):
And Adams was particularly devastating on the subject of the
damage done to the natural world by advanced extractive capitalism.
Speaker 7 (07:36):
Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt leaves
as legal tender, we have, of course, or become immensely rich.
We have also run into a small instation problem on
account of the high level of leaf availability, which means
that I gather the current going rate has something like
three major deciduous forests buying one ship's peanuts. So in
(07:58):
order to obviate this problem and defectively revalue the leaf,
we are about to embark on an extensive defiliation campaign
and burn down all the forests. I think that's a
sensible movie economic time.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
If you've been following the story of cryptocurrency, this scene
from Hitchhiker's Guide might sound a little too on the nose.
In twenty twenty one, Musk announced that Tesla was buying
millions of dollars of bitcoin and that you could buy
a Tesla with bitcoin, until he changed his mind, citing
the sort of environmental concerns that I looked into in
an earlier episode of this series. It turns out that
(08:37):
mining bitcoin really is burning down the forests. But you
can buy Tesla merchandise with doge coin, and maybe you
can sway a presidential election. In the twenty twenty four
US presidential election, nearly half of all corporate spending came
(08:58):
from the cryptocurrency industry. Some of that money went to Democrats,
but most of it went to Republicans. Among the billionaires
celebrating the announcement of doge that Apartment of government efficiency
was the CEO of the cryptocurrency company Coinbase. Cryptocurrency is
essentially money without government, a libertarian's dream. Doge's mandate is
(09:22):
to reduce government spending and to eliminate government regulations. The
second of these is a lot easier than the first.
What dismantling regulations might mean for money is a story,
though that goes back to the beginning of those regulations.
The kerfuffle over bitcoin really dates to eighteen forty eight
(09:44):
and the discovery of gold in California. A flood of
gold retavoc on the US dollar, and so as the
federal government took on new powers, it adopted a gold standard,
which set a rate for the price of paper currency.
Europe then did the same thing. This ushered in a
new era of global trade, and not incidentally, the grotesque
(10:04):
economic inequality of the Gilded Age. Farmers and factory workers
argued for a silver standard, but the US formally established
the gold standard in the year nineteen hundred. That same year,
a science fiction writer named Garrett P. Servis imagined a
different outcome in a novel called Moon Metal, in which
gold is discovered at the South Pole, setting off a
(10:26):
second gold rush.
Speaker 9 (10:29):
Gold is going to be as plentiful as ire. If
there were not such a flood of it, we might manage.
But when they begin to make trouser buttons out of
the same metal that is now locked and guarded in
steel vaults wound, where will be our standard of worth?
My dear fellow, I would as willingly face the end
of the world as this that's coming.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Just then, a sinister scientist discovers a mysterious new metal
on the Moon which he can beam to Earth by
way of a particle ray and introduces a new and
more precious form of currency.
Speaker 8 (11:03):
I can produce it in the pure form abundantly enough
to replace gold, giving the same relative value and the
gold possessed when it was the universal stand.
Speaker 9 (11:15):
But that will make you the richest man who ever lived. Undoubtedly,
why you will become the financial dictator of the whole earth.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Undoubtedly, currency is always a worry. Its value is so contrived,
so imaginary, but also so important. After the stock market
crash of nineteen twenty nine, people took their money out
of the banks and turned in their paper dollars for gold.
In the nineteen thirties, the US abandoned the gold standard,
at least for the duration of the depression, and prohibited
(11:46):
the private ownership of gold. If you've been listening to
x Men for the last few episodes, you'll remember that
it was during this era that in Canada, Elon Musk's
grandfather joined and became a leader of the technocracy movement,
founded on the belief that engineers could solve all political,
social and economic problems. Technocrats did not believe in price.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
By price 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.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Technocrats didn't believe in prices because they didn't believe in
any system not run by engineers. They wanted to get
rid of both governments and banks.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
There will be no place for politics or politicians, finance
or financiers. Rackets are racketeers.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
In place of prices and money. Technocrats wanted to reimagine
the entire economic system with a new currency, a unit
of energy, an erg whose stability would eradicate the volatility
of finance.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
A dollar may be worth in buying power so much
today and moral less tomorrow, but a unit of work
or heat is the same in nineteen hundred, nineteen twenty nine,
nineteen thirty three, all the year two thousand.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
The URG never did replace the dollar, and the US
formally abandoned the gold standard in nineteen seventy six, But
starting in two thousand and nine, people who want to
trade in units other than dollars can buy bitcoins. Bitcoin
a cryptocurrency isn't based on anything of value, Although not
unlike the URG, it has some relationship to energy, the
(13:37):
energy it takes to produce it. After Trump's election in
twenty sixteen, the price of bitcoin skyrocketed higher than it
had ever been before, and Trump withdrew the US from
the Paris Climate Accords. But bitcoin's value, like the value
of other money, only exists if you believe it exists.
JP Morgan once suggested that bitcoin was poised to become
(13:59):
the new gold standard.
Speaker 10 (14:01):
Cryptocurrencies were designed to make payments without a trusted third party,
such as a government or a financial institution involved.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Ishuar Prasad is an economist at Cornell University and a
fellow at the Brookings Institute. He believes cryptocurrency has set
off a revolution, a foundational change in finance, but that
bitcoin itself has not met its objectives.
Speaker 10 (14:24):
Bitcoin has really ended up failing in what it was
supposed to provide, which is a cheap, trustless medium of exchange.
It turns out it is not anonymous, it turns out
it is not cheap, and it is not very efficient.
So Bitcoin has centered up becoming a pure speculative asset.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
The technology underlying cryptocurrencies, Prosad argues, well, have all kinds
of effects on finance. It really is the future. But
he's not persuaded that, as some advocates claim, cryptocurrencies will
democratize finance.
Speaker 10 (14:56):
They've made it possible for people with very low incomes,
very low levels of wealth, to get relatively easy access
to digital payments and also to basic banking products. The
problem is that digital access is unequal and financial literacy
is unequal. So you might give people easy access to
(15:17):
a lot of products, but if you don't teach them
the risks emburied in those products, then you might end
up with the relatively less well off taking on much
more risks than they realize that they're taking on, and
the rich ending up being able to use these technologies
much more to their advantage, so they become even better
off than they are right now.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency based on nothing except a meme about
a dog, was started by a software engineer named Jackson
Palmer as a joke. Palmer later wrote an article called
my joke, Cryptocurrency hit two billion dollars and something is
Very wrong, in which he said that cryptocurrency, for all
its promise, had become nothing more than an unregulated penny
(16:02):
stock market. In twenty nineteen, after people started tweeting that
Musk should be the CEO of dogecoin, he said it
was his favorite cryptocurrency. Doge coin's value skyrocketed, Musk kept
tweeting about it, and up when its price he started
calling himself the doge Father. Musk talked about doge coin
(16:24):
on Clubhouse, an online chat room that was briefly popular
with Silicon.
Speaker 11 (16:28):
Valley occasionally make jokes about dogecoin that are really just
meant to be joked, but dose coin was made as
a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies. Obviously, but fate
loves irony, and as part of my says that the
most ironic outcome is most likely, or I say the
most entertaining outcome is often most likely and arguably the
most entertaining outcome, and the most ironic outcome would be
(16:50):
that dogecoin becomes the currency of Earth in the future.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
In twenty twenty one, Musk tweeted the single word doge
under a picture of a SpaceX rocket in front of
the moon. Doge to the Moon became a rallying cry.
On April Fool's Day that year, Musk tweeted, SpaceX is
going to put a literal doge coin on the literal
moon a joke, but also not a joke, Musk said
(17:19):
that SpaceX will be accepting doge coin as payment. Was
Musk a comic? The next month, Musk hosted NBC's Saturday
Night Live. He appeared in nearly every sketch as the
Nintendo villain Warrio on trial for murdering Mario. He explained,
I'm not evil, I'm just misunderstood. In a skit set
(17:40):
in the Old West, he played a bandit named Leron.
Speaker 12 (17:43):
What had instead of panning for gold?
Speaker 10 (17:45):
We just created our own cardsy currency.
Speaker 11 (17:49):
Yeah, and what the heck would it be based on?
Whatever we say?
Speaker 13 (17:53):
It's based on that.
Speaker 12 (17:54):
Hey, how money works.
Speaker 4 (17:57):
Money ain't a golden rock that we dig out of
the ground. Then we hope no one kills.
Speaker 10 (18:02):
Us before we train it for pieces of green paper.
Speaker 14 (18:05):
It's a perfect system.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
It's a weird thing about being a historian. Everything reminds
you of something else. Watching Elon Musk play Leron dressed
like a cowboy, he looked exactly like an old photograph
of his grandfather, the technocrat, who worked as a cowboy
and performed at rodeos doing rope tricks. The family likeness
is uncanny. Musk is also named after that cowboy's father,
(18:30):
his great grandfather, Elon muscism asks us to picture always
the future, but I find it hard not to keep
picturing the past. Yanked back lassoed by likenesses on SNL,
Musk appeared too on the show's newscast as a cryptocurrency
(18:51):
expert who can't give a straight answer.
Speaker 5 (18:53):
What is dose coin?
Speaker 11 (18:54):
Well, it actually started as a joke based on an
Internet meme.
Speaker 5 (18:58):
Okay, but what is dose coin?
Speaker 1 (19:01):
Finally he admits the truth.
Speaker 11 (19:03):
I keep telling you it's a cryptocurrency you can trade
for conventional money. Oh so the hustle, Yeah, that's uses.
Speaker 8 (19:14):
Everybody to the.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
That night, dogecoin lost a third of its value. Me
I was left thinking about the ending to that old
science fiction story Moon Metal from the year nineteen hundred.
Speaker 13 (19:27):
The looting of the Moon brought disaster to the rubber planet.
So mad were the efforts to get the precious metal
that the surface of our globe was fairly showered with it.
The air was filled with shining dust, until finally famine
and pestilence joined hands with financial disaster to punish the
(19:53):
grasping world.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
At the end of moon, metal markets collapse until an
international agreement leads to government control of currency. That is
what governments do in the US through the Federal Reserve
and through the Securities in Exchange Commission. The Biden administration
prosecuted crypto companies for securities violations under rules that the
(20:17):
crypto industry complained were unclear and misguided. The second Trump
administration is considering freezing much of that litigation.
Speaker 10 (20:26):
How much do you.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
Think we can rip out of this wasted six point
five trillion dollar Paris Biden budget?
Speaker 11 (20:35):
Well, I think we could do at least two trillion.
Speaker 13 (20:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
At a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden in New
York just before the election, Musk made some predictions about
the Department of Government deficiency.
Speaker 11 (20:47):
We're going to get the government off your back and
out of your pocketbook. America's does not not It's just
going to be great. America is going to reach heights
that it has never seen before.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
There is arguably a great deal of waste in the
US federal budget, though exactly where is the subject of
rather heated dispute, and many argued there's an excess of regulation.
Musk says that it takes longer to fill out the
paperwork to build a rocket than it takes to actually
build the rocket. Excessive regulations tie up all kinds of projects,
(21:26):
including housing and parks, projects that benefit all kinds of people.
So I'd be only too happy if something great, something wonderful,
were to come out of DOGE. But it strikes me
that a lot of what animates Musk in playing a
role in the American federal government concerns not taxing and spending,
but regulation of cryptocurrency. After all, the cryptocurrency industry helped
(21:49):
get Trump elected, and it expected results. As CNBC reported
just after the twenty twenty four election.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
Bitcoin briefly surging to a new record high as investors
bet that Donald Trump will deliver on his pro crypto promises.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
Just before he was inaugurated, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency
dollar sign Trump. By the day of the inauguration, its
market value had soared to ten billion dollars. To understand
all this, there's no better explainer than Mark Andreesen, a
venture capitalist whose company Andresen Horowitz has described itself as
(22:23):
the world's biggest investor in cryptocurrency. The Biden administration cracked
down on crypto scams. And Reeson says the Biden administration
also put pressure on banks not to work with crypto
companies in a deliberate bid to stifle the industry. Silicon
Valley had long supported Democratic political candidates and in general
leaned left, but Andreesen was outraged by the Biden administration's
(22:47):
interest in regulating both cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. As he
said on his podcast The Mark and Ben Show in
July twenty twenty four, it.
Speaker 12 (22:57):
Has been a brutal assault in an ascent industry that
I've never experienced before. I'm in total shock that has happened.
It's done intensely frustrating that it's been impossible to make
progress in this with the White House.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
That summer, Musk announced his support for Trump, as Andreason
described on another podcast called Honestly from the Free.
Speaker 12 (23:13):
Press, Elon right. Then Elon stepped up and said, yep,
I'm for him. That was the big moment in our
industry where the most important iconic figure in tech by far,
you know, did that in that moment, and so that
was the real shift.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
And Reason speculated that Musk's endorsement was likely partly pragmatic.
Speaker 12 (23:31):
I'm not speaking for Elon, but Elon decided that he
had to do this because if not, he wasn't going
to be able to launch rockets.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
Andreeson himself ranks pretty high on the list of the
highest donors to the Trump campaign. He soon became a
Trump intimate, recruiting people from Silicon Valley to work or
to volunteer for the incoming administration. With Doge and within
the Trump administration, Musk and Andreeson are achieving what the
technocrats of the nineteen thirties could only dream of the technocracy.
(24:05):
Andreson is also the author of an excellent distillation of Muskism.
It is called the Techno Optimist Manifesto, though it could
equally have been called the Manifesto of Muscism. It consists
of a list of statements, we can advance to a
far superior way of living and of being. We have
the tools, the systems, the ideas, we have the will.
(24:27):
We believe this is why our descendants will live in
the stars. If only we place our faith in the
techno capital machine and recent promises, we will become technological superman.
We are the Apex predator. We believe in greatness. We
believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness, strength, and recent sites
(24:48):
among his inspirations for this manifesto. On the list of
patron Saints of Techno Optimism Filippo Tomaso Marinetti. In nineteen
o nine, Marinetti wrote what he called the Futurist Manifesto.
It's a list of statements. We want to sing the
love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. We
(25:09):
want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march,
the perilous sleep, the slap and the blow with the fist.
We want to sing the man at the wheel. We
want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism. Standing
on the World Summit, we launched once again our insolent
challenge to the stars. So say Mojo, fists raised to
(25:34):
the stars. Ten years after Marinetti wrote the Manifesto of Futurism,
he co wrote the founding document of the movement led
by Mussolini, the Manifesto of Fascism. Marc Andreesen, like any
reasonable person, hates it when people call people they disagree with, fascists,
But here he cited the author of a fascist manifesto
(25:58):
as a major inspiration for his own manifesto, which is why,
to me, at least, the future envisioned by techno libertarians
happens to look chillingly like the very worst of the past.
The twenty first century is an age of technological wonder.
(26:19):
It is in many ways tremendously thrilling. Tesla and SpaceX
are engineering marvels, but I don't find Muskism thrilling as
political theory or social engineering. In twenty twenty one, the
year Elon Musk became the Doge father Time magazine made
an announcement.
Speaker 14 (26:39):
The person in the Year is Elon Musk. He is
reshaping life on Earth and possibly life off Earth as well.
And this is someone also who, in becoming the richest
person in the history of the world this year, really
speaks to the moment we're in.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Not mentioned in the Person of the Year announcement was
that at the time, two different women who were carrying
Musk's babies were in the same hospital in Texas. Musk
already had seven children, but he believes that a falling
birth rate is a civilizational threat and he means to
solve it. He seems particularly fond of a son born
(27:18):
in twenty twenty, during the pandemic, when Musk himself underwent
a kind of rebirth. He's often photographed carrying on his
shoulders this beautiful little blonde boy, and sometimes even brings
him along to press interviews. What's your name? What's your name? Actually?
Speaker 10 (27:37):
You should we help President Trump?
Speaker 12 (27:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Next time. On X men, the Astounding Tale of Baby
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