The name of automotive industrialist Henry Ford gave rise to the term fordism, meaning mass production combined with mass consumption. Fordism was the operating system of the previous century, write Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff in their 2026 book “Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed”.
They propose muskism as the name of the operating system of our century — derived, understandably, from the name Elon Musk. The authors present their work as a generalizing vision, but it seems to remain overly focused on a review of Musk’s life and activities as an individual figure.
Nevertheless, the book does contain generalizing elements. The authors describe muskism as a modernizing project, much like fordism was in its time. Muskism, however, strives for sovereignty through technology. In other words, it is a worldview according to which, in our increasingly insecure world, states and individuals may become more independent and more reliant on themselves.
Muskism in a broader sense, and Musk’s strategies more narrowly, reflect — according to Slobodian and Tarnoff — wider changes in capitalism. We have discussed Elon Musk’s background before, but it is worth recalling his South African origins. Apartheid-era South Africa appears to have been — for Musk and not only for him — a model of a modernizing state that constituted a techno-political project.
Such a militarized, modern, and isolated state fits well with today’s world of export controls, trade wars, rearmament, and the relocation of production. Slobodian and Tarnoff refer to this worldview as “fortress futurism” — a belief that technology can provide confidence in a hostile and changing world. The starting point is techno-sovereignty, but in Musk’s world this is not meant for everyone: it offers autonomy to some and exclusion to others.
Technological sovereignty, according to the authors, resembles access to the gated garden of Musk and those like him, with the key to the gate held in Musk’s hand. While techno-oligarch Peter Thiel sees techno-sovereignty at the level of the individual as an opportunity to free a person from the state as something unnecessary, Musk believes that the state can actually be useful and can be leveraged to guarantee income for muskists. After all, the internet was originally developed by the state for military purposes. It later passed into private hands and became the foundation of Silicon Valley’s rise.
Musk has successfully developed this symbiosis between the state and private enterprise. The Pentagon and NASA are dependent on Musk’s SpaceX, which by 2025 accounted for 95 percent of U.S. space launches. Starlink was created on the assumption that it would help ensure internet connectivity in sparsely populated areas of the United States, but by now it has also become indispensable on the battlefield.
Starlink is likewise an example of the ability of private enterprise, if it so chooses, to intervene in international affairs, and alongside SpaceX it has become a global platform for state projects. Starlink demonstrated its importance especially after the start of Russia’s large-scale aggression against Ukraine. In September 2022, Musk did switch off Starlink for a short time over Crimea and parts of the Kherson region, and he did so after a conversation with a Russian envoy. Musk himself, however, denies any connection…
The story illustrates how a private individual can become a key actor in war between states. At the same time, the symbiosis with the state continues to grow. In 2021, a contract was signed to create Starshield, providing additional capabilities for encrypted communications, signals intelligence, object detection, and tracking on Earth. Musk is betting on the idea that, as it develops, sovereignty will be infrastructural rather than territorial.
Musk sees his developments as an ecosystem. In the case of Tesla, for example, this includes not only cars but also insurance, self-driving vehicles, artificial intelligence, robotics, solar panels, energy storage, and even lithium refining. In the background, however, lies the fortress futurism of South Africa — a way of thinking shaped by an insular, fenced-off mentality.
Muskism is currently evolving in the direction of social media, the fusion of humans and machines, and a global system. Social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter adopted a business model discovered by Google, which one scholar labeled surveillance capitalism. Its essence is maximizing user engagement in order to collect as much data about users as possible. Investors found this highly attractive, and platform revenues were immense.
After purchasing Twitter and renaming it X, Musk also changed the platform’s political orientation, steering it from what he considered excessive left-wing bias toward the opposite extreme — right-wing positions. He also discovered that tweeting could be a means of influencing stock markets, in addition to political influence.
Initially skeptical of artificial intelligence, Musk eventually found an opportunity there as well and created his chatbot Grok. In his view, social media had one major shortcoming: it lacked a user interface that would allow digital devices to be controlled by thought. The response was Neuralink, which was intended to solve this issue by increasing the transmission speed between digital and biological systems.
Muskism has now reached a stage where the reshaping of humanity itself is being envisioned. The logical step is placing a chip in the human brain. If social media, the chipped human brain, and an interactive online code library are combined, one can speak of a so-called superseries encompassing the entire world. In this context, the state is merely one system or database that needs to be cleaned up and optimized.
The ultimate goal, according to the authors, is a purified community defined by belonging to the white, European-descended West and protected by top-tier technology. Through automation, humans are removed from the production process. Through social media, brain–computer interfaces, and artificial intelligence, humans and machines merge into one, forming a cybernetic collective.
Why does muskism appear to be flourishing precisely now? Most likely because we are simply living in a time that suits it. The loss of faith in institutions, opposition to migration, the rise of political extremes, and the fragmentation of the global order — all of this creates an environment favorable to muskism. Sovereignty through technology is aligned with politics in a deglobalizing world, where states increasingly value self-reliance over integration.
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