Jill Lepore
Appearances
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
I wouldn't be surprised if he moved to Europe. I wouldn't be surprised if he moved to Germany or Italy. I think he needs to mix it up and enjoy the arrows that come at him so that he can use those arrows to construct a And I think that there's a invincibility around kind of leaving Washington with his tail between his legs. He's going to need to exert his virility in a very public way.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
And I don't think he's going to be like doing battles in state elections like in Wisconsin again. I think that moment is over.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
I think Musk is probably surprised at witnessing an act of real principle and courage and defiance that comes from a sincere commitment to deeply held centuries-old values. That is a rare thing in our world. It is no part of his experience of the world insofar as I have ever witnessed it. And it's something to be cherished. I am full of admiration for that act. I hope it is emulated.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
I hope it has vast consequences. It may not. It's easy from where I sit in Cambridge to think that Harvard is the center of the world, and it is not. And yet it is a really momentous decision. And I... I can't see. Musk lives in the world of the trivial. As profound as the consequences of his decisions are, he is a deeply trivial human being.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
He delights in, you know, the goofy, snarky, four-word tweet, you know, with an emoticon after it. He's a trivial person.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
Small but important ways. From tech billionaires to the bond market to, yeah, banana pudding. If it's happening in business, our new podcast is on it. I'm Max Chastain.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
And we had additional help this week from Jake Loomis.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
I think Musk is a man of many costumes, and he likes to play roles. He is a person who is very immersed in the world of video gaming and comic books and science fiction and Hollywood superhero movies. Wearing the dark MAGA hat and the Occupy Mars black T-shirt is as much a costume and a performance as it is an expression of sincere political commitment.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
So Musk went to Stanford in 1995 for a PhD program, and he left after a couple days to start his first company. In order to raise funds for their ventures, they were all encouraged. to promise to be altering the destiny of the species.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
And that sense of the messianic language that was required to get funding from venture capitalists, I think a kind of fully grown up person would engage in that and know that it was bullshit. I'm sorry, this is the radio. A fully grown up person would engage in that and know, you know, this is nonsense. This is what you have to do to get money.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
But I think a very young, impressionable, sort of arrested development person who's grown up on superhero culture might really come to believe that, that they are better than anyone else on the planet. And that the future destiny of humanity is something that they hold in their hands.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
And if I want to be a messiah, there have to be existential risks that I can save humanity from. So they have to keep propagating new risks. So, you know, then it's AI and Musk is determined to either defeat it or create it or depending on the time.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
But, you know, in our consciousness, I think most Americans, certainly most people around the world, didn't start paying attention to Musk until he decided that the existential risk to the future of humanity and civilization was Twitter itself in 2022. And then he decides to buy it. to defeat the woke mind virus. And at that point, people start paying attention to him.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
But that's just the latest in a list of existential risks that he and he alone can fix. And so it's soon after that that he hitches himself to Trump.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
The thing about it as a historian that really pisses me off, this is pedantic and narrow, but like he misreads everything that he reads. He miswatches it all, right? Like he looks at Batman and he kind of wants to be...
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
The bad Batman, you know, the Christopher Nolan, the one who dresses in black, you know, the guy who is just a fascist ruling over the city of Gotham because the people are so stupid and such losers.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
He's not Adam West. He's also not. The Batman of the 1930s comic books, you know, who was really created in 1939 to fight fascism. It's a weird underwater world to try to be in the mind of Elon Musk or even just the let's conquer Mars in the spirit of H.G. Wells. You know, H.G. Wells was a critic of British imperialism. All of his colonization stories were anti-imperialist cautionary tales.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which started as a BBC radio drama in 1978. It was broadcast to Pretoria, where Musk was a little kid. So Musk talks about a very consistent kind of how I became Elon Musk story that he has told for the whole of his adult life was that when he was 12, he had a kind of existential crisis about being human.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
And he, you know, he read Spinoza and Nietzsche, and he didn't really understand them. But then he read Hitchhiker's Guide. There's a book version as well. And it helped him to understand the meaning of life. And he dedicated himself to exploring the cosmos and bringing the light of human consciousness to the stars. And this truly Drives me insane.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
Yeah, it's Zaphod Beeblebrox, who is the captain of the Heart of Gold spaceship, which is what Musk has promised his first spaceship to Mars will be called in honor of Beeblebrox. evil rocks. He's a goon. He is the most self-deluded, grandiose idiot. He's a bumbling fool.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
And the whole point of Hitchhiker's Guide, which is itself a spoof of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, which it does not take seriously, is an indictment of the mega wealthy.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
So one of the details I came across in doing the work for this series, I found an old auction notice for the typewriter that Douglas Adams used to write the scripts around 1976, 1977. And it has a sticker on the side, a bumper sticker on the side of the typewriter that reads, End Apartheid. Like, think about that. Think about Douglas Adams writing Antichrist Guide in the middle of the 1970s.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
You know, the anti-apartheid movement, the boycotting is going on. It's a really strong movement. It's not as powerful as it would become in the 80s, right? It's not like everybody who's got an anti-apartheid sticker on their typewriter in 1977. But Douglas Adams does.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
I mean, in fairness, Musk left South Africa at the age of 17. And you could easily conclude that that was in order to avoid compulsory military service in defense of the regime. And I think that's the charitable way to understand his desire to leave the country.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
There's this famous interview he gave with Jordan Peterson in which he said, you know, in 2020 during the pandemic, he was sort of pressured into approving puberty blockers for one of his children. And he greatly regretted it. And now he would say, you know, the woke mind virus killed my son. His daughter, Vivian Wilson, essentially disowned him. And she has said, you can't blame him.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
this on me like that's a story that he tells that makes him feel happier about himself like there was something virtuous in his mind about about his rightward turn but he had always been this way so it's a family saga I don't have any particular insight into that
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
Yeah. There actually is like a whole really lovely genealogy of science fiction stories about the commercialization of other planets, all of which, again, are cautionary tales, but that Musk reads as instruction manuals. But there's a kind of, on the farther side of the far right, embrace of the economic opportunities and the military prospects of space exploration. So
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
I think that turns a lot of people in Silicon Valley toward Trump because he seems to be somewhat open to it. He doesn't know very much about it, but he is, of course, delighted by the attention of billionaires. So I think there's a kind of courtship that begins to happen there. And then, of course, you know, Musk earns a great many contracts through SpaceX, including
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
Under the aegis of Space Force, there's an interview where Musk says something like, It takes as long to do the paperwork to build a rocket as it takes to actually build the rocket. And so becomes really committed to the idea that there's regulatory excess that can only be eliminated through Trump's victory.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
So when I hear Musk say at those rallies, you know, we're at a fork in the road, the future of human civilization depends on this election, he means SpaceX, right? He means, I need the federal government to, without any restriction, delay, impediment, I need to take these rockets to colonize Mars. And that's only going to happen through Trump. And part of this larger project of Doge is...
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
is to divert funds that are used to serve the poor, the needy, the sick, immigrants, anyone who might be vulnerable and not worthy somehow, I think, in how Musk likely sees the world. Their needs ought to be put very much at the back of the line so that we can bring humanity together. space and also so that we can pursue unfettered, the development of artificial intelligence.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
And this also relies on the quantification of human needs, whereby we shouldn't feed the poor. We shouldn't clothe the naked. We shouldn't heal the sick. We should let them all suffer and die because their needs, those are minuscule compared to the calculation of the needs of the billions of humans that will one day ever live if we can gain escape velocity from planet Earth.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
That is, in fact, the math that lies behind Doge. And that has nothing to do with democracy or citizenship or decency or any set of beliefs or commitments or moral clarity about the nature of the human condition.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
I remember in 2009 or so, I went to a Tea Party rally in Washington. And I remember chatting with some very nice people from Texas. And I was asking them what they had seen while they were in D.C. for this rally. It was like a Glenn Beck, like 9-12 rally or something like that. I said, did you go to the Smithsonian? Did you see the monument? Did you go to the Jefferson?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
Did you go to the Lincoln Memorial? What did you do? And they were like, no, we would never go to any of those places. They would defile us. Their hatred for the federal government extended to the buildings themselves. That were built with taxpayer money to celebrate American ideas, American ingenuity, American art, American beauty, American music.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
I was really staggered by that, that there was just such a strong hatred of the. And I do think that's not an ideology. That's an appetite. That's an emotional response to something. But I do think that Musk's doge taps into some of that.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
If you publicly, as an elected official, disavow the threat of climate change, but instead propose to purchase or conquer Greenland and Canada, which are great real estate opportunities given the reality of climate change— then you are actually engaging in a kind of calculation that is as cynical and as indifferent to human suffering as is Muskism.