Elon Musk, who’s chainsawing the federal government, is not merely a chaos agent, as he is sometimes described. Jill Lepore, the best-selling author of “These Truths” and other books, says that Musk is animated by obsessions and a sense of mission he acquired through reading, and misreading, science fiction. “When he keeps saying, you know, ‘We’re at a fork in the road. The future of human civilization depends on this election,’ he means SpaceX,” she tells David Remnick. “He means . . . ‘I need to take these rockets to colonize Mars and that’s only going to happen through Trump.’ ” The massive-scale reduction in social services he is enacting through DOGE, Lepore thinks, is tied to this objective. “Although there may be billions of [people] suffering here on planet Earth today, those are miniscule 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. . . . That is, in fact, the math that lies behind DOGE.” Lepore’s BBC radio series on the SpaceX C.E.O. is called “X-Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story.” Plus, an organizer of the grassroots anti-Musk effort TeslaTakedown speaks with the Radio Hour about how she got involved, and the risks involved in doing so. that poses. “It’s a scary place we all find ourselves in,” Patty Hoyt tells the New Yorker Radio Hour producer Adam Howard. “And I won’t stop. But I am afraid.”
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
From the online spectacle around Leo XIV's election to our favorite on-screen cardinals. This week on Critics at Large, we're talking all things Pope.
The Catholic Church was made for this moment. I think 2,000 years ago, the Catholic Church basically anticipated TikTok, Instagram, X. You don't have those little Swiss guard outfits and think they're not being photographed. Oil painting is not enough.
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This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It may take us many years to understand fully what's happening in America right now. This attempt by Donald Trump, as well as Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, the authors of Project 2025, and so many others to radically reshape this country and its institutions as quickly and as brutally as possible.
We've been talking a lot on the radio hour about the colossal upheaval of the first hundred days of the Trump administration and what could be more important. But today, the subject that we're going to drill down on is an appraisal of Elon Musk and his vision of our future.
Of the many politicians who have tried to position themselves as Trump's heir and closest advisor, really only Elon Musk rivals the boss. And in some ways he exceeds him. There's that astronomical untold wealth. There's his delight in trolling his enemies and his contempt for government and its rules. And there's a deep belief in him that what's good for Elon Musk is precisely what matters.
And yet the thing is, Elon Musk is not just a chaos agent, as he's sometimes called. He's driven by a distinct ideology, or at least a clear set of obsessions. And to find out more about this, I called up Jill Lepore, the best-selling author of These Truths and other works of history.
And I called her because she's written about Elon Musk for The New Yorker, and she's also produced a podcast about him called X-Men. She's a professor at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. We spoke last week. Jill, Elon Musk is only recently a MAGA figure. He supported Obama. He supported Biden in 2020. He was strong on climate change and the shift away from fossil fuels.
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Chapter 2: How did Elon Musk's worldview develop from science fiction?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Uniquely.
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.
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.
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.
Before he gets to anything ideological, what Musk encounters first and takes very seriously is the pop culture that he's immersed in, the science fiction, the comics. Talk to me a little bit about that immersion in pop culture. And in fact, you compare Musk at one point to Batman himself. Yeah.
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Chapter 3: What role does pop culture play in Musk's ideology?
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 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.
He's not the Adam West Batman.
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.
This isn't a reference that I'm intimately familiar with, to be honest, but some of our listeners will be. And you say this is critical to understanding Elon Musk. Let's listen.
Zaphod Beeblebrox now knows himself to be the most important being in the entire universe, something he had hitherto only suspected. It is said that his birth was marked by earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes, firestorms, the explosion of three neighboring stars. However, the only person by whom this is said is Beeblebrox himself. And there are several possible theories to explain this.
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.
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.
But wait a minute, is this all about world historical genius who's going to usher humanity into a new era, isn't it?
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Chapter 4: How does Musk's political alignment relate to his business ventures?
How did he come to be so enraged by what he called the woke mind virus? Was that out of personal experience with his kids?
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.
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
You know, Jill, you mentioned these existential crises that Musk wants to solve, and one of which is getting human beings off the planet and settling in space. This motivates his interest in privatizing space travel and, of course, the creation of his company, SpaceX, even the name of which seems to be ripped out of an old science fiction paperback.
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
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
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.
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...
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.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of Dogecoin for social services?
To what degree do they overlap in their interests?
I understand that Trump loved getting hundreds of millions of dollars for his campaign, but when it comes down to what you just explained about the way Elon Musk sees the world and the future and what the interests of the government should be or should not be, I wonder how much it overlaps or not with what a guy whose background is not Musk's but is in fact in New York real estate and reality television...
You know, how do they overlap at all?
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.
And I know that historians don't like to predict the future any more than halfway decent journalists wouldn't, but Musk and Trump are going to break up fairly soon, either for reasons of conflict or because Musk's attention will wander elsewhere. Where will Musk go next?
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.
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.
We're talking the week, of course, that Harvard University decided to, in a sense, stand up to the Trump administration. It had some very difficult decisions to make. Jill, you've taught at Harvard for a long time, so I can't help but ask, what do you think Elon Musk makes of that situation?
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.
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Chapter 6: How does Musk view existential risks to humanity?
Four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding. But the price has gone up, so now I only buy one.
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.
And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. And we've been speaking today about Elon Musk. Earlier in the show, I spoke with historian Jill Lepore about the influence of science fiction on Musk, his business interest in space travel, and how it relates to his work in Doge, slashing federal government programs to the ground.
But Musk's role in Doge and his support of far-right movements around the world are are now coming into conflict with some of his business interests, in particular with Tesla. The people who tend to buy electric cars are usually quite well-heeled and at least somewhat progressive. That had been the case for a long time.
But now Tesla sales seem to be dropping, and there are sizable protests at dealerships. And they're kind of getting under Donald Trump's skin.
You also gave us a directive to prosecute the people who are going after Tesla to the fullest extent of the law, some of the greatest police work I've seen. Within the next 24 hours, you're going to be seeing another huge arrest on a Tesla dealership president. And that that person will be looking at at least 20 years in prison with no negotiations.
That's great. That will stop it. Cold. One of these grassroots efforts goes by the hashtag Tesla takedown. Our producer Adam Howard spoke with an organizer about how she got involved with the movement.
My name's Patti Hoyt. I live in the north of San Francisco in a small town called Novato. And although in the first administration, I did organize rallies and protests, quite a few. I've had a break. And very recently, a friend of mine who's a veteran reached out to me and said, wanted to bring to light the plight of veterans. And knowing my background, he asked if I was interested.
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Chapter 7: What criticism exists around Musk's interpretation of cultural narratives?
And being the daughter of a veteran, sure. And having to choose, there's so many things going on, what am I going to focus on? I selected veterans and immigrants as where I'm going to put my energy. And I had attended a couple of Tesla takedowns. And thought, okay, this looks like the perfect thing to do.
Hands off the VA! Hands off the VA!
Hands off the VA!
And was it the cuts to the VA as part of Doge or...
I'm sorry. Yes, yes, that's exactly it. The fact that, you know, 30 percent of the federal workforce happens to be veterans. So not only the VA being threatened with a 20 percent cut in staff, but just throughout the federal workforce, there are so many veterans.
You mentioned being part of protests during the first Trump administration. From your perspective, are the vibes and the sort of atmosphere at these protests different in any way than they were in the first term?
I would say there seems to be more anger. And what I'm encountering, who I am encountering this time around, is a lot of people that didn't protest then, have never protested before, and now are out there.
What do you think is motivating these people who are getting on the streets for the first time?
Fear and anger. And I think perhaps the speed of which all of this is coming, I can't even keep track of what next. I think it was different in the first term that it... It took longer for people to get energized. They felt they had more time. But we're not the only ones in my little town. Puerto Madera is where the dealership is in our county. There's a protest at noon.
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